it haunts me sometimes that the internet is potentially the greatest empathy-training tool created thus far, but it's not often thought of like that
@uma as a controversial opinion: i kind feel like part of this is due to the way social media is designed and thus experienced. mastodon feels special and nice b/c it's small - smallness is actually a critical part of the process, i think. most social media is simply too big, and designed to grow (sometimes without regard for it's users!)
@uma people want to share and empathize, but there's different sizes of sharing and empathizing, and being pushed into a space that's too big is exhausting and /dangerous/.
like, i think the reason tumblr & call out culture have gotten to where they have is b/c the system is too large and too flat, there's no barriers really.
we turn to moderation and reporting tools as means of mitigating this but... the issue of scale and the need for a human touch presents problems
@uma anyways my point is that while public spaces do need to be moderated, perhaps what we also need is not a few big spaces, but many small ones
@uma i know i'm several days late to this (i dont know how i ended up here), but i often think about the comparison to my internet experience growing up before social media, being part of like small tight knit communities on forums and ircs in the ranges of maybe 10 to 300 active people. it often felt way more positive but maybe that's just the rose tinted glasses talking
@anotak that's exactly the line of thought that brought me to this conclusion! from what i've found it's a common feeling, which implies that it's more than just nostalgia - i think we get lost in the wonder of the great wide web only to find ourselves adrift, not particularly able to connect with or comprehend the values of thousands of other people at once. it's disconcerting.