One of the problems with advertising-funded social media is that the platform has a strong incentive to push people towards doing whatever they can to boost Engagement™ - posts, retweets, replies, likes, whatever. A big part of this is facilitating viral posts - make the biggest accounts bigger, make the most popular posts more popular, etcetera and so on. An unfortunate side effect of this is that one of the most effective ways to make a post go viral on such a platform is for it to infuriate people as much as it can possibly get away with. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc for a pretty neutral and scientific seven-minute breakdown of the dynamic. As a consequence, most social media platforms, especially since (in English, at least) somewhere in 2016, are constantly stressing their users out more and more as they spend time there, embedded in its firehose of Here Is The Next Thing To Be Upset About.

(Or, at least, me. That's why I don't Twitter or Tumblr any more.)

A big part of how the fediverse (Mastodon, GNU Social, Glitch Soc, Pleroma, &c.) is less awful is ... okay, a /big/ part is meaningful moderation and the platform being relatively small and fragmented, but another big part is content warnings, or CWs. If someone posts about the latest atrocity on Twitter, then I get that thrown at me with no chance to make a decision about how to engage with it - basically skipping straight to being upset by it. If someone posts about the latest atrocity here, what I get thrown at me is a CW saying something like "US politics, human rights violations" and I get to decide:

- Do I want to read about human rights violations right now? Is this my staying informed or my feeding an anxiety spiral?
- Do I want to read about this later? Should I open it in a new tab?

and, when I do read it (as I usually do), I've already thought about it, at least for a fraction of a second ... and that means that I'm already a step back from the immediate stimulus-response dynamic that helps angering posts go so viral. Not /free/ of it, but a step back.

I don't boost those posts here very much. I don't boost un-CWed politics posts at all, if I can help it. I keep that moment available to the people downstream of me.

And the result is a social media platform where my stress levels aren't constantly rising. And, as far as I can tell, it means a platform where stressful news is usually shared in a form that tries to be /useful/ rather than to boil anyone's blood, because we aren't willing to go along with unnecessary blood boiling and we're on the watch for it.

We try to encourage people to be considerate, here. It's a norm, even. We don't have to censor ourselves to keep this a place that's healthy to spend time on, we just let people know what they're getting into and trust them to control their own experience.