Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Heads-up: I'm likely going to be unfollowing quite a few people in the next week or so. The reason for (almost) all of them is going to be the same: continuous posting of negative/doom-ish/inciting/etc. things without CWs.

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to keep my feed from becoming a depressing hellscape, and it's apparently not possible to keep these follows in a list without also having them show up in my main feed.

Note that I'm mainly talking here about people tooting 'news' articles and such, calls to action, and so on. I understand that these are meant to 'make people aware' of a topic, but I am exceedingly aware of these things by this point and it does not help anyone to overload my emotional system with it constantly, least of all the people affected by the tragedy being described.

It is simply Too Much, and it is actively keeping me from actually being able to *do* anything about any of it. It paralyzes through depression.

So I've decided, for both my own mental health and my ability to actually work towards effective change, to start unfollowing the people I mainly see this from. This will, unfortunately, include almost every Dutch person I follow too, since CWs do not seem to have caught on on Dutch fedi.

It is not a personal thing but it also sort of is; if this stuff would be behind CWs consistently, or even just most of the time, it wouldn't have been an issue. So it's not about who you are personally, but it *is* the result of a choice you have made to not CW things. I will occassionally check in (there is a reason I followed you in the first place!) and reevaluate if that changes.

If all goes to plan, I will be receiving a kidney transplantation on November 12 (2024), followed by an unknown recovery period. What to expect:

After the transplantation, I will not be around online for a while; this could be anywhere from a few days to a few months depending on how well (or not) the surgery goes. Even after I return, I will likely be avoiding stress for a while, which also means I may drop out of things unannounced.

In the time leading up to the transplantation, I will become less and less consistently available, and you may see me around less, as I deal with the preparations for the surgery.

I'm receiving a kidney from a living donor, under pretty much best-case circumstances (no dialysis), so the chance of success is high, and the chance of complications is low, but it is not zero. Likewise, survival chance is high but not 100%.

If the transplantation succeeds, I will be able to live a mostly normal life, but I will be on immunosuppressive medicine for the rest of my life. Among other things, this means that you're probably only going to see me at (hacker) events that take sufficient precautions against COVID and the like.

So if you want me and other immunocompromised folks around at those events, ask organizers to take those precautions! Ventilation/filtering and CO2 measurement is a good baseline.

If you have any questions about all this, feel free to ask, but I may or may not have the spoons to answer them.

Because they're like oppression lootboxes.

The liberal viewpoint is not one of intersectionality; they might sound very progressive and recognize one or more types of oppression, but do not (wish to) recognize the way these interact, or the structure and patterns that underlie all of them.

This means that it's only a matter of time before I hear them say some extremely shitty and/or bigoted stuff about a topic that they don't recognize as a form of oppression, but I can't know upfront which topic it will be, or when it'll happen.

With my intersectional friends, I could then just point out that it's a form of oppression, and they will take it seriously, introspect, and work (over time) to understand it. Mistakes happen, but they will try to learn. All I need to do, is remind them.

With liberals, however... they do not recognize it as another occurrence of the same thing, and so I am left having to "prove" from whole cloth that yes, it really is a form of oppression, before they are even willing to put in *any* effort to understand the problem.

Every time this happens, it takes hours of my time, and energy that I do not have to spare.

I am already running on fumes most of the time, and I honestly just don't really want to hang around people who put that sort of price on not being shitty.

A reminder that if you are on hackers.town, mstdn.party, or mstdn.social (and a couple other less common instances), I will not see your replies!

These servers are silenced here because while there are a fair amount of nice folks on there, they *also* have moderation issues or a set of policies that's just not compatible with that of pixie.town.

If you want to make sure that your replies arrive here, I would recommend moving to a smaller instance with better moderation and vibes :) Preferably one where you (can get to) know the people running it!

#introduction:

I've actually been here for a while already, though mostly inactive! The Birdsite Situation prompted me to pop in here again. And I'm terrible at writing introductions, so I usually just say "I do stuff on the internet".

But uh, I do all sorts of activist-y stuff, work on radical FOSS (see http://cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.html), write (educational) stuff, am more or less a lonely polyamorous gender blob of indeterminate sexuality who likes both cuddles and kinky things, and I always have 10 times as many projects as I have time for, as is customary with ADHD brain :) Sometimes I even finish some of them!

While I'm an introvert and need plenty of time to myself, I *am* happy to meet like-minded people and spend time with them, and as long as you're not a bigot or apologist, you should feel free to interact with me and/or follow me!

Also, I live in Rosmalen (near Den Bosch) in the Netherlands, and honestly would like to get to know more local folks, and I also have some vague intention to start a queer hackerspace around here if I can find enough interested people. Eventually!

Type of guy who lectures you on being "too abrasive, you won't convince people that way" with no knowledge of your history, and who really just felt personally called out despite the post not being addressed at them, and so tries to cover their discomfort instead of self-reflecting

This all kind of slots into a broader frustration I have about people having collectively unlearned how to take care of their communities, whether those are in their physical vicinity or online.

It's like people have mentally outsourced everything to corporations. Leading themselves to believe that if a company doesn't do it for them, it is not possible. This happens for so many things, not just software.

I'm kind of running out of patience for nerds complaining how Matrix is 'terrible' and making exactly zero effort to contribute towards any sort of improvement, even when explicitly invited to collaborate on an effort to do so. And often arguing for switching to proprietary platforms in a context where that really is not appropriate (eg. FOSS projects).

Yes, some people have a good reason to not be able to contribute. I refuse to believe that 100% of nerds are unable to do so. And a lot of the complaining has a very strong undercurrent of "everything must be served to me ready-made and I am unwilling to work to make my neighbourhood better, because that requires effort".

Hey, guess what, building a commons requires putting in work. How about you do your part in making the open platforms better? Instead of making demands of the, like, 5 people who are actually doing something useful about it?

(This was inspired by a comment elsewhere, but not a subtoot of it, this has been grating on me for years now)