I was browsing fedi for some inspiration because I plan to add a post on my website about the things I posted on here so far. And then I found the attached image which exemplifies exactly what I meant.
This comic basically implies that being a creature is simply a matter of your mind, and I don't identify with this idea at all. To me, being a dragon (or whatever animal it may be in the future) means existing as one, in body and mind, with no difference from other members of the same species. What exactly am I supposed to get from a condescending "oh, but you are, honey"? I'd still have my human body and human mind, thinking human thoughts and doing human things. I very much am not a dragon.
"But Volpeon, it's more about one's identity" — yeah, and my identity doesn't work this way. I don't get anything positive out of building abstractions just so I can say "I am a dragon". Those words and concepts don't change anything meaningful about my reality, where I clearly am not a dragon.
I got another one, but first some background info:
When I post online, I'm pretty much always in my roleplay mode where I pretend to be my wyvern character. That's when I say things like "I'm a wyvern" or I go WAAH or I rant about platform design etc. But when I want to talk about my character or my identity, I'm in a more distanced mode where I'm just ...me. A human who's sitting behind the keyboard, who created a wyvern character to handle his identity and feelings.
There were times when I was talking about being a human, and then I got a reply saying "but you are a dragon!" That would've been fine if I had been in my roleplay mode, but I wasn't. I was talking about my identity. And that's when I don't want to hear these things at all, because they only hurt.
I know these people meant no harm, so I don't hold it against them. They couldn't know.
There's a genre of posts by therians and adjacent people that really bothers me: implications that not being a human isn't just possible, but even easy. Something you can decide to do when you feel like it. I guess it's a sore spot for me because it only reminds me that it is, in fact, anything but easy.
This also carries over to my taste in transformation media. If it feels like a commodity, it immediately becomes uninteresting to me.
The problem I still see is that tagging and other such actions remain optional, which means people will ignore or simply forget about them. A good platform design would force adding metadata without making it feel like a chore. (Forcing people to add at least 1 hashtag will just lead to useless hashtags.)
It could be achieved by having something like communities as a feature, where people join them and send their posts to those communities rather than all followers. It would automatically make the post visible only to the selected audience so you wouldn't have to care about what happens "outside". (You can probably find flaws in this specific idea, but the point is the principle behind it)
This was originally a reply, but it feels like it would be a bit overbearing in that context, so I'll put it here.
I think CWs are a good thing to have on here. It's one of the many ways it makes fedi a nicer place than other similar platforms. But I also do think that CWs shouldn't be necessary because they're the treatment for a problem emerging from the mindboggingly stupid "let's put most activities into a global context" platform design.
You often hear complaints about missing CWs, but I also do see the other side. You're lead to interact with your communities as if they're the only ones who are going to receive your posts. And if a community is open about certain topics that would require a CW outside of it, then it would feel strange to add a CW to posts intended for it. It's like the insect instance example I used on my website, but we can apply it to any microblogging without instances as well: If you're interested in insects, and you mostly follow insect lovers like you, it would feel unreasonable to add a CW about insects. You just want to share cool photos of insects with the community who shares your interest. It's also easy to forget that your followers aren't necessarily the same demographic as those you follow. They aren't visible on your timeline after all, so there's nothing reminding you that they exist. And your post will even go beyond your followers thanks to boosting/reposting/whatever you want to call it.
Honestly, there's just no right answer. I wish yinglet speech was CWed because I can't stand it, but if I were to voice that request people would talk shit about me. Yet, CWing politics is reasonable. What's the correct standard? The answer is that there isn't one. We're all a huge crowd of people with many different views and standards that are impossible to consolidate. This platform design is rotten to the core and these problems will never stop.
I wrote a lot today. Here's the current draft, feedback welcome:
The first online community I joined was focused on the RollerCoaster Tycoon series, featuring a website with an upload system to share your creations, and a forum as a gathering place where you could talk about the games, get help for game-related issues, organize contests and more. In addition to that, people would often use instant messengers to stay in contact with some members. It was the typical anatomy of online communities at the time.
