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.
@joepie91
Yeah, there's certain people I've unfollowed because of that as well.
And some people I've 'banished' to the 'low priority' list. Their posts and boosts no longer show up on my main feed but i still follow them.
And i can go to the 'low priority' list if i'm up for looking at such things
@thibaultmol I don't seem to have that ability, though it may be a Mastodon version issue
@joepie91 OH you're on Mastodon 3 patched version, interesting, didn't know that was a thing.
yeah maybe not.
@joepie91 i try to be good on this and I share your annoyance with many people not doing this. I hope you feel comfortable letting me know whenever I slip up.
@marlies I don't immediately remember your posts as being a problem here (though you're one of the rare few in NL) and honestly I don't actually mind if people slip up sometimes... it's just that some people very obviously just don't care about doing it and/or don't want to bother because they *consistently* do it, those are the folks I'm thinking of mainly.
Will (try to) remember your post though, and let you know if I notice you missing one, thanks :)
@joepie91 really appreciate it, thanks!
@joepie91 turning off boosts, muting news channels that get boosted a lot and filter rules for certain topics can be great tools as well
@piegames Unfortunately turning off boosts doesn't really work because a lot of interesting stuff ends up in my timeline through boosts... filter rules are a bit annoying because I'm stuck on Mastodon 3 for now and it doesn't let me auto-CW things, only hide them entirely 😐
(News channel aren't really an issue, almost anything with news channels is instance-blocked here and the remaining few I muted long ago 🙃)
As an addendum for clarification: for now, I'm going to try and exclude non-white folks from this change (as in, will not unfollow them), and see whether this is enough to bring it down to manageable levels, as they *do* still regularly post things that are actually new to me.
I still would appreciate CWs all the same for the same reasons, but also understand that there are conflicting needs that warrant doing it differently here.