It's funny, when you step away, the things you realize you took as normal that are deeply wrong.

I doomscrolled. A lot. It was my way of coping with immense anxiety about the state of my country. I would open the app, find the list (cheekily titled "🔥🔥🔥" as a reference to the feeling that everything was on fire), and scroll.

Zing! That tweet hit a button! Anxiety would race through me. But there was a bucket of water immediately at hand—if I retweeted, I could at least spread the word!

Zap! Another tweet pissed me the hell off. If I retweeted, more people could share in my outrage!

At my worst, I was anxiously retweeting hundreds of things a day, each one a momentary hit of cortisol—oh god this is awful—followed by the cool relief of retweeting and feeling like I did something. Hit, soothe. Hit, soothe.

That relief can become addicting. Our brains, as I often tell my clients, register the cessation of a painful stimulus as a reward. Each time I soothed myself with a retweet, I was priming myself for the next hit.

But beneath all of this, there were emotions I wasn't meaningfully addressing. I was afraid about the future. I feared for my and my loved ones' safety. I was grieving the loss of the (admittedly naïve) view of the country I grew up in.

Doomscrolling and retweeting on Twitter didn't change any of that. It didn't bring me any closer to a future I wanted. It didn't make me or my loved ones safer. At best, it reminded me that I wasn't alone—but that universality was abstract and parasocial when what I needed most was concrete, material solidarity. Even though I was being temporarily soothed with each retweet, there were much deeper emotions that I was avoiding, and the more I flung myself into flurries of retweets, the more those deep pains festered.

For Twitter's engagement algorithm, however, my addictive, desperate interaction was desired behavior. I was engaging, after all. Boy, was I ever.

As I see new people settling in here and bringing their enthusiasm for political discussion, I see, in many of them, a familiar desperation. A worry that if one doesn't reshare this post, one could be depriving a key swing voter of crucial information. It looks, to my eyes, like the anxiety and dread that led me to turn my Twitter feed from an honest slice of my human life to a firehose of sound and fury.

Doomscrolling was not effective activism when I did it. Because it didn't actually address the feelings I was having and the things I cared about, it left me burnt out, having spent extra energy and gone through countless mini-crises to make no material progress toward my values. It was engagement, but it wasn't meaningful action.

Here, now, I try to do that less. I don't follow accounts for insight on US politics. I try to share the things that make me me, rather than merely a conduit for political messages. And yet, like an addiction, I still feel it there, waiting to take me back. I can imagine how crudely satisfying it would be to lose myself in a whirlwind of dread again.

This place, where we can talk to each other without the invisible hand of an engagement algorithm, offers us the opportunity to slow down and reflect on what we're saying and why. Like any disruption of routine, it gives us a chance to be mindfully present, to observe our current choices, assess how they're actually working, and choose our next steps intentionally.

I hope that more people, when given this opportunity, might choose a more deliberate approach to their own political activity, one that's both more materially impactful and less driven by desperate anxiety than what the bird site instilled in us.

But if not that—I hope they'll at very least use a damn CW.

If you're #NewHere, there's one point I feel is so important to grok.

Things run differently here.

In our day-to-day lives, most of us use apps and websites that act as closed gardens. There may be beautiful, entrancing things to see and do inside those gardens, but you cannot get in or interact with them except by playing by their rules.

If the bouncer at the gate says he needs to see your ID, you either comply or you don't get to participate.

If the garden owners want to kick everyone out for a private party, they can do so.

Twitter is very much a walled garden. One company controls all the computers that make up Twitter, and if you want in, you have to play by their rules. Because it's all centralized within those walls, it's possible for a billionaire with an ego the size of Mars to take it over and immediately ruin it.

But things run differently here.

I know this is gonna sound very "there is no spoon"... but there is no Mastodon. At least, not in the way that there's a Twitter. Mastodon is not a single garden with well-defined walls, all owned and controlled by a single entity.

Mastodon is, literally, a program that almost any computer could run. And when that program runs, it joins a network of hundreds or thousands of other computers, all of whom can communicate with one another. This is what we call the "#Fediverse", which is short for "federated universe"—a rich ecosystem of different independent projects, each communicating with one another using a common language.

Ever think about how you don't need to know your friends' cell phone carriers to call them? You might use Sprint, and they might use T-Mobile, but we can talk to each other seamlessly because phone calls are handled via a common standard.

Or think about email: your friend might have a Hotmail account, and you might use ProtonMail—but you can email each other regardless. You don't have to create a new account on each "email service". You can just email each other.

Mastodon and the Fediverse operate on that principle. There is no Big Mastodon, just like there is no Big Email or Big Phone Calls. That means that what you're experiencing is a much smaller, collaborative (even a little anarchic) endeavor... one that is resistant by design to walled gardens and corporate control.

Things run differently here. I know this technical jargon might be a bit more than many people are used to thinking of, but when you sit with what it means, I think it illustrates that the internet has a lot more possibility than the collection of walled gardens it has become in 2022.

