Noah<p>I don’t think I really sat with my feelings on why I found myself posting on <a href="https://10base2.dev/tags/mastodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>mastodon</span></a> and enjoying the experience of the <a href="https://10base2.dev/tags/fediverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>fediverse</span></a> so much, compared to something like <a href="https://10base2.dev/tags/facebook" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>facebook</span></a> or <a href="https://10base2.dev/tags/instagram" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>instagram</span></a>. </p><p>You’d think that I’d have chosen a platform where I’ve physically met the people who are my connections and who are my friends and family. Not that I don’t consider some of you who I met through Mastodon as friends, but there’s really only six or seven of you who I’ve spent any kind of time with offline and the rest of you I’ve never been in the same room with before. </p><p>But I hadn’t ever really stopped to think about why I gravitated to an experience that was somewhat less personally connected and I think I finally found myself sitting down with those feelings to truly understand them.</p><p>What I realized was that while I enjoy this, I'm not emotionally-invested in this. If someone engages with me in bad faith here, I feel zero obligation to talk to them and I simply block them without thinking twice. When I was engaging with friends and family, I felt an obligation to maintain the connection with that person. There are people I am no longer friends with because I found out they supported <a href="https://10base2.dev/tags/trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>trump</span></a>. There's an entire segment of my family I cut out of my life because I found out they were deeply bigoted and racist. </p><p>I can't say I'm glad for that knowledge I gained there, all I feel I really gained is a deeper appreciation for the expression "Ignorance is Bliss." I don't want racists and bigots in my life but these are people with whom I once had really deep and abiding connections and friendships and then I found out who they were and I could no longer see a path to my having them in my life. </p><p>So I realized ultimately that the reason I enjoy this experience so much is because there's zero risk. The small segment of people I know offline, I know them to be cut from similar cloth. We might disagree on how to implement a CI/CD pipeline or on how to leverage a particular piece of tech, but I don't find myself afraid one of them might secretly be a Trump supporter. </p><p>I realized that all it boiled down to was that I had lost friends and family because I found out who they were and honestly I'm exhausted. I don't want to have to deal with that anymore. I cultivate something of an echo chamber intentionally here. I don't want to engage in "Well Actually." I don't want to dig into why someone thinks that anarcho-capitalism is a super neat mode of thinking. I don't want to argue anymore with people I've known for 40 years about why I think they're morons for thinking their child's preschool teacher should be armed at all times and wearing ballistic body armor. These are all actual conversations I had by the way.</p><p>I just want to have my nice quiet online experience where they people with whom I've chosen to connect and engage have roughly the same beliefs as me and if I find out they do not, there is zero emotional lift to my ceasing to talk with them because we have literally never met. I want to look at pictures of pottery from the fellow pottery nerds I've found here. I want to rage about Trump with the fellow leftists I found here. </p><p>What I don't want is to lose more friends and to lose more family. So I think ultimately the feeling I refused to look at and acknowledge was the extent to which I grieve for the death of those relationships. I lost love and respect for a not inconsequential group of people and I'm tired of finding out awful things about people I once loved. </p><p>I just want to be a geeky neurodivergent nerd with like-minded people who I've never met before. That's why I'm here and that's why I stay and that's why between this profile and my original profile on mastodon.cloud I have two thousand plus posts.</p>