Talking to people is why I’m here so I am the exact opposite

What’s in your anonymous inbox can’t hurt you irl. If they’re right, or make an argument that convinces you, you can always say so. If they’re personally hurtful you can block them. Meanwhile reflect that their nasty comments say more to the rest of us about them than you.

Imagine being able to walk into a bar and block anyone obnoxious from interacting with you, wouldn’t that be peaceful…

Edit to add: you’re probably going to get more posted comments from people who don’t experience inbox fright than from those who do. So keep in mind there’s a circle of silent friends supporting you!

This was a thing on reddit too. Don’t think that Lemmy is immune to group think or even bots intentionally farming divisiveness. If anything, the inconsistent moderation by design makes it even more susceptible.

I try to tell myself to just roll my eyes at pointlessly negative comments, throw it a downvote if I think it’s not contributing anything useful, and move on. Otherwise they’ll drag you to their level and beat you with experience, as it were.

If I’ve posted once in a day, and it’s gone against the grain in a particularly emotive topic discussion - then yeah I can’t say I’ve not said “oh here we fucking go” when I’ve seen the little badge with a number on it that’s not 1, because that’s usually when I’ve posted a YouTube link and the bot picks it up.

In fairness, 70% of it is a valid dissenting opinion to my own and I’ve got the opportunity to learn from someone else’s view, even if I’m still not convinced.

29% of the negative comments are just fannies just picking up a point which isn’t entirely clear and then interprets it in a way that’s logically and factually disingenuous to prove some sort of point, and I can count on one hand in the last thirty years or so the number of times that I’ve rattled someone’s cage to the point where they feel the need to PM me death threats or offer physical violence - by that point I’ve already figured out that they’re either deeply hurting and it’s manifesting itself in that way, or they’re deeply unwell and it’s well outside my skillset to help.

Lemmy overall is much more open to debate than Reddit, and the downvote button is used less of a “disagree” or “fuck you” button than it was on the latter site.

Learning to walk away and not waste your time engaging with people that fundamentally make your life worse is a valuable skill.

You are not obligated to engage with everyone that tries to goad you into a pointless argument.

If you don’t want to get sucked in, don’t respond. You don’t owe anyone anything on here.

I get this exact feeling, sometimes to the point where I’ll block an entire community. I work a lot with people, and I speak regularly in front of large groups, but I’ve never experienced the kind of aggressive comments in real life that I do online. It gets exhausting. And I know that I can block people, but it’s also hard to distinguish between people who are just having a bad day vs. someone who’s an exhausting troll or debatebro. I usually can’t tell the difference until after the struggle session, when I’m exhausted from arguing against … usually against points I didn’t even make lol

Edit: Just saw someone on a .world community who is repeatedly misgendering a trans person. I totally think “inbox fright” is valid, and the people who think it can just be ignored are not the ones who are in marginalized groups who are frequently targeted by hate. Even a good ally will get inbox fright, because these users will turn on you too, if you call them out for their bigotry.

I kinda felt this way when I used reddit.

Less so on Lemmy, and pretty much never on Hexbear.

On here, replies and reactions make me excited. Generally speaking we’re all comrades of some degree here. On a cesspool like I often get dread over the chuds who could potentially harass me

deleted by creator

sees 1 new notification oh cool someone responded to something let’s see what it is

5 notifications hmm. Well something I commented on must have hit the front page / trending

22 notifications oh god what community decided to take issue with me now… (after blocking a few instances, the amount of gif and emoji spam on my inbox has drastically reduced)

I have this with checking emails at work. I hate when I have a new email and don’t know what it’s about to say.

Maybe on a messaging platform with IRL people, but never on somewhere like Lemmy. If anything, I really enjoy seeing that number go up! 59 unreads right now (I never check the box, the only way they go is replies).

Oh yeah. Big time. Stems from a broader social anxiety, in my case.

What’s a struggle session?

Inbox fright is an interesting term. I certainly know and can relate to what you are talking about.

It doesn’t affect me too much I don’t think, but I know the feeling you are talking about. And I wonder how related or intersecting to/with social anxiety it is.