The Packbats' Weblog

I don't know how literally they meant it, but in the time we've been active on the fediverse, we've seen a lot of people talking negatively about irony and trying to speak out in favor of being sincere, and ... well, we take things literally. It's literally a thing we do. And taking literally this push to be sincere, genuine, and unaffected has been...

...I think "transformative" makes it sound bigger than it is.

But it's not been as simple as flipping a switch, making a choice. It's been a learning process, or an unlearning process.

What we're noticing - what we're noticing now, anyway - is that we have more work to do. We wrote a reply just now that could have said, "It sounds like they're making some ... assumptions", and that would have been funny, but it also would have been a way to avoid having to explain why we thought those assumptions were troubling. It's not a huge change going from that to "It sounds like they're making some expansive assumptions", but it changed the remark from a vague expression of negativity at a group of people to specifically naming a problem we see in how that group of people have gone about their business.

It was less cruel, looking it over. Less cutting. Instead of saying they're bad, it says that they messed up and it says how and it points in the direction of them doing something about it. Wanting to be sincere led to us being kinder - not necessarily less negative (honestly, I think the scale of what that word implies makes it more so), but less brutal.

Wanting to be sincere has also forced us to recognize negative self-talk and respond to that instead of vaguely self-deprecating. I ... don't remember an example of that, though.

I don't know. It's a process. We think it's been worth going through.

When we make a post on the fediverse, or when we made a post on Tumblr or Twitter during our time using those platforms, it was extremely easy for people to give us an indication that they were glad we posted it. All three of those broadcast-based social networks have at least one button that lets the originator of the post know that their post was seen, with no further steps required.

That's not true here. As far as I can tell, the only way that anyone here gets direct, in-their-inbox feedback is if someone hits that third button from those other networks and types a reply.

Typing is work. You gotta have something to say, and you gotta get past the inherent anxiety involved in any attempt to put your ideas out there for other people to see and judge. We Packbats don't expect comments or replies - those things are rare.

...and that means this platform is very quiet. Yes, there are only fourteen accounts signed up to get our posts on their reading pages, but this platform is also just quiet - it doesn't generate a stream of acknowledgements the way other platforms do.

(And the fediverse is quieter than Twitter or Tumblr - you don't get notifications for people clicking buttons on posts you didn't originate. Only one account's page sees the viral post blow up.)

Quiet is not a bad thing. But it's something we have to calibrate our expectations to.

- 🐲 🦊