Trial by Wombat? Not in my Mastodon!

Just griping.

I was asked to remove or hide behind a content warning any AI art I feel like posting to the Mastodon instance (Elekk.xyz) where I made my home when it looked like Musk was going to turn Twitter into his own personal fiefdom. That’s looking increasingly unlikely, but I have met some cool folks on Mastodon, so I still use it. Sometimes I post there things I don’t think would fit somewhere else – like my friendly wombat, here.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been called to the principal’s office. When I first joined, I did the thing where I would “friend” anyone who looked fun or interesting. I was told I shouldn’t friend anyone unless we had interacted and they seemed agreeable to the prospect, as being suddenly friended was triggering to people.

Okay, I won’t friend anyone without discussion. Your site, your rules.

Next, I was reminded to always use ALT text on images I post so that those with sight issues can get the meaning from the image. Actually, yes, I should do that, and have been mostly doing that both on Twitter and Elekk.xyz ever since.

Now I’ve been told that posting AI-generated art triggers people with disassociative conditions, as they look a little bit “off”. So I went through my timeline and deleted any AI-generated art – including the Wombat – that I’d posted, and promised to hide any future posts behind a content warning that blocks the post from view unless someone clicks the warning and chooses to see it. Of course, nobody is going to bother, because it could be okay, could be horrible, no way of knowing. So I simply won’t post that sort of thing there anymore.

Question is – am I the baddie? I’ve been posting AI stuff all over the place for a couple months now. I still plan to post to Twitter – if people don’t want this, they can just block me or simply not follow me in the first place. I dunno.

Right now I am a little mad that it looks like Elekk.xyz won’t be a permanent home in the Mastodon Fediverse, and also a little mad that someone who was struggling with life in general saw something I posted and was made to feel bad.

This isn’t an AITA. Not looking to bash the Fediverse in general or Elekk.xyz in particular. I just wanna post AI stuff for awhile.

So, fair warning – if you come to this blog, I can’t promise you won’t see AI generated imagery. But, I’ll try to keep it light.

All I can promise at this point, is more wombats.