When I post to Friendica, I don’t use content warnings, and I don’t use hashtags. Or I use them very half-heartedly and half-assedly. Today I would like to defend myself.
Why
So, like, what? What’s this about?
Most people on the Fediverse have been driven there by the toxicity on mainstream social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Over-represented among that group are people with intense psychological reactions to thoughtless abusive content, often resulting from a history of trauma. But there are plenty of people too who are just sick and tired of the bullshit.
Content warnings are an obvious help here. Before posting a war photo full of dismembered corpses, it’s considered polite to hide it in a window-shade arrangement. Most people don’t want to see dismembered corpses over their morning weetbix.
This idea naturally extends to other content likely to upset and offend, such as various forms of bigotry. Perhaps a discussion about homophobia might be worth having. But if you illustrate your point by quoting an especially obnoxious example, it’s likely that many scanning eyeballs will slide over your point and stick on the bigot. You’ve then hurt people without making any useful contribution. That’s bad.
Many people in the Fediverse have less mainstream concerns. For various reasons, some need to avoid pictures of food. Some need to avoid nudity. And a great many people would like political discussion to just happen somewhere else please. Content warnings for these numerous and overlapping categories would become unwieldy. Instead, hashtags can be used so that people can filter out those topics. This is in addition to their usual benefit of allowing people to find that content if they’re interested.
Given that many, if not most, Fediverse users have topics they want to actively avoid, it’s a standard expectation that you should use these mechanisms liberally. People who fail to use those mechanisms are frequently the subject of complaint. My own posts are not popular enough to be the direct cause of those complaints, but I’m also clearly part of the problem.
Politics
The single topic that sparks the most, uh, “discourse” related to this subject, is politics.
The definition of “politics” in this context is, of course, the problem. Mostly, people don’t want to hear complaints about whatever Donald Trump said this morning. And, stuff like that. Generally, anything concerning elected government officials counts as politics.
We all understand that we are morally obliged to be informed citizens who make a responsible choice at the ballot box. The best way to do that is to pay attention to the big issues of the day, carefully consider thoughtful points made by informed experts discussed at length. But the kind of day-to-day bickering that dominates the mainstream news is almost entirely useless. At best. At worst, it is psychological torture.
Unfortunately, every bastard out there thinks they are an informed expert making a thoughtful point. As a rule, you post things in public because you want them to be read. If you believe you have a point that deserves to be read by everyone, why would you actively sabotage that goal by adding a content warning? Some people even consider the possibility, actively reject it, and then vocally justify their choice with the importance of what they have to say.
That is before you even consider the flexibility of the word “politics”. Is a discussion of solar panels “politics”? Evolution? If it’s problematic to mention any topic a politician has ever given a speech about, that doesn’t give us much to talk about now, does it?
Me
Personally, I’m fairly self-conscious about what I put in public. Probably not self-conscious enough. But by the time I post something public, I’ve edited it a few times, filed off any edge it might possess, and what’s left is my best attempt at something anonymous and harmless. After the seventh edit, it seems pretty silly to add a content warning too. I can’t see what’s left to be upset about.
That being the problem, of course. I’m a privileged white guy with no diagnosed psychological conditions. Empathy is not in my top five life skills. What seems to me to be safe to post, is not necessarily safe to post.
Meanwhile, to me hashtags act mainly as a way to gain extra visibility to my posts. And why would I want that? I’m mostly posting as a heartbeat for friends who don’t see me face-to-face. A hashtag is only going to get my posts in front of a bunch of strangers.
Feeds
The problem is, despite my tiny subscriber count, I do have subscribers on a bunch of the large instances. This means that when I post something, it ends up not only in the feeds of those subscribers, but also on the public feed viewable by everyone.
When I post something on Friendica, it gets sent out to my followers, on their instances. But those messages contain a "to" field. And the content of that field is "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public". So I can’t really complain about this.
But I will.
I do not understand the idea of a global feed. I do not understand why anyone would want that. And if there’s content you don’t want to see, it seems madness to go look at a feed full of random crap from all over the Internet.
In particular, if there’s types of content you don’t want to see, but you look at a global feed anyway, I can’t see how I owe you any favours.
Subscribers
Meanwhile, there are people who deliberately follow me. I don’t know why strangers would do that. But if they do, again, I don’t see how I owe them any favours.
Suppose I have 50 followers who are reasonably content with what I post. If one more person chooses to follow me, and that person has a phobia of rabbits, does that impose any moral obligation on me to content warn posts with rabbits? This becomes absurd.
I do have a very small number of real friends who follow me on social media. If one of them tells me they do not like the things I post, that’s different. I would certainly add content warnings if asked. But strangers on the Internet? No.
Friendica
Almost everyone on the Fediverse is a former Twitter user. Twitter defines people’s expectations of what the Fediverse is for, and what it does.
