Mastodawn

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Mar 14

RE: https://oldbytes.space/@gloriouscow/116224004520766154

There's a larger issue here here, and that is that it's trendy in certain spaces to be extreme and opinionated about your beliefs, and angry at anyone who doesn't share them. I see this a lot on Bluesky and Mastodon.

The problem is, this is a slippery slope towards ending up in a tiny bubble and losing many of your friends. And that doesn't lead to happiness or to good mental health. Not for you, and not for the people around you.

The two biggest topics I see this with lately is AI and trans discourse. The simple fact is, morality isn't absolute. Words don't have absolute meanings. Tools aren't absolutely evil or absolutely moral.

It's okay to be sad at the state of the world. I'm sad too! And it's okay to be angry at problem people (think, the billionaire class). But when you direct that anger at your peers, just because they don't share the exact moral compass you have, you're just hurting them and hurting yourself.

It's impossible to live in a world where your social circle is fully aligned with you on beliefs and morals. It just isn't. It's okay to be disappointed. But if you start cutting people off for it, you aren't making anything better.

(cont'd)

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Mar 14

In the extreme, you misfire, and misfire so badly you just end up isolating yourself. I've seen this happen multiple times recently, with people who saw what they perceived to be a moral slight or failing by someone they knew, and came out with knives swinging. Those never end well. At best you get blocked by one person. At worst you get called out for being completely unreasonable, and end up losing badly.

For better or worse, we need to work together. You can prioritize those closer to your ideals. It's okay to modulate your relationships based on how aligned you are on values. But that's the key word, modulation. If you care about someone and they make a moral choice that you dislike, the two healthy things to do are to either have a conversation about it (in private!), or just do nothing, accept the disappointment, and move on.

At the end of the day, outrage and anger might get you clicks, boosts, and a feeling of satisfaction... but are you really helping? Are you really making your life better in the long term? Others'?

I'm going to use an older example on purpose. Some time back, a friend expressed that she wanted to play and stream the wizard game, and I DMed her. I tried to explain why that would be so hurtful. And I convinced her not to. And I think that was a lot more productive than piling onto people who play the wizard game on the internet.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!

It took 12 minutes from making that post to the first reply accusing me of victim blaming and gaslighting, and a further 5 minutes for that conversation, where I attempted to be pragmatic and polite, to escalate to ad hominem (at which point I blocked them).

Edit: And looking through the thread and replies, there were multiple errors of judgement made by this person, including:

Taking my position as a direct affront on them (when I have no idea who they are and obviously am not referencing any specific situation they are part of)
Making assumptions about my background
Interpreting my usage of impersonal you as personal (despite being in the context of a hypothetical, which I used since I was not even clear on the stance of this person, as their replies were one-liners with no context).
Taking my suggestion to consider therapy (again, in an impersonal hypothetical context) as a direct accusation of being mentally unstable (almost everyone can benefit from therapy!)

And this is why coming out knives swinging is not going to make you any friends or convince anyone.

@lina It feels like some people take their purity tests way too seriously, IMO. I understand that the way things are headed strong pushback is needed, but attacking / cutting off people who you're >75% in agreement with is not it.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Mar 14

@ddg Yup. And it's actually entirely counterproductive, because this (which can be summarized as "leftist infighting") only serves to distract from the major problems we can all agree about. It makes us weaker, not stronger.

@lina Absolutely. It's not a new problem, either, but those people fail to learn from the left's past messaging / gatekeeping mistakes.

It's ridiculous how most of the things we defend are popular with the general population, yet that infighting prevents us from becoming strong enough to promote actual change.

Christian Schneider Mar 14

@ddg @lina It's just so utterly stupid. I have been watching leftists burn bridges from their moral highground for decades, yet the world is leaning more to the right than it ever has, so it's clearly not working.

Unless of course your goal isn't to make the world better/more leaning towards the left/socialness, but to be a "thought leader" in a tiny little petri dish no one else cares about.

m_on_stair Mar 14

@ddg @lina in fact i think its valid/interesting/useful to be friends with people with whom you are in 10% agreement with

@m @lina As long as you can handle the 90% you disagree with, absolutely! Echo chambers don't do us much good, indeed. But there are some disagreements that just aren't compatible with being friends with someone.

@lina I've been noticing more and more people thinking cynicism and a lack of charitability is a virtuous way to look at things. if you only expect the worst out of people, you'll only get the worst out of them

Baffle 🍄Mar 14

@lina not sure which part the saw about gaslighting

At my day job I've seen a lot whay you say. I'm one of the few that don't use AI's or have gemini/chatgpt open all day and I'm the weird one...

I used to point out the problems of this kind of tools but, with time, my coworkers stopped commenting these topics with me. I've learned now to pick my fights: can't talk them out of using them but I can, for some specific use cases, manage to.

I've alse seen that, if you aren't always the "bad guy" ruining the fun, you can learn a thing or two and people trusts you more

Thankful Machine Mar 14

@lina What need did you satisfy in posting this?

Patrick Georgi Mar 14

@lina Quite frankly, the "impersonal you" wasn't that clear in the exchange, so I can see how it could be read as targetted at the other person.

Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Mar 14

@patrick That's fair.

But that's kind of the issue with these situations, there's no room for error once the knives come out. The other person went out at me directly without any nuance or room for alternate interpretation. I should've stopped and reworded, but I'm only human, I was already bothered by the opening salvo and in my experience there's little room for a nuanced argument with people who act like that... so I think my brain just went into "get it over with" mode and unsurprisingly that didn't work great.

@lina This brings to mind the so called "4-Ears model of communication." If people get stuck in the so called "Appeal-Ear", whatever message they get, they interpret it as if they have been asked to do something, or change something on what they are doing about what is being talked about. The ear that gets emphasized the most is typically a listener's responsibility, and not a result of the exact sender's words in the message:
https://greator.com/en/4-ears-model/

4 Ears model: how does it work and where does it apply?

The 4 Ears Model is a communication model. It states that a statement can be interpreted in four different ways.

Greator

The Lady Nostromo 🏳️‍⚧️Mar 14

@lina Thank you for taking the time and making the effort to write this out and share it in this space. I absolutely agree with you.

From my own perspective, I think it is a constant battle to remind people that the "social" part of social media should encourage the use of social skills. The best parts of us can be leveraged here, even when the mechanisms of a social media platform allow and even reward hit and run tactics.