I often run into really cool but reclusive people in the fediverse, particularly in queer/leftist instances, whom I'm always too afraid to follow out of fear that I don't come off as enough of a "queer/leftist" person, since my socially conservative family drilled it into my head from a young age that talking politics online will irreparably damage your social credibility or something. I suppose that's what they call internalized oppression.
Mention of the really bad kind of social conservatism & queerphobia
Always having to ask what Karl Popper would think about me blocking self-identified nazis is exhausting. I always wanted to join a safe space instance like eldritch.cafe, but since my fediverse identity is tied to my "professional" identity, the internalized transphobia reminds me that if I show myself as being "too queer" for Captial (which I already am) then I'm shooting myself in the foot somehow.
Mention of the really bad kind of social conservatism & queerphobia
@njms like most people, I think you're engaging too much within the frame of the situation you experience instead of questioning the frame.
As soon as we're discussing a block or not-block binary we're stuck in a narrow perspective. Our engagement with other people in the world shouldn't be stuck with that dichotomy. We should have better tools and attitudes about all the nuanced ways to engage or not. Blocking is a blunt tool.
Mention of the really bad kind of social conservatism & queerphobia
@wolftune I say "blocking" as an example of the more general problem of whether or not we ought to expect ourselves to engage with people when it harms us or we don't want to. There's certainly lots of subtly to it. It's something I usually expect of myself, but not really anyone else. If you don't mind me asking, what tooling do you think we should have for filtering content? This is actually relevant to a project I'm working on
Mention of the really bad kind of social conservatism & queerphobia
@njms for engaging with the level of nuance this situation requires, here's a starting point https://www.techdirt.com/2021/02/02/techdirt-podcast-episode-268-new-approach-to-fighting-online-harassment/
That's about a tool called Block Party, but the discussion touches on so much of the difficult questions.
There's everything from reactive-now-but-normal people to dedicated trolls to bots to ignorance to simple misunderstandings and much much more. It's complex.
I have myself way more thoughts than can fit here