I’ve recently written about injustices that were thrust upon me by communities who chose the side of the aggressors, or the bigoted, and you might be thinking, “Gee, Nova, that’s gotta be the only time that’s happened, right?” And you’d be wrong-o. It seems that my sort of, I’ll stand up for myself, and speak out against bad things, or bad people, as soon as I see them, or am forced to interact with them, kind of mode-of-operation, is incongruent with people and communities who sit on the sidelines with platitudes of feigned positivity.
I don’t claim to be 100% neurotypical and free of psychological issues. I am quite sure I suffer from at least some side effects of PTSD. When I originally came out as trans, and began my transition, I endured things in my real world job that I’m not sure many people would have made it out the other side of.
People telling you, “Yeah, you’re being harassed, but this is something you’ve got to just come to terms with. You’re transgender.” Or, HR spending a month investigating a few variations of reported harassment, only to come back to you and tell you that they’ve dropped the case completely. Day in, day out, people sneering at you, making snide and bigoted comments to your face, and then years of more things than I can count on five hands that are also considerably bad.
Some things have happened to me here and there, and it sucks. Some of those things involve Laurelai Bailey (a person with a rabbit hole so deep in her history of accusations, including that of being an FBI informant, that it’s impossible to link to just one source that says, “Hey, this person is bad.“) holding me metaphorically hostage with threats and doctored screenshots, since the day I came out on Facebook.
But that’s a topic … for another time.
Flick forward to Mastodon, a platform that was built on being open, owned by the people, and therefore also administrated and moderated by the people.
I’m not writing this to give anyone the idea that they shouldn’t sign up on a Mastodon instance. I love Mastodon and its connected networks, and I still think it’s partially ahead of its time, as normal social media users on corporate software still argue with themselves, trying to figure out if not getting 400 likes on every post is worth the switch (Okay, this is a little sarcastic).
But, with my experiences, this is why you’ve got to at least somewhat investigate the stances, the morals, and the rules of the instance you’re seeking to join on Mastodon. Because sometimes, even the ones that are open to all walks of people, are not inherently good, by any standard. Sometimes you’ll find this out later, down-the-road, and that’s exactly why Mastodon has an account merge option.
Hackers.town wasn’t the first place to flip me the bird and toss me to the buzzards. In fact, Ginny McQueen’s kitty.town instance was the first. Her instance is one of extremely strict content-warning labeling, and during my years of being isolated, and still very much reeling from the treatment I’d experienced in the job I’d lost, I had a most definite mental breakdown. She banned me, and continues to block me (as far as I know). That’s her prerogative, and she can do what she wants.
Then came cybre.space, and deadinsi.de, instances inhabited by people who treated me basically exactly the same way over enough time, whenever I was moving into crisis-mode, a thing that rarely happens with my mental health anymore. But, it’s no wonder both of these instances are dead and gone.
Finally, I landed on Hackers.town in December 2020, having been offered a space to post, and not be immediately tossed to the curb should I suffer any issues resulting from years of abuse, and the fallout I still somewhat experience to this day.
I mean, at least, that was the idea.
I resided there for about three years, and over the course of that time, my mental health gradually improved as I worked to rebuild my life after years of nearly entirely giving up on myself, and everything else.
But, to say that I don’t still suffer from some sort of side effect of having had these things happen, would be a lie. I still don’t respond well to harassment, or people intentionally goading me in my notifications on social media. Ever since one of hackers.town’s members (who appears to no longer have an account there) barged into my notifications to provoke me over an innocuous post about how much I enjoy having a Macbook–I’ve been working on entirely ignoring trolls. Blocking, muting, and on Mastodon, completely muting or suspending entire instances.
I wouldn’t even call what happened there the worst meltdown I ever had, but it was still pretty … bleh.
I told (now defunct and deleted) user 0xSH00T to, “go fuck himself, eat a pile of dicks, and delete his goddamn account.” And, due to his account being deleted, I can no longer dig up the things he said to me in response to me saying:
Nevertheless, I was pretty pissed off, kind of spiraling at the time. I told the admin, Gibson, to either ban him, or ban me.
He chose to ban me.
On the other side of this, this is what spawned my instance mkultra.monster, because, having been on Mastodon since 2017, to now, and having dealt with this kind of behavior from people who should be competent admins and moderators, I can fully say, I don’t trust that easily anymore.
When you join a Mastodon instance, your admins and moderators should be well versed in community management. They should be able to determine, in an argument, or clash, who the aggressor is, and who the person defending themselves is, even if that person is having something of a mental-break, due to being harassed.
Since losing my account on hackers.town (in August 2023), I’ve been doing a lot better. I spent a lot of time on Threads, and found out how satisfying it is to simply silence aggressors into the void. Since being an admin of my own Mastodon instance again (yes, I have hosted numerous ActivityPub instances in the past), and having the power to fully moderate bad actors and bad people, I’ve never been more content in controlling my social circles and spaces. Responding to these types of people always goes down a path that I do not prefer, and simply cutting them off from having the ability to be inflammatory, is awesome.
I can’t say that I’m pleased with the instances I spoke about here in this post today, because, like the aggressors in the Twitter-Synthwave community, none of them have ever apologized.
But that’s okay, because at least I can write about it, and get it out of my head, so that it’s here, in an open space where it no longer needs to live in silence.
When you come to Mastodon, keep in mind the types of people you want to surround yourself with. Keep in mind the rules a specific instance has in-place. Look at how they interact with people, and make a sound decision. Or, don’t! That is, again, why you have the ability to move your account to wherever you please.
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