To be clear, when i say “autistic social network” what i mean is a platform commonly confortable and safe for autistic people.
i know autism is an spectrum and what aply for most people here doesn’t aply for all
Ignore the image, i didn’t knew what to upload
This sub. I may be biased.
Lemmy in general. All discussion happens in neat forum categories with moderators - they can be closed if off-topic, so the rules are enforced (should be). No fuzzy hashtags. Simple, non distracting interface.
It made sence to me
tumblr.
But having an actual opinion on this question would mean I’d have to try a bunch of social media sites and I don’t.
I haven’t used tumblr since before yahoo bought it but I remember people being out for blood when someone says something problematic.
I’m not defending problematic opinions, but it didn’t feel like people were given the benefit of the doubt or the opportunity to explain what they meant and maybe learn about ways to phrase things so that they are better understood by that audience.
Otherwise, it was def a great place to be freely weird and niche!
Yeah they were trying to protect their space so they continued to have a place for weird and outside the norm discussions, art, posts, but probably went a bit too far and made it toxic in an effort to avoid toxicity. Tale as old as tribalism.
Sometimes I think it’s a snap reaction which is understandable despite being unfortunate. If you are so used to being harmed the urge to intervene before it gets to that point and not really having the energy to debrief or whatever seems natural. I can also understand wanting to be a safe space for marginalized folks and not tolerating any behavior that is unsafe, whether the person doing it understands it or not.
Again, I’m not talking when someone actually holds problematic opinion and wants to broadcast that. I think it’s perfectly okay to be like, “that’s not welcome here.” Or even when people want a space/discussion to be exclusive to a certain identity.
I do think these things can be hard for autistic people to understand if it’s not super explicitly stated. It can be hard to understand community norms and feel awful if we are excluded for something we didn’t mean like that or for saying something we genuinely didn’t know was problematic. The specific examples I’m thinking of are slurs that are not always super obvious that were once part of everyday language
example
( the one I’m thinking of is a slur for Romani people that is shorted and is used to mean being cheated and I had no idea was based on the slur term especially because I had only heard it spoken and not seen it in text)
or abelist insults (not the r word, literally any other insult based on intelligence).
Nobody owes us an explanation and people are free to curate the spaces they want to have but it still sucks to be on the other side some times.
Eta: another example that came to mind too slowly lol - I joke that autistic people get one problematic special Interest and WW2 doesn’t count lol. I think it’s okay to be interesting in something awful and it doesn’t mean you like or support that. Unfortunately people who do like or support bad things may pretend it’s an innocent fascination but they are really trying to low key recruit or distribute harmful ideas rather than discuss them in an abstract sense.
I’ve seen people pile on people with special interest in policing even though they didn’t say anything for or against the police. I am an abolitionist to my core but I’m not going to shit on someone obsessed with police cars for example. They aren’t the problem 🤷♀️
But again, I think it comes down to capacity to understand what the other person is saying before reacting and unfortunately it’s in short supply for most people rn
I don’t know if the answer is a specific platform or a type of community on that platform. I have found different Lemmy pretty good in some cases and absolute shite in others. I think the key is finding somewhere where people give each other grace and treat each other like humans.
Places with narrow scope are generally pretty okay, because people are focusing on that topic and you are with “your people” so folks are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if you are sloppy with wording.
I also find luck with groups committed to abolition or alternative conflict resolution because people are not treated as disposable.
I block people on here pretty freely but I don’t see myself as an individual blocking another individual as the same thing as piling on to someone or the kind of posts you see in drama communities. Just like I don’t want to talk to people who grind me gears irl, I don’t really want to see posts that make me angry in my online communities.
