2019-05-14 - Breaking Out, Breaking Free.
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So, yeah. So many things.

My mental health hasn't been awesome lately, many downs, some ups,
one gigantic fuck-off manic episode which I managed to control
before going too far, with lots of help from those around me.

One positive that came from my mania is that I left notes! Copious,
mysterious and bewildering notes. These are posts half-written,
ideas, rants and rages, on a range of things both important and
not. It is interesting, to me, to have some sort of insight into
my `other` brain, to have this record of my other obsessions is
fascinating, and looking on them with the assistance of medication
and CBT and everything else is clarifying.

One thing, one big thing, which I've come to from looking at
these notes is that I am probably done with the Fediverse. I've
been drifting there lately, and it isn't healthy - its just not a
healthy environment for anyone.

Many of the people there are refugees from Twitter, like me, people
who want to escape from the trolling and the hate. Problem is that
there are a not insignificant number of gatekeepers there who are
determined that alt-twitter should be *their* twitter, and some of
these gatekeepers are frankly disingenuous in their approach to the
fediverse.

Note that this isn't an attack on Gargamel, not that he doesn't
deserve one, but on various users, people with substantial
followings who are continually reposted by their followers. While
I may have unfollowed them, there is continual presence of these
people in my stream, and I'm tired of it.

These are site admins, software programmers, people who's activism,
who's *understanding* of `activism`, of intersectionality, is so
radically alien to my understanding of those terms; such as the guy
running a server promoting Black Culture, who's totally racist. Or
the activist, promoting autism- and trans-awareness, who dismisses
every left activist outside their own circles as a `tankie`. These
inanities are repeated, over and over again, its like the world's
first decentralised circle-jerk.

Then there's the things where I'm struggling to understand my own
position on.

Like, recently enough, the pleroma devs were crowing that they
were about to provide the single largest fediverse server
instance, hundreds of thousands of users. This was finally (almost
accidentally) revealed to be...

... cam-girls, sex-workers and their clients.

Now, I'm not claiming that my own perspective is superior to
others, but that's not something I'm entirely thrilled about.
I'm not anti-sex-worker, but it doesn't appear to me that this
service is providing empowerment to the women, rather than simply
parasiting off them and their clients. I'm old enough to have had
my opinions of the issue formed by Dworkin's _Pornography_, rather
than later-wave feminists. As she said:

> new pornography is just a vast graveyard where the left has gone
> to die. The left cannot have its whores and its politics too.

And I just don't think there's a place or a space to make that
argument on the Fediverse. The reaction would be an almost
pavlovian attack on me for attacking sex-workers and sex-positive
feminism.

So, I choose not to make that argument there, but describe my
feelings here, instead.