Merlin Star's Website

There were a few breaking points. Warning of police brutality and racism, nothing graphic.

First: Website accessibility for LinkedIn has gotten steadily worse and so I cannot go on that website most of the time without getting a headache.

Second: Over 75% of my Indigenous connections and people that I followed got banned within a year. While the banning of anti-racist Black folks is awful (and something I’ve been subjected to 4 times), seeing the majority of anti-racist Indigenous folks I follow literally get banned for calling out genocide and blatant racism has actually caused multiple PTSD flareups.

Third: Found out the hard way that even the more radical folks on LinkedIn have significant political differences that wouldn’t mesh well with me for most of my connections.

Fourth: The algorithmic violence. Used a support icon for someone that recently faced police brutality? Guess what, now your entire feed is that for 3 days even if you try to hide all the posts!

Fifth: Liberal haven. Expected, but it can get really exhausting. And seeing parents of autistic children advocate for police reform for specifically autistic children by having a database for them … you do realize how quick that will backfire, right?

Lastly, that compared to other platforms (Mastodon, Discord, XMPP, a few others) that LinkedIn was consistently creating much higher levels of anxiety. If racial abuse got sent my way to Mastodon, Discord, etc, I could have said person permanently blocked and easily block directly related folks to the account. On LinkedIn, I would have to go through manually and block each person and guess what? LinkedIn can also ban your account for looking at too many accounts and that has actually happened to me! So guess what, I can’t even block all the racists because my account would get flagged for looking at too many accounts. And forget about reporting, I’ve reported comments where someone called a Black person the n word and worse and they did nothing. Meanwhile, some white person openly brags about reporting an Indigenous person for pushing back against genocide rhetoric and said Indigenous person is banned and their appeals are denied.

Mastodon Social in that aspect opened my eyes. If I’m not tolerating that kind of environment and immediately block that whole domain for a lack of moderation, racism, sexism, etc. and they’re moderating better than LinkedIn, then why am I staying on this website?

But hey, I can tell I made the right decision because my anxiety was gone when I decided this.

I’m going to make up a phrase to end this blog post: May you not be homeomorphic to a sphere!