Teach a man to fish and he'll stop you to explain how you're doing it wrong.
#ReplyGuys #Men #Sexism #mansplaining #ToxicMasculinity #gaslighting #misogyny #patriarchy
Teach a man to fish and he'll stop you to explain how you're doing it wrong.
#ReplyGuys #Men #Sexism #mansplaining #ToxicMasculinity #gaslighting #misogyny #patriarchy
There's a type of reply-guy that crawls out of the woodwork when I post anything that might inspire others to take action, and they're deceptively insidious.
Regardless of the topic, they sound like this:
Alice: I don't own a gun because they're for killing and I'm not a fan of killing.
Bob: Then only the bad guys will have guns.
Alice: I deleted my Facebook account.
Bob: If the good people leave then the bad guys win.
Alice: I'm openly queer so others know they're not alone.
Bob: You'll make yourself a target.
In every instance, they defend the shitty state of things by discouraging action and change. It's a reply that is designed to support the default, the current power structure. It's a type of reply meant to de-fang movements.
I've posted about this before, but apparently it bears repeating. Fighting for something takes energy. Change takes sustained energy and momentum. These types of interactions sap energy. They're not posting anything openly disagreeable, they're just dropping little doubt caltrops, little concern anchors—making it harder to keep fighting, harder to gain momentum.
If you're about to jump into a thread and concern troll, don't. I'm fucking sick of it. The rest of us don't have the time or energy to drag your dead weight along.
for the fucking #ReplyGuys out there: Roboto has serif, sans-serif, monospace and slab. and it was one of the first fully customizable font-faces with the font-flex CSS declaration.
Noto, the fully in-house version of Roboto by Google is a fantastic sans-serif if only because it includes all world alphabets; but i prefer Roboto. am a UTF-8 gal and it’s enough for me.
seriously. i’ve tested & used thousands of fonts since the 1990s…
for the fucking #ReplyGuys out there: Roboto has serif, sans-serif, monospace and slab. and it was one of the first fully customizable font-faces with the font-flex CSS declaration.
Noto, the fully in-house version of Roboto by Google is a fantastic sans-serif if only because it includes all world alphabets; but i prefer Roboto. am a UTF-8 gal and it’s enough for me.
seriously. i’ve tested & used thousands of fonts since the 1990s…
Something I actually love about the Fediverse—and I'm not being sarcastic at all right now, btw—is all of the unsolicited advice I get from random people who already know way more than I do about whatever incredibly niche topic.
There have been so many times I've posted something bizarrely specific, not even asking for advice, and had replies from people who'd already gone there before me, giving me their takes on what to do or not to do. One reason I not only don't mind this but, again, welcome it is because most of the advice I've been given in that context has been helpful. I say "most" and not "all," and "helpful" and not "correct," not because most of it's incorrect. Most of it's not incorrect. I say that because of me more so than anyone/anything else: not all reasonable advice applies, at least all the time, to me and whatever I'm trying to do, and again, that's usually because I'm already out on the fringe anyway. That doesn't mean the advice is bad in its own right, though, and it's usually not. It's usually still helpful, even, or perhaps especially in that case. People here are in one way or another, on average, about as fringe as I am by my own estimate, so fair enough. This is exactly what I mean when I say that I welcome any and all reasonable advice.
I'm not saying that Reply Guys don't exist, or that RTFM is always an unreasonable response; I'm saying that the Fediverse is, in my experience, particularly useful for troubleshooting whenever RTFM is impractical, either because the FM doesn't even exist or, again, may not be fully relevant if it does. The reality that rational people would be willing to pay for that kind support makes it both hilarious and amazing that random people on the Fediverse give it away for free when no one even asked for it. If you do that, and if you also identify as a guy, that still doesn't make you a Reply Guy if you're asking me; that makes you, to me, some guy who replies, and replies with something that doesn't waste everyone's time at that, which is unfortunately rare on the Internet (however ironically).
Reply Guys can be found anywhere on the Internet, not just here. The way I look at it is that the more helpful a community is, the fewer Reply Guys there are proportionally, and the more people actually reply. So the Fediverse is quite helpful according to my own logic.
Just so we're clear, I do block people who piss me me off, immediately. It's just that that doesn't happen here very often, especially as compared to the rest of the Internet I'm familiar with. If I had to ballpark it, I'd say that for every one person I block here specifically because of their interactions with me on my own posts, I become mutuals with—and this is conservative, frankly—five more, and that's not an exaggeration.
This is what I love about most of you:
most of you are unapologetically weird.
This is how it's supposed to be.
Thanks.
