• 6 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2025

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  • On one hand I definitely respect where you are coming from. “Too political” is frequently wielded at the oppressed by oppressors; “two genders, male and political” and all that.

    On another hand, as a queer, neurodivergent person of color I don’t handle the constant aggression and “another bad thing happened because of a country’s government, or a political party” posts well. I get paralyzed into inaction. Fediverse “apolitical” communities, at least in my experience, tend to be safe spaces for people like me without bigotry. I’m far from the most oppressed person on earth or even the USA, but I do think I am correct when I say that sometimes, some oppressed people want a break from constantly thinking about and reading about their oppression. If I don’t aggressively curate my feed on the Fediverse and instead take what is hot and popular, it is going to be chock-full of people arguing about politics (specifically in the sense of big actions and policies taken by governments). So I curate, avoid these posts, and find enough energy to take political action in real life instead of scrolling thinkpieces on why this political happening happened for hours online. If there were no spaces free of that specific kind of politics (that yes, also made the political choice of removing bigoted posts and comments), I’d probably eventually just be chased off the internet entirely.

    But yet again, this could be my own specific perspective talking and other people do feel silenced and suppressed, so…





  • I specifically only ever look at Subscribed, never Hot or All or Local specifically to dodge all the US politics. As an American. This works well for me, but I admit just jumping on almost any instance and seeing what is there before you get to log in and filter to only Subscribed is very disheartening. Always some outraging and depressing US politics content on the front page, even without algorithms intentionally trying to push outrage (because unfortunately, outrage naturally succeeds on its own anyways—being angry generates more urge to type 5 paragraphs).

    The other commenter’s explanation works well too. But if I have to deal with all these horrid political happenings in real life, I don’t want to come online and see more of it and dwell on it. And having all those politics so popular online… for some it might be informative but I think for most it’s just a venting space and I’m not sure if it’s helpful (getting rid of bad feelings and expressing your feelings is important, a third party could look on and see peoples’ points and get their mind changed) or letting people blow off anger in a way that neutralizes most of their energy to help others or resist bad things more tangibly (volunteering for soup kitchens, calling up their representatives, protesting, local organizing, paying the switching cost and putting in the time needed to move away from infuriating enshittified platforms and learn or self-host a new one), while pushing potential users away because they think the Fediverse is all US politics all the time with no escape.

    Grateful you are trying to make a community that is more likely to hold solutions and people trying to solve outraging problems, than people posting about how another bad and outraging thing happened to the tune of 300 upvotes and 30 comments about how angry they are. Pleased to see an Mbin-hosted community, too. More software diversity on the Fediverse is nice.







  • Delete whole thread specifically because I imagine that is two layers to check through, you both have to find the deleted post and then its edit history, instead of just edit history. The whole principle of “a determined thief could probably break into anywhere, but they’ll probably pick the low-effort unlocked house and skip over the one with a security camera, two dogs, and a tall wire fence,” just make it harder and more inconvenient to find the post content. (I do say this not being 100% aware of how the code behind the Fediverse works, nor if we have something similar to the Reddit undeleter sites yet. Also do not know if the Reddit undeleter sites recovered old versions of posts before edits.)

    I usually do make the assumption anything on the internet is for forever, but I also think we’re well aware that sometimes people make mistakes, and sometimes people realize only after they commit the mistake. I am not so sure just saying “well the internet is forever, just give up” is the smart decision here. I’d prefer losing an online discussion over someone self-doxxing and being unable to take it down.

    In general, I also use deletion because sometimes I’ll type out a reply I think is nice and measured, but then I think of if the other person is going to be okay with me trying to politely disagree or if I’ll get a much more harshly-worded reply full of insults in return. I end up deleting to avoid the conflict and misery. I can understand why people would want to access the discussion, especially since I’m pretty sure I still stand by what I said in those but just took it back to save myself “fuck you!!!” in my inbox, or worse a lovely logical disagreeing response… with a bunch of namecalling surprise at the end. I’m not sure I’d be able to keep calm and report instead of sending back a whole thing on how that wasn’t very nice and how heartbreaking it is that I was engaging in good faith (and not just pretending to and using that as a cover, not sealioning) and got responded to as if I was being much nastier, what happened to kindness and civility and educating people you think are wrong instead of hating on them immediately… (and then I delete it because I realize how bad it looks and that it’d only invite more vitriol.)

    No, this has not happened to me yet, especially because most of my opinions fall in line with the Fediverse at large. I have not posted transphobia and rightfully gotten bashed for it and then end up crying about why people are so mean to me when I just said the T slur. But I have seen enough unkind replies like this to a person not being nasty or bigoted that I do fear it. Even now I kind of want to delete because I’m worried you’ll say “well just then block em lol, grow up” (yes, I would, but obviously being told the nasty things meriting a block in the first place does not feel good) and a bunch of “toughen up you snowflake” type things to me. In real life, I have not really had people be nasty to me and I have continued expectations that people will continue to treat me in a way that does not involve hostility, so of course I do not have high defenses for that.

    Funnily enough this only happens with typed words. In real life I think I only ever said something I wanted to take back once in elementary, but I have also encountered a much smaller number of belligerent people who I think would swear at me in real life than I have online.



  • I mean, if I accidentally wrote something that gives away my location (maybe a discussion topic about bars and I mention my local bar Barname is super great?) I want to be able to have that GONE instead of kept alive in the name of discussion and keeping content. I am sure you can think of multiple cases where actually getting rid of some content would be useful. Is there a solution that allows for both? Would editing over my comment, as a comment below mentions, work? Typical deletion allows recovery, but editing over lets me obscure my accidental self-dox?




  • I use the Unhookd extension on YouTube so I do not get lost all day. Thankfully always turned my nose up at Shorts, but removing them still makes the real estate stuff I actually use instead of something that makes my sensitive self start thinking about how much I hate the short form content we-want-to-addict-you reduce-friction-to-keep-you-scrolling-for-days trend. No more suggested videos. No Live Chat. No Home Feed. Just me and the search bar, going directly for the video I need/want to see.