@zebratron2084

Yeahhh. My wanting to post -> actually posting conversion rate is around 1% for reasons that are mostly no individual’s fault.

I feel stifled, I guess. And I feel like there's no way I can voice concern about it without sounding like some edgelord complaining about safe spaces. Some poor chud in the early days of Snouts (a neighbor in the fediverse, founded by IRL friends, tons of mutuals there but not a place I'll ever join) said he felt content warnings were overused, and the whole community including *every admin and mod* took a dump from the heavens on this guy. It was absolutely a dogpiling; the dude did not need a talking to from like 8 different staff, let alone all the regular users who piled on with absolutely no sort of “ok come on guys that’s enough.”

Folks (including my instance admin) took them to task for overreacting and they seem to have calmed down since then, and I’ve chalked it up to growing pains, but still... I think that guy might have been onto something, even if he expressed it in a really punchable way. Every post is homework. I can’t just run the routine scan for sex/drugs/violence before I slap warnings on things, I have to rack my brain for absolutely every way some seemingly innocuous thing might hurt someone, and that’s something I already torture myself doing whenever I say *anything*. I'm already inclined to self-censor and this environment exacerbates it.

Over on my home instance a while back, I was feeling saucy and posted a couple snippets of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, and was told to take it down because it’s not screen-reader friendly. I could have reposted it behind a “dadaist sound poetry” content warning, but the joy was gone at that point. And I’m still not convinced it was necessary; they weren’t long snippets, I ran them through text-to-speech and it only took a few seconds to garble its way through, and frankly is it such a damn crime to subject screen-reader users to a few seconds of nonsense just like everyone else who scrolls past?

Well, point taken. You’ll see less weird stuff from me. Which means you’ll see less of me. If that's what's better for this ecosystem, who am I to argue, I guess. Stings though.

Image descriptions are another complication for me. I’m completely on board with using them whenever possible, but several times I’ve seen boosted posts like “~friendly reminder~ to always use image descriptions; many of us won’t follow or interact with you if you don’t!” Not can’t, but won’t. No awareness that taking a hard line on this one accessibility issue could be creating a different accessibility issue for other people.

Some days my brain just doesn’t work. Some days I’m not very verbal. Some days – a lot of days – I’m capable of posting a quick picture of some flowers I found outside but not capable of describing it. Let alone having to describe selfies, or art – like the weird doodles I sometimes want to post but never do anymore. The impression I get around here is not “it’s ok, do what you can, better to have you here at all,” but rather that my instinct to just disappear is the right one, and that "if you can't be perfect, don't try" is the truth and not a paralyzing cognitive distortion.