As much as I long to wake up to news that Meta has gone down in a ball of flames (for many, many reasons) I do use Facebook to keep up with long-term real-life friends and family. I may resent the infrastructure role Facebook plays but I cannot ignore its usefulness. Oddly, one of my favorite features is the Memories feature - a revision of the very feature that made me rage unfriend nearly everyone on Facebook back in 2011 (another interesting tale). Clearly I returned to Facebook at some point (yet another interesting tale). Here's a memory from three years ago (November of 2022) when I was trying out Mastodon in my attempts to flee the chaos that Twitter was devolving into:
I'm sure this is bound to make someone angry with me, but, hey, not pizza, etc.
There's a convention on both CounterSocial and Mastodon to use CW - content warnings. I have used them when I was posting something about Twitter (called "Bird Site") because folks are presumably on CounterSocial/Mastodon because they left Twitter and don't want to be reminded about it. Fair enough. If I were someone who was posting about a movie or TV show I would use the CW to not reveal any spoilers. That's reasonable, too.
However (you knew this was coming), it appears that more usage of CW is desired on these platforms. This brings up a philosophical question - which is similar to the philosophical question I have had to wrestle with given my night owl status: I send emails at 2am. I had someone get...not upset, but taken aback when they got a 2am email from me. They slept with notifications ablazing, apparently.
Not to be impolite, but that's not my problem. If someone has their phone blazing at all hours for email notifications please allow me to introduce you to the Do Not Disturb function where you can allow emergencies through and block out all the rest. It's awesome.
Now, phoning or texting someone at 2am? I get that I don't do that unless I know they are awake already and my attention is welcome. To most, a 2am call or text is "who died?". (my definition is more 6am - and if no one died the person who called might be in line for it)
Email, though, is a different animal. Its purpose is to be read when someone gets around to reading it. I would put social media in the same category - here or Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn. I'm going to send those out when it works for me. Again, don't let your phone wake you up with something other than an emergency phone call or text (or alarm).
So, content warnings? How in the heck am I to know what sets someone off? They might have had a horrible childhood experience associated with classical music - but it is UP TO THEM to create a filter to keep that out of their timeline. I have all sorts of filters because certain topics of conversation bug me - I'm on Mastodon for cybersecurity and ethics stuff, not identity politics. I don't care if someone is vegan - knock yourself out - but I don't want to see your vegan rant. So, I filter. I don't expect the world to CW everything.
The whole CW thing really makes me think I need to just lurk on these platforms and not post. It's wearying. Nothing will ever be right - nothing will ever be good enough. It's like an abusive relationship where you can do 1000 things right and miss the 1001th because you didn't know it was there. The goalposts always move. And the scolding...it's like an HOA where someone always has to go around and do the gEntLe ReMiNdEr about the CWs. I'm not posting dead bodies or rape scenes.
I usually phrase my preferred sleeping schedule as "I'm the person you call at 2am to help move bodies; if you call at 8am you'll be the body" - but 6am does sound more reasonable (and for the record I have never moved a body, at 2am, or any other time. Yet.)
I don't know if the whole CW thing is still as big as issue now as it was then - I skulk into Mastodon when I remember that I have the account - I use Bluesky now, but mostly to admire bird photography. Bluesky has excellent filtering capabilities so it's possible I filtered out any of the censorious folks 😏
The purpose of sharing this here is to remind folks to not be censorious donuts but also to remind folks that you need to turn off notifications for anything that isn't life or death. Take charge of your life - don't let the little pocket computer tell you what to do and when to do it.