when you try to make new friends on a new online platform, it’s…. well, it can be socially exhausting in ways that I have a hard time dealing with

Which is why I haven’t gotten as deeply situated on Mastodon and Dreamwidth as I’d like. Even though those seem more capable of surviving these sort of times than Discord and Tumblr

Because I am not good with new sets of social rules.

I screwed up quite a few times just getting into Tron fandom in 2023 – because I had not been active in any fanfic/fanworks community since the early 00’s, and ALL of fandom is different since then

not to mention the fact that EVERY fandom has its own social expectations (honestly I am lucky Tron fandom is so laid-back, and that my passion for it was strong enough to get past the few stresses I had)

but yeah it’s a whole new set of social rules to learn, entering any new social space.

Like.

what boundaries are people likely to have, and which of those are mostly considered normal and which are mostly considered weird and unreasonable

what words have what connotations to most people in the space

what is considered too much information (to share or to request); what topics can you bring up and in what contexts

what jokes are treated as funny, or unfunny or mean

how is this affected by who you’re talking to and how you know them

what are people generally likely to find offensive, and how will they let you know, and what should you do in response, and what can you expect then

…and in online social spaces, all this is even affected by the technical details of how the site works

like, on tumblr, saying something in a reblog vs in the tags vs in the comments all have slightly different social meaning, because of how people do and don’t receive those messages– while saying something in a new post of your own has its own whole meaning different from those. And blocking or unfollowing a person can limit what the two of you see of each other but doesn’t eliminate it, and what it does allow… isn’t intuitive. Nothing is.

And once I get used to it… I can be super active in places where I already feel comfortable that I at least understand the social expectations.

Like. Tumblr has plenty of people with weird expectations, but by now I’m fairly familiar with what those can be, and what most people in my friend group think of them

but

the moment I start trying to interact in a place where I start seeing people expressing types of boundaries I’ve never seen before? I get terrified that I’m gonna do something unforgivable without realizing it.

And so I gravitate back to the places I find familiar.

And I don’t leave them until they become so bad there’s no other option

which… might be coming up. At least, with every change in present-day internet, it seems closer.

Even when it seems we’ve convinced a website to roll back a bad decision, it still just feels like they’ve set it aside, and will try again later with less warning and more secrecy and hope we don’t notice this time

and I do NOT like that.