Furry Chat

i have such conflicted and strong feelings about this. as a mod of several furry telegram chats i have had to experience this "anti" affinity with some very outspoken members and, recently, some younger members who are just over the +18 line.

safe spaces and protecting minors are obviously paramount. on the other side, where adults only congregate, i think people need to understand that every group chat, every discord server, every lemmy instance, etc. is going to be a shared space. this shared space has admins or the original group who set the expectations and what's okay. these may be people who have different ideals, values, and moral points of view from you. if you're outnumbered in your opinion, you can't just create some power to change everyone's opinion on something. that's no different than real life where you can't kick someone out of their own house because you don't agree with them. imo, this is related back to the core of the article: entitled visitors and onlookers really ruin otherwise safe spaces because they feel entitled to shout their dissenting opinion in an otherwise mellow and agreeable space. and that is really awful sometimes.

edit: i felt like i should add that i am very supportive of civil, respectful disagreement and discourse. my examples were more towards a situation where, for instance, a subject otherwise agreed upon by the group would cause one member to cry out that they should all be banned or removed from the space. this extremism really hurts productive conversations. it's not impossible for a group of people to be completely wrong and out of touch on a subject, but malicious and hateful dissention doesn't solve anything. it only makes abraisions in an otherwise, usually, calm space

I think that the nature of modern social media platforms make this kind of moral panic It has some properties that make this kind of constant moral panic seem inevitable.

• Huge centralized platforms: they push groups of people together that have core ideological differences. Don't get me wrong, it's healthy and beneficial for all to be exposed to beliefs, have their current set of beliefs challenged, so everyone can grow and learn from each other. But a constant barrage of critiques, callouts, challenges, etc hurts more than it helps. There need to be safe harbors so folks can just chill.

• Engagement at all costs: Social media companies participate in the attention economy, where they make money proportional to the time people spend on the platform. Companies have to fight for your attention in order to survive. And the best way to do that happens to be through fear and anger. Bird app is incentivized to push callouts to the top of the feed.

I'm hopeful that federated communities won't have as much moral puritanism as the big platforms of today.

Reading through this has me thinking... Maybe the downvote button for yiffit should be disabled?

Hear me out on this, on reddit before the bad times, the downvote buttons original intent was to stop posters from straying away from a topic or spreading misinformation.

Nowadays, while the old guard still stuck to the intent of the downvote button, most of the new blood treated it as more of a bullying tool. A way of saying "I don't agree with you, I don't like what you are saying, nor do I Iike what you post. But I won't bother telling you that, So I am going to downvote you."

It is a suggestion. If you don't want to change it, that's fine. Reading through the article made me think of this and our resident downvoter who seems to downvote on topics ( like this one) and images they don't specifically like.