Not me. I did briefly use Twitter, but quickly found it too toxic to be engaging. For me, Facebook circa 2009 is the definition of a useful social network. It’s not about broadcasting my every thought to a global audience. It’s about keeping contact with my friends. I’m posting smalltalk. No-one cares whether I’m discussing the weather or the cure for cancer. Being active is all that matters.
Traditionally, Friendica has positioned itself as the Facebook to Mastodon’s Twitter. The UI has followed Facebook conventions rather than Twitter conventions. In 2011 the choice was between Friendica and Elgg, so it’s not like that was the selling point for me. But if I was making the choice again, the mature plugin system and similarity to WordPress mean I would likely still choose Friendica.
And my posting habits mirror that history. For all I know, content warnings and hashtags are all the rage on Facebook these days. But in 2009 they were not.
Hashtags
Hashtags in particular are an artifact from Twitter and its extreme limitations. And they are a concept I’ve never been happy with.
The basic problem is that hashtags are ambiguous. A typical example, #abc might refer to the American Broadcasting Company or to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. You would guess that #china refers to the country, but how do I tag my cups and saucers?
More than that though, the topic of a hashtag depends who’s writing it. People using #cannes are typically referring to the film festival. Like most people, I’ve never visited the city, and never intend to. But it’s a real place that exists year-round. People are looking for apartments or complaining about the drains. Why should those residents be subjected to a flood of uninformed opinions from a bunch of luvvies about stuff that doesn’t interest them?
Similarly, and getting close to the sharp end of this point, #politics almost always means US politics. The most chauvinist and ignorant group wins the semiotic evolutionary game here, and with Americans in the mix there’s no competition. But there’s nothing any of the rest of us can do about that shitshow, and at the logical conclusion of several rounds of “Republicans make things worse, Democrats keep things the same”, there’s not much cause even to be interested. Filter it out. But meanwhile my own democracy is still standing, I do have a vote, I want to be engaged with the topics where I do have a meaningful voice. So #politics utterly fails as a useful filter.
Metadata
In times of old, in a now abandoned and forgotten salient away from our ossified technological borders, the Nepomuk project imagined “tags” as generic objects that could be applied not just to web pages, but documents, devices, projects, appointments, and anything else you might interact with on your computer. And that includes other tags. Why would you tag tags with tags? You could tag “Cannes” with “Film Festivals”. And since you can always have two tags with the same content, you could have a second “Cannes” tag tagged with “Cities”. Underneath, tags are defined as URLs. Meaning that your “Cannes” tag can live alongside someone else’s “Cannes” tag as easily as multiple people can share the name “Matthew”. There are so many possibilities in what we could have built with that approach. But in 2026, at the end of the software industry, it’s useless to fantasise about “could have”. Oh well.
The old Nepomuk ontologies are still out there though. There is no reason we couldn’t recycle the idea. In this scheme, tags would be metadata, not data. They would live outside the post, describing the post instead of being a part of it. This allows for a much more straightforward and foolproof implementation of filtering. But it also allows for what I really believe is the important part of this…
Moderation
I really do not believe I am the right person to categorise my own posts. This is, naturally, partly laziness. But more than that, I’m not in a good position to spot my own racism and sexism. When I post thoughtlessly, I’m not thinking carefully. If I could spot the hashtags and content warnings I ought to apply, I probably wouldn’t post what I’m posting in the first place.
Instead, it should be external contributors who tag posts. When you spot someone posting something offensive or hurtful, it’s far more constructive to post a tag that will hit other people’s filters, rather than post a reply telling them off. Tagging won’t trigger an argument. It will starve them of attention.
It should not be original posters, nor moderators, who apply the majority of tags. It should be random passers-by. Of course this unavoidably means at least one person has to endure the worst of everything. But there are more readers than writers. For most of us, it would quickly become an everyday occurrence to see people tagging our posts. That would seep into the collective subconscious, establishing an expectation of polite behaviour.
In general, politeness is not something you generate within yourself from fixed rules. It’s something you learn from the negative experience of breaking those rules.
Naturally, many people will maliciously tag each others’ posts, so this has to come along with some kind of web of trust. And there will be schisms, different tribes adhering to their own peculiar definitions. This is where the fun part is: making your own choices about what “counts”, what’s a synonym, and what’s an antonym (“please push posts tagged ‘reverse discrimination’ higher in my feed”). Can you imagine anything more dreary than discourse on which of several definitions is the owner of #homophobia? Stick that shit under a URL and be done with it, please.
Future
None of those ideas exist today. For the moment, hashtags and content warnings are what we’re stuck with.
It’s very hard for me to fully engage with a system that I fundamentally disbelieve in. But I guess I’ll continue to dribble out a desultory hashtag or two. And if I truly feel I have something worth saying about Trump, it’ll go under a “US politics” content warning. No-one will ever be able to claim that I never use the tools available to me.
But I will surely forget or, indeed, not bother, from time to time. And if anyone ever takes the trouble to call me out for that, well, this one’s for you.