Just gonna reiterate that despite being an openly queer woman with large reach on fedi I'm having a great time. I don't know why my experience is different from some other highly visible people in that way. I wish I did, because that might mean there's some kind of solution to their problems on here
In fact fedi is the happiest I've felt about social media pretty much ever *and* fedi was instrumental in helping to make our queer game launch a success
There's a lot of doom and gloom about fedi and I feel it's important to provide an alternate perspective occasionally, if only to show the potential of this place
The best advice I have for people with a large following on fedi who are having a bad time is to maybe find a smaller instance with a more engaged moderation team (and authorized fetch) and move there. I have never had to play whack-a-mole with bad instances because the mod team on my instance yeets them into the void long before I would ever interact with them
@eniko Do keep in mind that that advice only really works for a relatively small subset of people on here; eg. Black folks constantly run into racism, including on a lot of the 'respectable' and small queer instances, and fedi as a whole is really not doing well enough at combating that.
I likewise have a pretty good experience on fedi, but I'm also white and my axes of marginalization are well-understood ones here. Both "you can have a good experience on fedi" and "you can have a horrible experience on fedi" are true depending on who you are...
@joepie91 yeah, but two recent examples of "high profile and miserable" are also white so, that's who i was thinking of. it's also "my best advice", not necessarily "this will definitely fix your problems"
@eniko @joepie91 I'm not sure what's meant by "high profile." If it means "internet celebrities," and "miserable" means "my online presence isn't immediately monetizable" then I would see that as a feature not a bug.
The word from minorities seems to be that the commercial web gets them in ways the open source movement doesn't. I don't doubt it, and I'll do what I can to fix the Fediverse, but I'm not gonna adopt a pro-commercial attitude for the cause.
@joepie91 @eniko I've seen those complaints, too. As well as the complaints about requests for receipts. I can easily believe that I'm so privileged that many very large things are very invisible to me, but I remain clueless as to what to do about it. But their job isn't to teach me, so I guess I've got to figure it out on my own.