I understand the need for content warnings on posts containing nsfw or nsfl materials, or anything that has a good chance of triggering a traumatic response, eg discussions related to self harm or abuse.
But I’ve run across people who expect others to put content warnings on selfies (especially if they contain eye contact), pictures of food (often specifically food with meat), and anything to do with politics. I don’t want to invalidate their needs or preferences and say they shouldn’t wish to see those things on their timeline; I’m just not sure content warnings is the appropriate tool in the cases.
Mastodon has very customizable controls for hashtag filtering now. You can set up filters to completely hide posts containing certain hashtags or you can have mastodon apply content warnings to them for you if you want to decide whether to see the affected posts case by case.
I think the people in the latter group should instead apply hashtag filtering as needed. If they see a post that gets around their filter, they should either adjust their filters or ask the poster to use the appropriate hashtags, eg to remember to use #politics when posting about politics.
Thoughts?
There are no hashtags on lemmy. AFAIK, as long as you are using a mastodon instance that federates with any lemmy instance, hashtag filtering will not work to exclude unwanted content from this lemmy instance.
I have been trying to get better about using content warnings for the obvious stuff, including political news, but it isn’t always easy to draw a line between what I consider political and what someone else might think. Filters has made the whole experience much more tolerable.
