Yukon Whorenelius

Late last year, Tumblr moved aggressively to remove "adult" content from their platform. Roughly a third of my blog was nuked overnight by automated systems. Fully clothed images in neutral poses were flagged as adult. Appeals took months per post. The Gays migrated away en masse

In 2014, Facebook put in place the Real Names policy. Many of my friends were banned for using their trans names, drag names, leather names. The names their community knew them by. They said they were going to fix it, but four years later, I *still* have friends being suspended.

Facebook & IG's moderation policies have become aggressively conservative in the last couple years, as @PupAmp has chronicled. You can be suspended for using the peach emoji. For calling yourself--a gay person--"faggot". For nudity, even with genitals and nipples covered.

Instagram's content restrictions and aggressive enforcement means that many of us gays have a chain of alts, and are used to jumping from account to account as our mains are deleted or suspended. Our tights are too tight. The butt angle a little too direct. We skirt the edge.

When I brought this up at a party last week, almost everyone in the room had a suspension story. It's just a fact of life that every few months to years, you're going to be cut off from a good chunk of your friends and extended circle; perhaps lose your history permanently.

There's something here about how enforcement-on-report allows for suspensions to be weaponized against us when we piss someone off. I was suspended immediately after calling a white supremacist "horny". Who knows if that was what it took. Anyway, some other time.

This is a shitty way to live. I'm tired of having the word "queer" push your tweet into the "potentially offensive" hidden realm. I'm tired of having our accounts banned from appearing in searches or autocomplete. I'm tired of losing my sole means of connection with many friends.

And I think it's going to get worse, for those of us out here on the edge. Tumblr's dead. Facebook and IG are write-offs at this point. Twitter's been the last platform where I felt like I had a decent shot at this kind of expression--and even here, I censored myself constantly.

But here's the agony for me: the communities we built on these platforms were *good*. So many of my friends are here. All I gotta do to keep in contact is... be less gay. Don't show S/M. Don't show skin. Careful of that "repeated violations" clause, cuz it might get ya.

And oh lord, there are a million ways to be queer and assimilation is not a dirty word in my book, even if it ain't for me. If button-down flannel is the skimpiest thing you want to wear, I wish you ALL the best. You can probably be that here.

There are new platforms out there, like newtumbl, which say they'll be friendlier, more sexually open. I don't know. I worry they'll run out of money, turn to ads, fall victim to the same pattern we've seen with Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram. And I worry about SESTA/FOSTA too.

I think if we're going to have a place to speak that's less subject to those pressures, it can't be a global corporate platform. We have to own the space ourselves. I also think gay people are gonna have to be the moderators for gay spaces, and leather people for leather spaces.

And there's this kinda cool thing called the Fediverse: a constellation of these little software neighborhoods, each running Mastodon, Pleroma, etc. They talk to each other. It's like distributed Twitter: you can follow people on your own instance, or anywhere else.

I've thought a lot about Christopher Alexander's writing on subculture boundaries, on the importance of semi-permeable social spaces, on how Twitter following networks kinda get at that, but not quite. I think Fediverse might be a good call. Independent, but not closed.