FBXL Social

I ended up going all-in on the fediverse after I started to realize they were really pushing the censorship angle openly. I was never personally censored (besides some really brutally biased subreddits that were more than happy to downvote all wrongthink into oblivion), but knowing it's out there has a chilling effect on speech. You start looking over your shoulder, and asking if you should really post that idea, and at that point what's the point of a discussion site if you can't discuss anything?

I grew up in a situation where I had to constantly hold my tongue thanks to divorce stuff between my mom and my dad. It wasn't healthy. Later in life I had to work really hard to open back up because there were so many filters I'd put on everything I said that I'd hardly ever speak, nobody knew me, I was all alone.

Once I forced myself to remove the filters, I found that while I wasn't everyone's cup of tea, some people really, really liked the person they discovered. I wasn't alone anymore.

Then our society started pressuring everyone the way I felt pressured back then. They're wrong -- The reason our society feels lonlier than it's ever felt before is that we've gone all-in on an ideology that says you have to watch everything you say, you have to shut out anyone who says anything wrong, you have to distance yourself from anything that isn't exactly what the establishment has told you to be and nothing more and nothing less.

That's true, and even that was ok for a while because there was a diverse enough population that different people with different ideas could vote up or vote down and moderation was pretty minimal. Later on it became more polarized and moderation amped up considerably and it became particularly bad.