Today, 20 years later, the landscape is very different and I’m left with a growing feeling of frustration. Forums have been replaced by microblogging and Discord, two types of platforms which can’t possibly fulfill the same role since they are (closer to) ephemeral real-time communication than asynchronous communication. The kind of interaction I like — discussions spanning weeks or months or even years — has become a rarity buried under a never-ending onslaught of small talk, text bites and memes.
I get it. Not having much of a barrier to overcome makes it so much easier to share your thoughts on anything that comes to your mind, and it’s for this reason that I use the fediverse very actively myself. Small interactions certainly aren’t worthless, but sometimes I want substance. I want to read pages of discussion about a topic which draws me in with interesting insights and different perspectives and without any distractions between every post.
Forums gave me exactly that, whereas the platforms that succeeded them don’t.
Discord simply isn’t a good replacement for forums, even though it tried to introduce some structuring features with threads and forum channels. Nobody uses the former, and the latter rarely have any activity or merely serve as showcases for art or hobbies. To people, Discord remains a regular chat platform first and foremost, and that experience sucks with large communities. You get small groups who dominate most activity on the server or the #general channel, making it hard for me as a new member to join in. Interesting discussions happen rarely, and if they do, they’re interspersed with random other conversations and posts. The message history is generally a non-chronological mess because people want to contribute even if they were a bit late or didn’t type their responses as quickly as the chat zipped by, so there are often responses to posts way up in the history. All of this makes discussions hard to follow and even harder to find at a later time.
Microblogging is almost real-time, but rather than having casual conversations, its focus lies on sharing your thoughts with the world. If there were communities as a feature and no character limit, it could be suitable for quality discussions: Combined with the fact that it’s not as fast-paced, longer posts would be feasible and visible to the audience you hope to get good and relevant responses from. What we’re getting instead is a comically bad “global town square” pile of garbage causing nothing but problems and incentivizing shallow posting tuned to get a high number of reactions. The advantage of microblogging — not being actually real-time — is completely negated by the lack of structure, which forces people to deal with one huge feed for posts and which means that anything you post will rapidly disappear in the void and not get much attention. And if that’s the case, why put in effort? Even on the fediverse with its lack of an effective character limit, this kind of posting is prevalent for this reason.
If these platforms are so unsuitable as community hubs, why have they taken the place of forums? It’s because of the convenience they offer. Starting a community on Discord is easy: It leads you through the process with a pretty UI, and it’s easy to get people to join because a lot of them already have an account. With microblogging, you don’t even need to set up a community; you just follow people and get a vague sense of being part of certain communities from the activity in your timeline. In contrast, a forum requires server hardware, it must be installed and maintained by someone, and you have to convince people to create an account. It requires money, technological skill and effort.
And yet, in trading freedom against convenience, online communities have lost a lot of their individuality and identity. They didn’t use to be just slightly different hangouts with slightly different small talk and memes; they were all unique with custom forum setups, websites with features nobody else had, and especially because nobody’s contributions ever got lost. That little game someone developed for the community 2 years ago? You can still find it and read about the development process and updates. You can discover how the developer’s skills have improved over time. You can find the posts leading up to the start of this project. You can see all events, projects, conversations, perspectives and views; everything that shaped the community and turned it into what it is today.
Modern online communities have no history. They’re all just the same [big platform]-flavored community experience which feels like the hundreds I had before. They’re ephemeral and easily forgotten.
I'm changing the direction of my post a bit to be less about every single flaw of Discord and just broadly describe what I dislike about it. If there's demand for an interactive "all the ways platforms infuriate me showcase", I can still create that but without the narrative around it.
I do see the utility of an AI which normalizes people's dialect, accent or whatever. I have auditory processing issues, which means that if I don't understand someone clearly for whatever reason, my brain nopes right out and I don't understand anything at all. Parties are a fucking nightmare for me.
Though, I'd rather see it being used by people who have these issues, as an assistive technology.
This is what the experience is going to be now: The embeds have a specific prompt to press a button or send a message, and then the situation plays out. It feels way better to me than the fullscreen experience.
