@erin honestly things have turned out a lot better than I thought they were going to. there was a slump from like, mid-2021 to mid-2022 (roughly speaking) where it felt like it was basically just me posting here and I was considering whether or not to just make a single-user instance. but some people have stuck with it and the whole twitter situation certainly helped

but I also think that these things can't survive off edginess or fighting people online alone. there was some early drama way back over some inane discourse about like transmisogyny or something, and a lot of people jumped in on arguing with people about it, but in retrospect it just bothers me because it's the lowest common denominator of posting that has been conditioned into people who are used to being in an environment like twitter that is essentially a prison where you need to join a gang and have other people to back you up when you get into fights with people.

I think there's value to these sorts of things in moderation, because one of the easiest ways to create cohesion in a group is by having a common enemy, but there needs to be more substance to it than that for it to not fall apart once the common enemy either is no longer there or the group implodes from sheer resentment and hostility and creating a stressful environment. the only reason twitter is able to persist like that is because it's much harder to leave twitter, where everyone else already is and you can just find a new clique if you want, than on fedi

I also think that the whole premise of there being any kinds of 'communities' around g/acc has always been flawed because it was never meant to be that. it's just a piece of writing that has nothing actionable associated with it whatsoever, by design in fact, beyond contributing to the conversation. but I have rarely seen people do that, and I guess that's because I personally have the background of being a philosophy person and then was in circles in acctwitter where I had already been used to the idea of being around people who are actively engaging with theory by reading it and talking about it and writing their own original works. but that unsurprisingly isn't enough to form anything around, because not a lot of people can or want to engage with things in that way, because not everyone has that same skillset or even necessarily the same interests beyond discovering some random piece of writing that they vibe with

this is why g/acc was always supposed to be followed up by Neo-Amazonia, which is supposed to be a suggestion for what to do, and how to build solid real-world foundations to keep the meta-level networked communications grounded in people having actual skin in the game in the real world where they have other people around to hold them accountable and keep them engaged in doing literally anything productive and interesting. and it's why I've over time gravitated towards trying to cultivate a certain vibe of posting on xnfm, because ultimately what is there to do productively with the format of social media if not try to negate the core ideas of it and create new posting languages

anyway, I'm trying to tell myself that the best is yet to come, because if the magik has left me then I don't really have anything else to go back to anyways like a lot of other people who were once overly invested in these kinds of circles and then heel-turned into their normie cope arcs. or rather because the idea of giving up on the lines of flight I've been on is just intolerable and not a life worth living

(mfw this is unironically some thoughts I want to eventually write into a piece discussing the Parler Xenofemme thing)