this is something I'd considered posting as an actual post on my blog but I think that for the sake of addressing things with more immediacy I will simply get my thoughts out here:
in the past I've done NNxN mostly because I enjoy doing stupid things for the bit, and also because it's a good motivator to detox from social media for awhile. but this November in particular was about observing what would happen without me being on the instance, because it had become increasingly clear to me that some entropy has set in on xnfm over time due to an influx of new users combined with various fixed ideas :catboy_stirner: of what the instance is supposed to be. this has happened repeatedly over time, and at each point my solution to it has been to take a hard turn and try to incite a new arc for the instance. but it had become increasingly obvious to me over time that the other issue is the instance having a cult of personality around the egregirl known as Nyx Land.
on some level I don't mind this and even encourage it, not for the sake of my own ego but as a sort of organizational hack. but it's also still a hack. a system that is too overly top-down and centralized sacrifices resilience and long-term viability for short-term agility, and in the event that I'm ever no longer around, or the instance is no longer around, or if I simply end up not wanting to use social media anymore in general and give the instance over to someone else, I would like fo there to be a resilient culture. more broadly, what matters to me is that the instance allows for people to make connections that they otherwise wouldn't have (with other trannies or in a more abstract sense :xf_lemur:), which means that there should be a culture that can spread beyond the instance itself and lesbovampirically infect broader transfem demographics.
but it was clear to me that my own presence here had been developing a degree of libidinal overinvestment that was concealing the deeper systemic rot, and there was a palpable kind of desperation to it. so by removing myself from the instance for the month and quietly sitting back to observe, my plan was to see where things would settle, and from what I've seen there are various lines that have been drawn by different cliques of people with different reasons for being here. some people are here because they're actually invested in the same stuff as me and actually do shit or at least give a shit about being involved in niche alternative spaces on the internet. this comprises most of the users who have been here the longest.
then there are people who were previously on fedi and then started making this their main instance, or people who arrived here several degrees of separation from that by people who were already here. this category of user seemingly has ended up here because they have bought into the superficial degenerated images of xnfm, that it's like, the schizo failgirl stoner transbian degenerate instance, or previous that it was the femcel instance, or further back that it was the most evil and scary baeddel instance. who knows what it'll be next! but whatever it is, the instance is not what you think it is; this past month has proven that. whatever image you have of what xnfm is supposed to be isn't what it is.
xnfm is first of all nothing more than a space on the internet to publish text. it's sort of like a public utility that I run for myself and allow other people to use because I have the computing resources to spare. the space is only as good as what you use it for, and if you use it like any other social media site to make barely-conscious mimetic posts of shit that you've seen other people posting because you want your posts to get engagement, or if you performatively engage in the discourse of the day because you think that it's really important and you NEED to give your input to get engagement, or if you repost slop meme content from other sites that you didn't make yourself because you want engagement, or if you post self-deprecating sadposts because you want engagement and attention, then the instance will get worse. it's a garbage in, garbage out sorta thing.
now you can say in response to this "well what should we be posting" and maybe act like we need to treat the space as a book club, or some other idea you have of what's a productive use of time. but you should instead take the complete opposite approach. before most of you bitches were here, I didn't post on xnfm because I wanted engagement; I posted here because I've had stuff I wanted to put out into a publicly-accessible medium that is short enough for it to not matter if it's particularly polished and can be found again. if you post anything on the internet it should be because no one else other than you is ever going to post it, and if all you have to say is whatever everyone else is saying, maybe you should log the fuck off, detox from the fake internet points crack-cocaine algorithmic IV drip, and start developing an actual ego and sense of self and individuality and whatnot (so that you can then destroy and overcome it).
in part I blame myself for a lot of this because I had spent the past several years of my life being in a state of gradual decline and posting through it thinking that it would be ignored and not taken seriously by anyone or have any influence. I had assumed that no longer being on twitter would mean that I could post whatever I want and it wouldn't matter and simply be ignored, and I could continue to exist in my corner of the internet, letting the demons guide my hand for the majority of the time that I didn't feel able to get anything of value done. eventually I had spent enough time in that sort of state to realize that there is nothing to valorize about girlrotting. it's actually a bad thing to wallow in self-pity, to spend the precious time you have on earth passively consooming garbage "content", to get in pointless arguments with people on the internet and making yourself miserable to feel like you're doing something that matters.
the trvth is that none of us matter as far as the space is concerned. the only thing that matters is that you are contributing something valuable to this space that cannot exist anywhere else on the internet, and if you're not onboard with that, if you don't want to create a culture of being passionately engaged with cool shit (which can even include shitposting if you're good enough to make it an artform), if you don't want to put in the work consistently and function as a collective rather than as a bunch of accounts on a social media site with "followers", then you are free to leave and I encourage you to.
ultimately, none of this shit matters to me. I've been here before all of you and I will be here until I either leave the internet entirely to focus solely on posting stuff to my blog, or until I am no longer materially able to host the instance, or until I'm dead. I live and die by my posts, what the fuck have you ever done? :xf_joker:
