Emotional_Series7814

“Speaking in general” would have worked, as would have just saying “people” or using generic nouns.

I have no idea how to make this come across in a helpful, informative tone but please know I mean it that way and not in an aggressive way.

I feel like that great advice… for people who need it. Not sure if this reply is directed at me, but if it is I feel like you are replying as if I complained about not being able to meet people and desperately wanting a partner and need to hear the advice… my entire post was that I am eschewing dating apps because I hear how hellish they are and that I do not need one anyways because I’m already happy by myself and I’ll take a partner if one comes. I am not explicitly seeking, either, just not closed off to the option if it shows up.

If you are commenting for any onlookers instead, I totally get it. I’ve accidentally fallen into all my relationships too, by way of participating in activities that involve other humans (I personally pursue music—specifically making it with other people. Piano accompaniment is just more fun for me than playing solo), or meeting them through friends. I have never used a dating app for actually meeting anyone, although I did sign up for OKCupid as a 12-year-old just to take the personality quiz (with an obviously fake profile) so I can’t actually say “never used a dating app”.

Not OP but I hear so many stories of sexual harassment, of people insisting on having sex when you clearly state in your profile you are not looking for a hookup and calling you names when you do not give in, “sour grapes” treatment for rejection for any reason really (“I just messaged you out of pity!” stuff), of gay people getting messaged by straight ones thinking they can “turn” the gay person… as a woman lucky enough to have never experienced this kind of trash in my life, I am NOT willing to open the floodgates to harassment or this level of rudeness and experience it for the first time.

It helps that although it would be nice to have a partner, I know I could be happy and fulfilled without one, so I’ll never have a desperate need for a partner that pushes me to risk harassment and use an app.

Sorry! One thing Kbin doesn’t do and that Lemmy seems to do sometimes is telling me, without me clicking on the user’s profile, which platform and instance a poster is posting from.

As a Kbin user, microblogs definitely are not all the posts we make here. We can both microblog through “Add new post” and make a thread through “Add new link”, “Add new thread”, and “Add new photo”.

Genuine question, as a non-Twitter user, what was Twitter-style discussion that held value like? I only ever heard about it being a quick source for certain official outlets to broadcast to others (which does have value but that’s not discussion), a place for political fighting and harassment, and about how you weren’t able to have nuanced discussions within the small character limit.

I know one advantage of Mastodon is that the character limit is much higher.

I was always annoyed by the “LMAO everyone pathetic nerd stereotype” thing they did on Reddit, only partially because it assumed everyone was a man desperate for sex from a woman. Is this comment an attempt at a joke or a genuine assessment?

I may be a nerd and it is probably fair to say most Fediverse users are. But I’m not a basement-dweller stereotype and I’m not sure where that comes from aside from the tired old Reddit joke about all its users being that exact stereotype.

Also, again, network effects. Go where advice exists on a nice wiki, not where it’s a new community and maybe 1 person will answer your comment if you are lucky—a lot of people just want an answer and don’t want to deal with the nonresponse and tumbleweeds from a totally new community. It is emotionally easier to toss a post about gaming into the void than it is to approach with an actual problem you have in a relationship or with your finances you need help with, then to check in daily in hope someone answered only to get crickets back, and then repost in another community (or even another site, where you might have to rewrite that post so that you can’t just look it up and find out FediverseUser83 posted the same thing as RedditUser92 and is thus probably the same person’s two accounts). So these become “why waste the effort and time when you could just go to Reddit and get a quicker response?” to an even higher level than other communities—nonresponse probably hurts more.

For relationship advice specifically, I recall that subreddit being called unrealistic so often that I understand why people might be wary to start a new one here.

I’m actually pretty image-conscious and a lot of this manifests in putting effort into how I dress. I am also incredibly uncomfortable putting pictures of myself (yes, you can talk about fashion without selfies, but the typical “does this look good on me” post requires you post yourself. “Look at this outfit I put together” is easiest to do with your own human body, not searching online for images of each piece of clothing you put on and putting them in one image, especially because some older pieces may not have a perfectly matching online image) on social media like Reddit, let alone the Fediverse which duplicates your post to tons of servers who may or may not respect post deletions. I’d imagine this frustrates the growth of fashion, makeup, and hair communities.