@ActuallyAutistic group The online #ActuallyAutistic movement is nice, but I think a lot about the autistic people who are completely unaware of things that are accepted universally in this community.

Most autistic people I know IRL:
- don't know what the issue is with Autism Speaks, or the puzzle piece
- don't know what's wrong with ABA (to be fair I don't know many who went through it)
- readily use functioning labels or "severe/mild autism" to describe themselves
- lack specific critiques of "gifted/talented" and "special education"
- if formally diagnosed, are implicitly anti-self-diagnosis

So was I til recently, and while the counters to those made intuitive sense when I first heard them, I guess I wanted to remind everyone here to be kind to autistic people that may not share your understanding of autism. I wouldn't want to push people away from resources they need just because they absorbed the views from the environment they grew up in. We seem to be doing a fine job so far, but I thought I'd bring it up.

This was an interesting read for me; a guy sets up on mastodon, starts posting, then gets what is, from his account of events, a false positive moderation hit that gets his account deleted.

And it’s interesting to me because he presents this as a Mastodon problem.

I feel like a lot of women and minorities, especially LGBT people, kind of regard this as a normal social media experience. It’s entirely common for us to randomly find ourselves restricted on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook for simply talking about our own lives. Sometimes we get outright banned, and appeals tend to not work.

The only social media I pay for is Mastodon (I have a cloud server) and Reddit, and I nearly got banned from Reddit for talking about reclamation of terms user against LGBT people. Lesson learned: no “shop talk” on Reddit.

Even private Facebook posts are not safe. They’re safe from malicious reporting, as long as you haven’t gone too broad with your friends group, but Facebook has a lot of automated moderation that scans everything, and if it doesn’t like what you say, into Facebook jail you go.

In this light, it comes as no surprise that queer, and especially trans people, are congregating on majority LGBT instances or, in increasingly large numbers, rolling our own. I have a cloud Mastodon server which I’m paying for, but @Zoë O'Connell and I have also been experimenting with a #Friendica server running on our own home network. We are safe in our own servers: from malicious reporting, and from automated keyword auto-bans.

The worst that can happen to us is defederation, and we aren’t particularly at risk of being defederated by our own community.

And the micro-instance fediverse is a fun place, with a lot of camaraderie and, I think, quite a different and more intimate experience than even being somewhere like mastodon.social, let alone commercial social media.

To all the malicious reporters out there, all you did is encourage us to get stronger and build a fortress. Joke’s on you.

I think one reason I hate romantic comedy (or at least, heterosexual ones) is that as an #actuallyAutistic person, I can't relate to any of the drama that goes on in them.

It's very common - in fiction in general, but especially romantic comedy - to base an entire plot on someone lying out of embarrassment or fear of social repercussions, then realizing that they could've just told the truth from the start and that leads to the best outcome. I don't know how neurotypicals react to these narratives, but generally my reaction is "come on, it's not a big deal, just be honest about it" and then when the main character finally does that, my reaction is "yeah, no shit!"

Plus all the social drama that happens in slice-of-life comedies, things like boys vs girls, or jocks vs nerds, or schoolyard gossip, makes no sense to me. Always makes me wonder "do neurotypicals really act like this in real life, or is this exaggerated for TV?" Either way it usually bores me.

Am I alone in this? Is this just another manifestation of toxic masculinity, or is this an autistic thing as I suspect?

@ActuallyAutistic group

State of the fediverse

Some federation statistics from my #Friendica server. #Mastodon is by far and away the biggest software platform we're federating with, but interestingly, Friendica is now number 2. I'm sure it was nothing like that last week:

Platform		Instances
Mastodon		5309
Friendica		170
Hometown		114
Akkoma		21
Pleroma		18
Lemmy		17
GoToSocial		10
Pixelfed		7
Misskey		6
Honk		2
SocialHome		2
Peertube		1
WordPress		1
WriteFreely		1
other		30

Looks like Friendica is getting some of the recognition it deserves!