@iBolt07 Hi, I can see you're new so I'm not going to be upset or strict about it but it's really common on here for people to have in their profile a request that you introduce yourself before sending a follow request! I don't know what it's like on twitter but it's usually a good idea to read someone's profile before following to see if there's anything like that
-F
@Felthry Okay! Yeah Twitter is very "just follow with no introduction" so I had no clue that was courtesy here! Thank you!
@iBolt07 yeah we're one of those weird folks who never used twitter so i don't know what was the norm there! i just don't want to be followed by people who i don't even know who they are--don't need to be like a close friend or anything, just want to know who you are, y'know? -F
@Felthry Just a weasel who is on social media too much who likes to make friends
@iBolt07 sounds good to me! weasels are generally pretty good
-F
@Felthry Also, another friend put it very well. If a person isn't open-follow on twitter, you literally can't see their profile/tweets at all. So it's very different.
@iBolt07 huh! i mean, you can post followers-only here too but you can stiill post publicly even if you require follow requests
everything we hear about twitter makes us think "why would they design it that way" but i guess you probably think that a lot about fedi!
-F
@Felthry Actually I've been myself questioning why the interface here was so difficult, but happy I finally figured it out. Twitter was... fine... but then it got extremely psychologically manipulative and kinda toxic.
@iBolt07 i hope you can unlearn a lot of that addiction and clout-chasing. it's a lot nicer to just interact with people as a person (or as several people, in our case!), than it is to get all competitive about it and feel obligated to make the numbers go up
but a lot of things are geared towards making you want to make the numbers go up
-F
@Felthry Oh I have. I had a bad epiphany over it a few years ago and had to rethink alot. I had remade my account on Twitter in 2021 and I stopped caring about the follows :3 I just said what I wanted to say and it was more enjoyable, but it's still a cesspool of toxicity and a very addictive distraction.
@iBolt07 i'm glad! it's good to see people escape things like that
-F
@Felthry mmhmm I am alot happier. It was a hard lesson to learn :3
@Felthry I'd been on there since 2012, and I really found it great at first, but as time went on, social media as a whole became alot more "targeted" and exploitative - if you interact with harsh political takes, Twitter will deliver you more, cause it'll keep you on the site longer so they can deliver more ads to you. Also it just kinda became an addiction - I chased clout behind the scenes for years and it kinda became an enormous distraction.