i really hate MDNI in the way that it signals “minors, please look at my profile and self-police yourself out of my face so I don’t need to spend any effort on managing my own social media account, because that is very costly mentally and I just want to hang out with friends on my silly godforsaken 2000s nostalgia Interwebs” which, well, let’s just say that as a Former Minor in a time where the vast majority of queers and furries have MDNI in their profile, it was simultaneously extremely exhausting and dehumanising to need to be so incredibly vigilant about anyone that I happen to interact with and incessantly checking every profile I come across just to know if I can “interact” with it or not. The adults didn’t want to figure out their own socialisation, so I was collateral damage, so I was forced to do the labour for them and still come out extremely lonely and depressed and ostracised.

When I joined fedi I wanted to be queer and be myself but when I left I was left with crippling fears of being different. I was left with the impression that I needed to do all the work to be just like other people in order to have anyone like me. and I’m still working on that to this day. and that was the internet for me, that just was the internet for me.

in a “accepting and tolerant” online community, we instead see people who demand others to have empathy while beating others down with their own fears and paranoia when it comes time to empathise with others

@twinkle I have a lot of thoughts about this because I was a minor in the actual 2000s interwebs, heh. I've tried to pare this down and it keeps creeping out to like 2000 characters, sorry.

The super short version is I think two things changed in the past ~20 years. The first is we all got shoved into this public global firehose together so those gated 18+ chats you had to opt into (and which frequently didn't check so you could just lie) got moved into the public. The second is the cost for getting that identification wrong has gone up drastically.

So there's this friction; on one side a growing fear that talking to the wrong person about the wrong topic can end in incarceration because the the US/UK and probably more are extremely carceral about minors. On the other side is this belief that being able to hornypost in public is a form of liberation. But it's not just hornyposting; depending on the locale and exact circumstances just being gender affirming could be construed as "Sexual" because of this hellscape we live in and blargh.

And people just picked the thing that they thought protected them from liability for the least amount of effort. Their effort anyway. I tend to think we'll never be sanitized enough for people in power though.

I myself haven't figured out entirely how to walk this line. There isn't a clean answer. Just telling people "You can exist here but you have to carefully inspect every post and profile to determine if you can click it, then self-police" doesn't seem very fair or workable for anyone though.

@trysdyn idk what to do myself either, and so I’ve mostly just been in the camp of “inaction is itself an action”. i dont interact sexually with minors but I’m not gonna just pretend they weren’t normal people who are normally curious about sex and i wouldn’t turn it down if a minor asks me about sexual topics and i can actually give a good education of it, but I’m just gonna turn a blind eye if a minor interacts with my more sexually charged Stuff because like… telling them “don’t do that” is how we’re ending up with 18 yos who go “no limits no boundaries” and severely hurt themselves and then have a crashout sex repulsed phase and then get violated anyway

@twinkle Fuckin' YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP...

Guess what my 18-23 or so was....

@trysdyn i know too many people who grew up in a Christian household 😭

@twinkle Christian household to "18 with no boundaries" to abused to sex-repulsed burnout to eventually developing a healthy-but-incredibly-kinky outlook is kind of a common build path isn't it? :/