Thinking of making a filter for "no at" messages. If all one wishes is to voice something but in no way engage, why even toot? Just write it to /dev/null or something?
Prompted by seeing a no-at message complaining of a tech issue that has a super easy fix the poster clearly doesn't know about, which makes me wonder why they didn't no-at the tech support email address instead. :shrug:
@cathal If people don't want to engage with other people then perhaps social networking is not for them. The clue is in the 'social' bit.
@cathal I can imagine reasons why someone would post publicly but say they don't want to engage:
- Complaining is part of their identity. They want to tell their friends and acquaintances what's on their minds, or posture for them, but they don't want to solve the problem. They don't want others pointing out that the problem is solvable, because that makes the posturing uncomfortably clear.
- "No at" is an indirect, face-saving way to request broad expressions of support and nothing else.
@cathal
I actually like "no at". Sometimes someone will share something just to vent.
In real life this is easy enough to sense, yet it still took me a good long time to get this. If someone complains about their shitty day start by showing some empathy and saying "that sucks". Maybe later you can suggest a fix.
On Mastodon I really like that most people are going out of their way to be nice towards each other, so I would want to respect this. The "no at" makes this really clear.