Gregory's ServerI don’t have a solution for this, and it feels obvious when I write it out. But it seems worth grappling with across as well as within our various communities. 🪴
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49 comments
 @emjonaitis For sure! I am thinking a lot about ways of getting into the needs of a bunch of cross-cutting groups, like people who really want to connect more but feel lonely and ignored + people in groups that are likely to be targeted (Black women, most of all) + “big” accounts whose work enriches the network but whose own experiences of it are often so alienating. This is one of 2-3 things I’d like to work on next, tbh, but I’m a little crispy so I’m taking a wee moment first. 🫠 @emjonaitis @kissane I was thinking along the same lines. Even if only 1% of users is going to get all up in their feelings about something, and you have--to pull a random number--13,000 followers, that means 130 people are going to get all up in their feelings about something. I don't want to have 130 pleasant and engaging conversations with people I know well in a given day, let alone 130 strangers getting upset at me for something, even IF I could sympathize with their perspective.  @Azuaron @emjonaitis @kissane maybe I am misunderstanding your post, but how is it those 130 persons's problem if you have a lot of followers? If you start having a lot of followers, obviously it will require you thinking about how to handle it. That's your responsibility. And I am not saying your responsibility is to reply to each one of them. Rather I al trying to say that what's causing your issue is more your high number of followers than the "purity" of 1% of them. @FelisCatus You're definitely misunderstanding my post, because I never assigned any kind of blame. @kissane I feel this hard, “purity culture” leading to subtraction (of self, of participation, of consideration, of ideas) and that we should be about growth, care, protection, revival. That purity is a test one is trying to measure up to, to force oneself (and others) into quantifiable boxes; chasing purity in all angles is not aligned with the messiness of human grown and maybe its allure is that it promises certainty? A way to KNOW we are safe (by whatever metric we measure that).  I'm personally really happy when someone takes time out of their day to explain why something might be a problem and respectfully offers a solution. But then there are those people who misread your message, or don't bother to contextualise it to another culture, and instead of checking did they understand correctly, they just jump forward to sending insulting pictures and tagging you for their friends, who just check the synopsis for the mob... I don't disagree on principle. But I do think that it's worth remembering that what you call "purity testing" is sometimes the result of hypervigilance. I also think the language "purity test" is...not the best. It belittles their position and their reaction in ways that scream "privileged" to me, because the more marginalized you are the less wiggle room you've got for "live and let live" attitudes. @johnzajac I’m inclined to give people a whole lot of leeway on health stuff, but there’s a still point past which it’s still bad and counterproductive behavior. Most of what I see here (and most of what I mentioned) is people exercising social discipline because someone else drove a car, linked to youtube, posted on another network, expressed excitement about voting, or used an iphone. As someone who grew up in fundamentalist purity culture, I think that stuff is classic purity culture. 🤷🏻 @johnzajac (And as someone on the way vulnerable and very isolated end with covid, I can understand and even sympathize with even fairly terrible behavior while also believing it’s doing the opposite of helping.) Haha for sure! When I was doing high school arts advocacy I had this staff of just post-college age activists working with me, and we'd often argue about stuff like this. My position was that sometimes the right thing to do isn't the strategic or effective thing to do, and that where the left often falls apart is that they do the right thing rather than the effective thing. I also had a soft spot for slacktivists, which irked them to no end lol. I think managing those "purists" is part of being an effective and strategic change agent. I've found that if you build a mutual and trusting relationship with them you can temper that energy and bring it to bear. I mean, this is the internet so whatever. Half of them are probably just trying to have a fight with you so they can let off steam. I just wanted to inject hypervigilance because the ideas we get on here can bleed into everyday life, and I hadn't seen anyone else do it. @kissane @johnzajac I've recently boiled down what's happening here to: "I understand you're [!SITUATION] but I still don't want to be treated like that." Everyone has their threshold for interaction and that MUST be respected. I mean, that's obvious to me, and it's part of why block function exists. We are the ones lobbing our ideas into the cyberscape, though, so we bear some responsibility for inviting the trampires in. @johnzajac I'm sorry: I'm not sure what you're trying to explain to me, or why you're explaining it to me, as we're strangers and none of this has been an information problem, just me chatting with a person I actually know about something we largely agree on. There's no query or debate in this situation to address. Anyways, I hope sometime we have the opportunity to discuss something on real terms, because your work looks interesting. Have a good day?  @johnzajac @kissane as someone who's marginalized in a few different ways, I disagree: I have very little wiggle room to purity test people because I can't afford to be picky about who I accept help from  @kissane Secondly, there are also people who have a very hard time moving beyond binary good/bad thinking for reasons of nature/nurture and how their brain works. There's an aspect of splitting and projecting all bad onto others involved in this. But everyone can learn to move beyond binary thinking and it gets easier with practice (we can all use some practice doing this, our brains ARE wired for quick good/bad categorizations and quick reactions). I mean, purity is a thing about fascism, sure, BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, purity is a thing that also happens when you have to protect your identity against majority. That's how you get those flamboyant gays of 1980s, or vegans of the same period, or stop-oil -activists today. You either make yourself a caricature by demanding rights, or you stay in the closet. (I can only think how many gotchas Thunberg gets for owning a phone, or using clothes, electricity etc). Perhaps I used the wrong word, or wrong