Dreamwidth's Privacy Feature

One thing I really like about Dreamwidth is that you select the people who can see your private posts by putting them on your access list and that concept isn't folded in with followers or mutuals. Because for me whether someone follows me (and whether I'd like to allow someone to follow me) or even we both follow each other isn't the same as whether I feel comfortable with them viewing my private posts.

I can choose to add people who aren't following me at all on my access list if I want to, and I don't have to show my private posts to all my followers or even all of my mutuals if I don't want to. I'm glad places like Mastodon and Pillowfort have real privacy features, unlike a site like Tumblr, but I like Dreamwidth's privacy options in terms of who can see your private posts the best out of all of those.

Important Cat Emojis

Here are important cat emojis:
🐈😺 🐈 😺

Surviving vs Living

I might survive if I was still logged into Tumblr, but I wouldn't be living.

Friendship Requires Effort

Never let anyone tell you that nonsense about 'you shouldn't have to initiate contact, your real friends will initiate contact with you'. If everyone did this, everyone would have exactly zero friends. 

Think about it a moment.

You wait for your 'real' friends to initiate contact with you. Naturally, they also wait for you to initiate contact with them, to prove you are their 'real' friend. No one contacts anyone and eventually neither of you would know how to contact the other even if you wanted to. Everyone henceforth exists in a state of permanent forlorn friendlessness.

The truth is that friendship takes work.  The truth is that in our increasingly isolated world, where you may see more ads in a day than you see people, people are increasingly unequipped to understand how to do that work, or too afraid of rejection to try.

As someone who lived a long time with both a lack of basic understanding of how to cultivate and maintain friendships and who suffered from intense social anxiety, I can tell you that if never initiating contact with people was how you made 'real' friends, I would've been the world champion of friendship. Spoiler alert: I was not. Over the years, I've gotten better at managing my anxiety and learned how to socialize by carefully observing what people with a lot of friends do. Which is this: they are the ones initiating contact more often than not.

People are busy, or bad at socializing, or have a social anxiety disorder, or have executive dysfunction, or all of the above and more. Even if you are always the one initiating contact, it doesn't mean they aren't a 'real' friend. Only the nature of your interactions with them can determine that, not who initiates them.