Boundaries

I sent an email over the weekend that I knew I needed to send, but didn't really want to.

I'd agreed to help admin a new Mastodon server, which was and is fine. And via that ended up helping moderate a suddenly-very-large instance, which turned out to be not fine. Everything I've worked for four years to get away from - the cacophonous, angry, shouty, attention-seeking, spammy world of Twitter People - had now arrived on Mastodon. Because I was helping moderate, I couldn't simply mute and ignore it. I hadn't realised how much I'd managed to leave this behind until it suddenly hit me again. The physical reaction in my body - tensed muscles, an inability to sleep properly, a general hyperactivity - had been happening already for a week from the first wave of Twitterers, but this put it into overdrive.

A sign that I've been successful in rethinking how I want to live and want to think, is that I quickly realised I needed to do something about it. I'd agreed to be a backup administrator. The overwhelming majority of new signups had picked the instance somewhat at random after someone told them "Mastodon is the new Twitter". I didn't want to let Mike down, but I also didn't hugely owe most of these people much, at least not yet. I needed to protect my own mental and physical wellbeing. So I pulled the plug and sent the email.

In reply, the loveliest response: basically "I'm sorry, delete all incoming emails, remove yourself from moderation discussions, unplug, thankyou for your service". Immediately I felt a physical wave of relaxation surge through my body. It was kind of extraordinary. I slept better last night than I have for a fortnight. Boundaries, they're great. This was also a great reminder to me that I need to be vigilant now not to be enticed into arguments on Mastodon. Every time you post something public, there's a chance some reply guy will decided it's important that you know that you are wrong. I was briefly enticed into just such a back and forth today. Luckily I reasonably quickly recognised what my brain was doing, and muted the conversation.It's nice to know that I've managed to *almost* train myself into better behaviour: better for me, better for the people around me. As many admins and moderators have been saying to each other on Masto this week, we have to set the examples we want others to follow.

This week I've seen a lot of wrong opinions about Mastodon. That there is a desperate need to "scale". That because some people are yelling that it's "the new Twitter", somehow there is a responsibility to make it the New Twitter. That server administrators are bad people if they server-block toxic nodes instead of leaving it up to individual users. That any downtime is proof that FOSS is unusable, or admins should therefore work 24/7 to protect FOSS's reputation, or ...something. I didn't really understand that one, to be honest. It's been tempting to engate with this, or to whinge about it with yet another "masto meta" post. But that's exactly the "engagement" I left Twitter to get away from. Of course, I have to get it out of my system somehow, hence this Gempost 😔.

Community building, caring for each other, making things together: these are all great and good. But every first aid course and pre-flight safety message tells you the same thing: you have to take care of your own safety first, *before* helping others.