Moderator Minute Discussion Thread: What skills do you use to preserve your mental health online?

[quintessence]

Hello all! As mentioned in this month's Moderator Minutes, this space is being provided to talk about how to protect your mental health online.

As a ground rule, we're keeping this specific threat dedicated to this topic and will close it after about a week or so to give people time to participate to the degree they wish. Off topic posts will be removed / asked to make their own separate posts.

[madrobby]

The one easiest thing to do is very generously block people, even when you only suspect they're inauthentic or posting in bad faith.

Social media doesn't have stringent requirements about "the truth" like a court of law. It's perfectly alright and even a good thing if you remove something that gives "bad vibes" from your life. No one has any innate right to interact with you.

The second thing is using content-based muting very generously. I hope Mastodon will expand this feature in the future, for example it would be nice to make content-based muting sharable so you could e.g. subscribe to a "mute US politics" list.

[quintessence]

This is excellent advice! I think sometimes people struggle with blocking people for a variety of reasons, perhaps feeling like they are judging another or feeling judged themselves. Do you have tips that have helped you that you can share?