seriously though, it makes me a bit sad.

like, i recognise the importance of safety tools like blocking and muting and defederating and stuff. but isn't it a bit depressing that a single post that might be slightly annoying or off for a moment can lead to someone just cutting contact for your entire lives, never encountering you again ever, no matter how much you or they might have changed or how indicative that one interaction was of the whole person behind it?

of course nobody owes anyone else their attention or their contact, but it feels somewhat dystopian, doesn't it, to treat entire people as disposable like that.

i mean, i'm not different there at all either, I often catch myself using the block/mute/unfollow button when I encounter something that just mildly annoys me. perhaps if i had been in a different headspace at that moment, I could have become best friends with them down the line. who knows how many partners, friends or just interesting interactions I missed out on because of this. I definitely blocked people who didn't really do anything wrong; and because I did, I will never encounter them or anything they do or say again. That's heartbreaking.

Like, we all occasionally have difficult times where we perhaps say something we don't really mean, or sometimes we just have weird takes, or sometimes we're just in a bad mood. And the longer your online presence exists, the amount of people who have cut contact with you and who will never see you again just... increases without ever going down.

Who knows who blocked me like 3 years ago because I had a mildly annoying opinion, who could have become a really good friend? Or a partner? It's so weird.

Imagine if I could block real life people as easily as I could online. I would probably never have had a relationship for longer than a month or two, because any mild disagreement or argument could just result in a lifelong loss of contact.