#Fediverse #Thanksgiving #HappyThanksgiving2025 #RTFM #ReplyGuy #ReplyGuys
Something I actually love about the Fediverse—and I'm not being sarcastic at all right now, btw—is all of the unsolicited advice I get from random people who already know way more than I do about whatever incredibly niche topic.
There have been so many times I've posted something bizarrely specific, not even asking for advice, and had replies from people who'd already gone there before me, giving me their takes on what to do or not to do. One reason I not only don't mind this but, again, welcome it is because most of the advice I've been given in that context has been helpful. I say "most" and not "all," and "helpful" and not "correct," not because most of it's incorrect. Most of it's not incorrect. I say that because of me more so than anyone/anything else: not all reasonable advice applies, at least all the time, to me and whatever I'm trying to do, and again, that's usually because I'm already out on the fringe anyway. That doesn't mean the advice is bad in its own right, though, and it's usually not. It's usually still helpful, even, or perhaps especially in that case. People here are in one way or another, on average, about as fringe as I am by my own estimate, so fair enough. This is exactly what I mean when I say that I welcome any and all reasonable advice.
I'm not saying that Reply Guys don't exist, or that RTFM is always an unreasonable response; I'm saying that the Fediverse is, in my experience, particularly useful for troubleshooting whenever RTFM is impractical, either because the FM doesn't even exist or, again, may not be fully relevant if it does. The reality that rational people would be willing to pay for that kind support makes it both hilarious and amazing that random people on the Fediverse give it away for free when no one even asked for it. If you do that, and if you also identify as a guy, that still doesn't make you a Reply Guy if you're asking me; that makes you, to me, some guy who replies, and replies with something that doesn't waste everyone's time at that, which is unfortunately rare on the Internet (however ironically).
Reply Guys can be found anywhere on the Internet, not just here. The way I look at it is that the more helpful a community is, the fewer Reply Guys there are proportionally, and the more people actually reply. So the Fediverse is quite helpful according to my own logic.
Just so we're clear, I do block people who piss me me off, immediately. It's just that that doesn't happen here very often, especially as compared to the rest of the Internet I'm familiar with. If I had to ballpark it, I'd say that for every one person I block here specifically because of their interactions with me on my own posts, I become mutuals with—and this is conservative, frankly—five more, and that's not an exaggeration.
This is what I love about most of you:
most of you are unapologetically weird.
This is how it's supposed to be.
Thanks.
#Fediverse #Thanksgiving #HappyThanksgiving2025 #RTFM #ReplyGuy #ReplyGuys
APROPOS OF EVERYTHING
am seeing an uptick of #ReplyGuys parachuting on my mentions to “oh, it’s just trolls” this or “it’s just bots” that.
makes me wanna go all chicken cobra on their asses honking WHOSE BOTS?
Dear Mastodon commenters:
When someone describes a systemic problem with a technology in society, you dickheads have an awful habit of Kramering into the mentions proposing to solve the problem with some lump of open source with an interface bad enough it's a list of reasons to become a terrorist.
Apart from how nobody fucking asked, you are also being too obnoxiously self-centred to realise that INDIVIDUAL SOLUTIONS DON'T SOLVE SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS that are not a matter of people not being enlightened to the existence of a particular lump of FOSS that isn't going to work for that user in that situation anyway.
Your reasons for thinking this is in any way appropriate behaviour trace directly back to the libertarian origins of open source and the Californian ideology as outlined as far back as the 1990s. Many of you are absolutely not libertarians and you *still pull this shit*, and that's where you got it from.
This is a perennial fucking pattern. I realise that posts like this reach everyone except the fuckheads who really need to read them, but to sum it up:
NOBODY ASKED FOR YOUR SOFTWARE REC FOR THIS SYSTEMIC PROBLEM.
TRY SHUTTING THE FUCK UP AND NOT ACTING LIKE A FATUOUS BOZO.
Feel free to link back here when someone does this to one of your posts.
I have been guysplained to more times for this one post than in my whole previous history on Fedi.
If you're mad about "y'all", you missed the point of the post.
If you're looking up the etymology of "guy", you missed the point of the post.
If you're telling me that you don't think "guys" is a gendered term, you missed the point of the post.
If you're saying "dude, it's just a word", you're kind of a dick.
If you're thinking that "maybe cisheteronormative white man shouldn't be the default assumption just because they hold a disproportionate share of power and oppressors often influence language so as to make it seem like their way is the only sane way", then...damn, you were paying attention!
If you're like "omg, so much this", omg, ikr?? 🫂🫂
If you're typing out "I'll try to do better", thank you, that's all we ask 💝
