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Fedi (or Twitter or anything else like it) is not a good place for facilitating communication between people. @puzzlebark first floated this idea to me a few weeks ago and I didn't really understand it at the time, but the recent friction between everyone has really convinced me that this can never really work. I hate posts. I hate timelines. People don't fucking talk to each other on here. I hate the town square model. You can't have a town square without a fucking town.
This lack of any real interaction is perhaps what has made fedi/twitter/whatever so alluring to people like me, who are really just antisocial edgelords that love fucking up people's timelines. Of course the problem is that the place is a sealed chamber: the largely antisocial userbase needs a way to turn friendships from fedi into real things, but they have no idea how to facilitate irl solidarity or a healthy Discord server or whatever the fuck. Ironically this makes it actually easier to form emotional connections with people on here because we're all stuck here together, but these emotions aren't based on any actual social interactions. When she posts good etc etc
Like on the surface--what the "town square" model is really for--we see people posting about their ideological contours. Their edges. Where they end and not-them begins. What subversion looks like is posting more mundane things, random things that you might experience during typical social interaction with them. Yet replying to such posts in kind breaks the code of keeping everything as far away from actual social interaction as possible, so discussions here never really seem to last if they aren't about some contentious topic.
Ultimately I personally feel that this place may have enabled my recent extremely reclusive real-life behavior (though there are of course other factors) and I will be more critical about my engagement with it in the future. Am I just coping about human social interaction feeling like it is inherently unworkable for people like me by blaming it on a specific social network structure? Maybe. Things on here are real, which is why they're even more insidiously fake. In case it wasn't obvious from my avatar I hate everyone else here.