If it’s not true, I will make it true. I will make sure it comes true, no matter what happens. The internet is a huge opportunity for those who weren’t usually represented in offline spaces to be themselves and form their own communities. The internet was always a place where barriers and prejudices shouldn’t have mattered. We need to protect that principle. And if that principle is not true or not valid, I will make it true. I will work my hardest to make it so. And nobody can stop me.
Such righteousness! But can’t you see that this attitude is part of the problem? Here, this video actually explains it pretty well. You, too, are reducing an actual person to just one random shitty statement. A fleeting opinion becomes the entirety of their personhood, and that links up with everything shitty you’ve seen anyone else say that was similarly shitty. The person is no longer a person but a caricature of evil poisoning your internet space. That’s not reality though. OP is just a flawed human like everyone else who said something hurtful. In our real day-to-day lives we are normally forced to reconcile with that, because we see our neighbors constantly and depend on one another. But on the internet we don’t need to reconcile that, because it’s just an anonymous throwaway space where words battle words. But not the Fediverse! Because the Fediverse is small enough, we bump into each other constantly. We’d be wasting a golden opportunity by reducing a person to a set of opinions.
If you really want to make the Fediverse a better place, which I believe you do and which is why I’m responding again, then you and I and everyone else need to focus on seeing people for who they are beyond the screen. It’s doable on here. We’re small enough. We see the same usernames all the time. Did you know I’m a happily married drug counselor in my 30s? You do now! Am I more than just the asshole who told you to chill? What could OP do to reach the same goal? What can you do to facilitate that? Is the best course of action to just roast the guy every time you see his posts? Or find a way to reconcile? I think you and I have the same goals. Maybe OP too.
