Yukon Whorenelius

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.