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Comment by lewiscollard | Hacker News Reader

I was on Mastodon for three years. I deleted my account. When I found out that Charlie Kirk was murdered, my second thought was "well, best create yet another filter on Mastodon so I don't have to watch people celebrate Charlie Kirk being murdered" and when I caught myself having that thought I realised that being on Mastodon was a net negative for my wellbeing.

(I didn't like the guy either, by the way, or at least I knew enough about him that I knew I have much better things to do than listen to him. There are more than a few people like that, all of whom I wish find some peace in their hearts, and none of whom I wish to come to any harm.)

Mastodon is packed to the brim with literal psychopaths and people pretending to be psychopaths for imaginary Internet points. It is not an experience I suggest for anyone who is neither of those things.

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I'm on mathstodon.xyz (mastodon for maths) and haven't seen any of that. So I guess it's the people you subscribe to.

But I have the freedom to decide what I want to consume.

> I'm on mathstodon.xyz (mastodon for maths) and haven't seen any of that. So I guess it's the people you subscribe to.

I was on an automotive-focused instance. I did see a lot of that.

> But I have the freedom to decide what I want to consume.

As do I; I had the freedom to delete my account, thus avoiding the need for any active measures to make my life free of schizoposting.

TIL there's many Charlie Kirk fans amongst fans of cars?

If this is intended to accuse me of being a Charlie Kirk fan I can only conclude that you either did not read what I wrote (in which case, you should refrain from replying to it), or you are being dishonest on purpose.

I don't see how you made that leap. It was directly in reference to your reply:

> I was on an automotive-focused instance. I did see a lot of that.

They were more or less just rewriting what you wrote.

> They were more or less just rewriting what you wrote.

The literal opposite of what I wrote, actually, because "that" refers to "celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk", an activity not much associated with fans of Charlie Kirk.

Ouch, yeah, thanks for the explanation. Total reading comprehension failure on my part.

Thanks for the clarification.

TIL there's many Charlie Kirk haters amongst fans of cars?

From early in my Mastodon journey I made it something of rule to not follow anyone who doesn't CW politics, and mute or block many of the accounts that post politics on main unfiltered.

I don't need that many filters if people make good use of Subject lines (I do like to joke that CW is the short Welsh for Cwbject.) It means I don't see a lot of "celebrities" in my feed that cross-post from one of the other sites and doesn't add CWs because their client or cross-poster doesn't support them, but that seems to be so much the better. It also often means I remove Boost privileges in my feeds from people that will boost stuff without CWs.

That sort of curation is a lot of little bits of work over years. I can definitely understand the feeling that the easiest way to catch up on that curation is to just quit. It's why I quit Twitter (when it was still Twitter). It's why I don't bother with BlueSky or Threads. Mastodon gives me enough curation tools and I've used them for long enough that I feel happy with Mastodon.

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