1. Move on. Whatever happened, they’re not interested enough to respond.

2. I usually respond to thoughtful comments even if I’m not interested. When I don’t it’s because I started dating someone/got busy and haven’t had time to go through all the messages -OR- it wasn’t as thoughtful or witty as they think and I don’t want to engage.

Some examples:

• “You sound like a lot of fun. My wife and I recently opened our relationship and…”

• “You don’t seem like other girls, a rare find in this place…”

• “I know your profile says no one over (x) years old but I’m (2x) and…”

• “You look like lots of fun. My wife, her boyfriend and I have opened our relationship and…”

I put a poster up for a women/trans/non-binary inclusive group in an anarchist cafe, with their approval, only to get a literal essay from the cafe the next day about the miss-use of a word pertaining to our trans inclusivity. I can’t recall what the “right” word was supposed to be, and the poster’s verbiage was already researched/reviewed by trans people in the group. Due diligence was done.

Queue people leaving the group because we didn’t feel it was necessary to print new posters. They felt we should be less hostile to “people taking the time to educate.” Yeah, I made a few comments.

But you know what? I much prefer that to the kind of shit I had to deal with in conservative spaces. I worked on a couple political campaigns, had back room discussions where people don’t “educate” when you’re not one of them, they insult and back-stab you.

I can at least see the essay as an attempt to share knowledge, to include rather than exclude, even if it was from a place of self-importance and ignorance.

The friction I see in progressive spaces is usually about making things more equitable. It can be poorly thought out, but no one’s perfect. I prefer flawed inclusivity to hostile exclusivity.

The Argonaut Melampus cured the insanity of the daughters of Proteus with hellebore and urged them to join with young and strong men. Melampus believed woman’s madness derived from their uterus being poisoned with ‘venomous humors’, due to a lack of orgasms.

Thanks for being a bro, the Argonaut Melampus.

More to the point, I migrated from lemmy.world to sh.itjust.works by going through the instance list here: https://join-lemmy.org/ …and picking an active one in my country with a list of rules I could live with.

But as others have said, it’s basically the same experience unless you pick an instance with aggressive rules and/or defederated from the ones you don’t like. Otherwise you’re just seeing the same people and communities.

I don’t think I’ve ever had an issue with a blahaj user, so there’s that.

“Another futile attempt to breach the legal naval blockade and enter a combat zone ended in nothing,” the Foreign Ministry wrote on X.

That’s some Lex Luthor sounding shit right there.

I used to get a lot more freelance writing and design gigs before AI. It was great under the table money because, at times, I recieve partial support for my disability, and they deduct from my monthly funds if I make money. It’s not enough to live on to begin with, so I relied on side gigs for any savings at all.

Now? I get none. Former clients have outright told me it’s just cheaper to use AI or Canva or whatever. I have friends with similar stories, so I wonder just how much of the unseen labor market was affected by this.

I don’t blame AI. It’s a neat technology and there’s nothing inherently wrong with. I blame capitalism for stealing from artists, building unsustainably, and for creating a world where people have to worry about lost funds from designing bullshit web graphics and business cards instead of having the time, money and bandwidth to follow our passions.