🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)Feb 26

I'm not a car person, so I never really paid attention to car makes or models before. Sure, I knew that there were Hondas and Hyundais, but unless someone was actively pointing them out, I couldn't tell you which was which.

Then I became the owner of a little red Ford Focus, and I started driving it around.

Next thing I knew, I was spotting them *everywhere*. I'd come out of the grocer and there'd be identical ones parked on both sides of me! Hell, I eventually got a window decal so I could more easily tell which was mine 😋

A couple years ago I discovered I was lactose intolerant, and—bear with me, these stories are connected—I started keeping lactaid with me wherever I went (just to be safe). I started paying attention to just how much dairy was in things, and wow, spoiler: it's in like *everything* 😅

Over the past couple years, I've gotten pretty used to being lactose intolerant. I keep lactase handy, and I watch out for things with "too much dairy". It's just become background noise—like noticing other Ford Focuses (Foci?). It's just part of my life now.

A couple months ago I got propositioned by a creep in my hotel's lobby.

A couple weeks ago I had slurs yelled at me as I walked down the street with my mom.

A couple days ago someone told me to kill myself in a DM.

Every day, someone says "really? I don't see stuff like that here".

Show threaddragonfrog

@alice i think part of the issue is the weird privacy settings - i can reply to a public post with a DM or "followers only" post that's visible to *my* followers not those of the person I'm replying to. Presumably if I'm a serial harasser, I'm not going to have a lot of normal decent people among my followers.

And from my victim's POV they made a public post and got threats or abuse in reply and nobody is standing up for them.

Feb 27 at 2:54amWeb
Show threaddragonfrogFeb 27

@alice in that moment the victim is going to be understandably shocked and triggered, not paying close attention to subtle UI elements telling them that everyone else in the thread probably can't see the abuse they're facing.

I don't have a solution to the problem, but I see it as a problem with the mechanics of the protocol. Changing the protocol wouldn't make abuse go away of course but it might help a bit.