example. This isn't my first language, nor am I familiar with United States of today or or yesteryear (which I'm assuming you're contextualing my message to). What I tried to say is that pushing new ideas as an activist involves being a caricature for various reasons: to draw attention, to set an example, to not be pushed aside when others ask you to take it down a notch for their convenience etc. Would an example of purity test to be like animal rights activist being barred from taking part "in the scene" for saying that they consider hunted meat to be ethical? Because I've been speaking in this context. This happened to a friend of mine. Edit: After reviewing the conversation: Or being pushed to eat meat because it's "not that bad" and "you don't want to make a scene"? In this case you either fold or make yourself a caricature. I'm not a historian of homosexual rights, and I feel a bit uncomfortable in speaking of these things in detail, but I understand that big part of gay rights was having it been accepted that being gay is normal. And that in turn required mentioning you've being gay even when you could avoid doing so, thus breaking the idea of what's normal. This is what I meant when I said flamboyant. It might have been the wrong word, of which I apologize. You note that my argument wasn't about gays, but about activism and its costs. Also that I repeatedly apologized of initially speaking of gays for various reasons, NOR did I want to argue about things where your lived experience and my limited book knowledge were from different continents and cultures. I've tried to steer toward the basic hypothesis, but also wanted to create space for comparing our cultural differences as I wanted to hear your thoughts. Afaik, ACT UP wasn't a thing hereabouts. AIDS was more or less seen as a problem for the public health care system, and that's how it was adressed. (This based on articles I've read -- I'm a bit too young to have lived this). But as I said, using gays in this context might have been a mistake. I've done activism. Never been in the "vanguard", though. I do know people who I'd say are. But I don't keep my ideals close to chest in hope of normalisation. But speaking of gays and gay rights of 1980s, these are the photos that are popular here to memorise the time. I'd say it has some carnevalisation in there, wouldn't you? At least it's hard to do this in closet. And that's hard in a society like mine which was very homogenous. They were intentionally breaking the law (by being seen and themselves), and thus making them open for jail. And today Pride is all about carnevalisation, of course. @fifilamoura @kissane no doubt there are many things going on. but i think contemporary culture has brought out aspects of activism that are hyper-individualistic rather than community-focused - you see people performing these self-improvement projects like changing their diets, altering their vocabularies, and displaying only the correct opinions on social media, using an abstinence-based approach to becoming a Good Person. but with purity comes contempt for the people who fail those standards. @fifilamoura @kissane what these people don't realize is that if the majority of humans fail your minimum standards of being a Good Person, you end up hating the human race - and your activism is no longer rooted in compassion, but contempt for the impure. you can't claim to care about humanity while despising almost all of it. there has to be room for forgiveness of human failure. @fifilamoura @kissane i agree. i also think this version of 'activism' appeals to certain people who don't have a strong sense of their own identity. it offers convenient identity badges that tell you who you are, so you can bypass the process of having to use your own insight to figure that out. then it provides a list of rules, and all you have to do to be a Good Person is follow the list, rather than thinking critically about what is the moral thing to do, or developing your own opinions. @kissane I just want to say that I think you're doing great, I admire you a lot, and the person I saw who was engaging in all that finger-wagging at you seemed to be clearly working out his life frustrations in entirely the wrong direction. I think you're wonderful and I'm sorry you're taking such undeserved heat when you're clearly doing your very best, for yourself and for everyone 🫶 @elana Augh ❤️❤️❤️ I’m truly okay, my skin thickens back up fast! But I’m such a network nerd that whenever I see problems I start thinking about them in network-wide terms. @kissane This reminds me of the Bloom County strip where Opus tries not to harm even one blade of grass... @kissane I love to ignore and block the #PurityTrolls and #SanitySealions. Not much else can be done. They’re not here to have a nice talk.
@kissane the problem with zealots... You can’t let ‘em get to you. If you post online, you’re opening yourself up to attack. It’s a fun thought experiment tho. You either silo yourself with other like-minded people and defederate, or stay open and exposed. Maybe there’s a balance, maybe there are better controls we could implement. I’m not sure anyone’s really treating the “fediverse” as a “product” outside of Meta. It’s all individual instances and client software. people are messy.  @kissane Killing Everyone is a kind of mathematical asymptote that seems hard to hit if you're just one person in any "-verse", Fedi or Uni,... how?! Perchance, if?! your actions were butterfly wing-like steps to "killing everyone" I would say that's a pretty scary but less believable asymptote any ONE of us could be approaching. So I ignore those kinds of purity/asymptote setting. Too easy to move the asymptote being set by whomever. |
@kissane There’s a volume aspect to this too. I suspect I’m considerably more norm-core than the archetypal Mastodon user (along most axes but not all) — but because I don’t have a big account, this stuff just doesn’t come up for me.
Might be worth doing a qualitative study of pain points identified by big users of various platforms/whatever-we-call-them, and what those say about the culture. (Possibly this is already out there. Possibly you are even the person who would have written it… I’m out of my depth here) The median user of any service probably just isn’t going to experience the same things.
@kissane There’s a volume aspect to this too. I suspect I’m considerably more norm-core than the archetypal Mastodon user (along most axes but not all) — but because I don’t have a big account, this stuff just doesn’t come up for me.
Might be worth doing a qualitative study of pain points identified by big users of various platforms/whatever-we-call-them, and what those say about the culture. (Possibly this is already out there. Possibly you are even the person who would have written it… I’m out...