I'm not sure that you can separate the concept of safe spaces out from politics, in much the same way that you can't separate your individual identity from politics. I'm not saying that they're a bad thing, but I do think that they're inherently political. People tend to want to segregate into spaces where they don't have to constantly keep their guard up.
HelixDab
joined 2 years ago
Centralization has another aspect that is simultaneously both good and bad: you can easily remove offensive content and problematic users. A centralized approach makes it very easy to remove cancerous people, groups, and content, while a decentralized approach makes that far harder. But in a centralized system, who defines what is cancerous content, et al.? Reddit did a great job at removing racist content, for instance (or, if you go back farther, they removed 'jailbait' and 'creepshots' communities, which were producing content that was just on the line of being obscene). But they also took a "both sides are bad" approach when it came to literal nazis v. antifascists.
I'm a Reddit refugee, so it's going to take me a while to learn to navigate this. And yeah, I've been kicked off Twitter, so Mastodon was already on my radar.
Eh, sexuality is political though. It's easy to think that it's not, or shouldn't be, especially if you're straight and surrounded by other people that are also straight. The personal is always political, and the political is personal. Most of use don't have to worry about needing a space of refuge because we conform well enough to the majority viewpoint that we're not constantly in tension. The mere fact that someone has a different skin color than me shouldn't be political, but we've got centuries of racism to one degree or another demonstrating that it is.
I understand what you're getting at, and I agree that sexuality, gender identity, skin color, etc., shouldn't be a problem for everyone, or anyone. OTOH, I also think that certain worldviews--such as the idea that black people should be forcibly expatriated to Africa and Jews should be murdered, and that both of these things are morally correct--should be both politicized and excised from society. I'm fairly libertarian, in that I think that what I do as an individual that doesn't cause direct, immediate harm to other individuals shouldn't be an issue. But borders get mushy and slippery, because no one exists in a total vacuum.
Anyway. Shit's complicated.