@kyleha

No, a straw man is an argument intentionally constructed to be weaker than the opponent's actual argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man?wprov=sfla1

@kyleha I'm talking about a text issue. An example would be Irenaeus's "Against Heresies", which rebuts a lot of Gnostic beliefs and is the only remaining record of many of those beliefs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Heresies_%28Irenaeus%29?wprov=sfla1

@conny_asf_ggg good point! I think the culture of the Celts of western Europe as filtered through the written records of the Greeks and Romans is another example.

I may have done that exact thing just now.

An excessive immune response to an irritation that either barely exists, or only superficially resembles the substance that truly justified the response?

Sounds like the fediverse is allergic.

Yes. I'm seeing the same.

Exactly what I was thinking. I know where this comes from - people don't want to draw the attention of folks with the "wrong" opinions. But at the same time it makes it very difficult to engage, since I have no idea where these opinions originate from, or how exactly were they voiced. Very confusing indeed.

Same! I see the same for tone policing too. No policing, just people saying they won’t be policed.

I take it as a sign that I’m following the right people.

Hypothesis: the concerns played out almost entirely in individualized replies to specific posts and not anywhere they'd be in the spotlight. Artists and other people trying to sell something would be predominantly exposed to them, other people don't necessarily see any of them.

This happened a lot on Twitter as well.

I think it comes about because people don't want to give extra attention to people who make bad takes.

But it does mean that you frequently see a lot of discourse with missing context.

agreed.
Reminds me of how folks keep saying “you can’t say ‘Merry Christmas’ anymore!!” … like, no one is saying you can’t, people. Though, *if it’s all you ever say/post* you might annoy a few folks ;)

I haven't seen the source post but it seems to have grown out of someone on the kolektiva instance complaining about people selling their art/crafts on Mastodon (I'm guessing there's a good chance it was a troll but it could have just been someone who's decided they're going to make anarchy into some kind of rigid fundamentalist ideology and is now overeagerly policing everyone...ah, the irony). I think Kolektiva has gathered their person and dealt with it (though not 100% sure).

I have seen someone I follow expound on how Mastodon needs to pay for itself by allowing commercial advertising (it seems pretty clear to me they just don't understand Mastodon or the fediverse and are going full startup product manager, I assume they'll catch up eventually). I suspect for people who haven't ever been on non-commercial social media or engaged in discussions about the open web it's a big adjustment conceptually and behaviorally.

maybe we both are following the decent people. And also, the impossibility of quote boosting things is really effective on not dispersing bad toots.

tbh, if we as a community just set aside a hashtag for commercial stuff, then it could be muted by people who didn't want to see it.

Pretty much as people are currently doing with the whole birdsite debacle...

I don't know what to call it, but I think it is a special case of context collapse. Every person has a unique and different feed. So one person is seeing X in their feed, they post anti-X, but you aren't following who they're following, so you see only anti-X. Context collapse.

It seems to me that means that the power of people driven engagement is working. Views the community doesn’t support are simply not gaining traction, but remain local (ie concerns about commercialness), while views held in common are shared (the rebuttals).

To help temper an overactive ‘allergic’ immune response we could all take a moment to ask if a rebuttal has context before we boost; if the answer is no, maybe wait or research before passing it along.

Same experience here. I started to see similar bunches of threads since 2-3 days ago in my stream. These were composed of people expressing outrage or indignation about a "Mastodon purity police" discouraging freelance artists from advertising or selling their wares on Mastodon.

No context on where the original exchange occurred or who was discouraging the advertisement or sale of said artwork. I did surmise that this must be due to the recent #TwitterExodus 🤷‍♂️🐦

I HAVE seen people post general anti-capitalist / anti-corporate notions. A general distaste for "brand accounts" etc.

Most probably didn't have self-promoting creators in mind when they said it, but rather large commercial corporations.

But as someone who IS here at least partly to promote my project, and hopefully sell merch, get donations, etc, I can see how such messages can sound threatening.

I mean, I once got kicked off of a Google+ group for "self promotion", so I get the fear.