That's one of the reasons I love it here. ♥

When community moderators—online or off—ask me for resources, my first pick is always Shawna Potter's book Making Spaces Safer. It's an invaluable read, because it goes beyond the nuts and bolts of moderation to look at the broader picture.

Moderation is more than (the admittedly important) task of deleting spam and blocking Nazis: moderation is about cultivating the culture you want to see flourish in a space.

On the centralized Big Social networks, moderation is inaccessible to normal users. Moderation is something done by Twitter employees (or, y'know, was). You can report posts and tag Support and appeal decisions, but moderation, like most of Twitter, exists behind a curtain. And because Big Social sites are walled-garden monoliths, you have no meaningful say in the moderation—and by extent, the culture—of the social network. You either put up with it or you leave entirely.

Federated social networks are different. Each server has its own moderators, and therefore its own culture. Here on my instance, for inst—for example, I maintain a Code of Conduct that excludes all sorts of behavior that I wouldn't want in my offline social circles. I don't keep company with crypto shills or obnoxious centrists or transphobes, so I cultivate an online space with the same ideals. Someone who disagrees with that is going to look for a different space.

And because of how federation works, leaving a server for another doesn't shut you out of the network altogether. You can hop to a server that better fits what you're looking for and still participate.

As a result, the average person using the Fediverse has a level of control over their experience that just isn't possible on Big Social sites.

Federated social media shows us how our online experiences don't have to look like the corporate, centralized models we've grown accustomed to.

Folks are migrating here again, so I'll share my #introduction once more.

Spencer

2022-04-26 00:48:40

There's a new influx of people to the #fediverse today, and rightly so! Figured that's as good a time as any to make a new #introduction.

I'm Spencer (he/they). I run Motley, which is my name for this little Friendica instance. It's mostly just me here these days, although I still have dreams of one day helping my friends find digital community here.

I made myself a home on the Fediverse because I wanted to distance myself from the big corporate services. I care about #decentralization and #selfhosting, as I believe more people running smaller personal servers will help break the stranglehold of big tech companies.

My ideal world is one much freer of coercive hierarchies. It's smaller-scale, more cooperative and communal, and more deeply connected to the earth. I'm kinda #solarpunk, I suppose. I care about freedom, tempered with an ethic of compassion for one another and the world we live in. I also practice #polyamory. I find that inextricable from my values.

I dabble in way too many hobbies, and it's delightful. I love #boardgames, especially #Netrunner, which I maintain is the best game ever. I'm a member of the volunteer fan organization keeping that game alive—ask me about it and I'll gladly talk your ear off. I enjoy amateur #mixology. I started learning #lockpicking last year, and am also working on becoming licensed as a #hamradio operator. I'm interested in community-focused approaches to #preparedness, because I don't think the odds are good for the uncomplicated continuation of this late-capitalist "normal", and when things start to fall apart, I don't want myself, my family, or my communities to be caught off-guard.

Over the last couple of years, my own spiritual growth has taken me in a location that might look bizarre from the outside: I still firmly identify as a secular humanist who does not believe in the supernatural, yet I'm also increasingly an intentional practitioner of "#magick". I occasionally read #tarot for myself, have cast a couple of spells in my time, and generally see the playful fantasy of magick as psychologically useful and spiritually rewarding. I run a Friendica forum about it, in fact, though, like many things here on Motley, it's fairly dried up.

My posting is eclectic, and I tend to share to a followers-only audience by default. I strongly believe that arguing with me is a privilege reserved for those I already have a relationship with, so I have very little patience for strangers who comment on my posts in an attempt to provoke a debate. I don't know you—why would I waste my time and energy in a fight I don't know is safe? This is my little corner of the Fediverse, and I choose not to spend it interacting with fascists, bigots, conspiracy theorists, Web3 shills, or generally anyone I find unpleasant. Because of that, I'm slow to accept follow requests until I can peruse your public profile and get a sense of who you are.

I'm sure I could go on forever (haha already have), but that probably gives a good start. I'm always down for new connections, since that's what makes the Fediverse thrive.

Cheers! 🍻

Okay, I need to figure out the actual issue here so I can troubleshoot it effectively, but for now, I'm going to just scream into the void.

I cannot, for the life of me, seem to get my #selfhosted home server to stop timing out. I want to set up the Friendica phpmailer addon so I can send emails via an external SMTP relay, but every time I send test emails, the server chokes and Cloudflare informs me a timeout occurred. If I try to update something from my YunoHost admin panel, the GET request usually leads to a timeout.

I've fiddled with Nginx settings. I've tried to increase PHP-FPM settings. FastCGI seems to be implicated. I'm messing with all these config files for programs I don't understand on multiple machines and I can't figure out, for the life of me, why sending a few emails via SMTP relay would be so resource-intensive that my server would not only think for several minutes, but choke up in doing so.

I just want a server that works reliably again, but I don't understand enough of what's going on to even understand the problem, let alone troubleshoot and fix it. 😩