My own coping mechanism is to block anybody who spouts extreme (usually right wing) views. Otherwise I'd abandon this site like all other social media and not get to see the cool stuff that people are creating. I know it's not the best method, but it's the only way I can avoid going through life constantly frustrated.
Please keep on sharing your journey and do whatever you have to do to filter out the noise.
I've thought on this a bit. The value of this community is not lost on me, but I'll admit I'm conflicted. There are just lines that were crossed so long ago that feel fundamental to what is true and good, and some things are intolerable to me these days. I'm not too shy about it either. I'll be real about where I'm at:
My mother lives very far from me. Absent our usual 'meet-halfway' travel plans for Mothers' Day, we talked on the phone for a good while. Of course it's hard to stay off of the subject of our bus conversion; she and her husband have been into tiny-homes for some time. I'll admit that except for a close group of people, I've largely kept our project to myself since its inception. I filled Mom in on our progress, but also talked to her about selfishly guarding the space to do this project on my own terms and how I wasn't really broadcasting it much. The bus will bring enough attention to itself regardless. She gets it. And I'm sure she'll love this build thread as a way to tag along (she's still mad I deleted IG).
Then we got to talking about her intellectual pursuit of choice: Genealogy. It's been a bigger part of her life recently and eventually she mentioned Rootschat.com, the
Skoolie.net of Genealogy as I gather. She joined over 10 years ago but stopped using the site after a couple years due to "inactivity," as she put it. I can't say what engagement on that forum was like from 2010-2015 but I looked while we were talking, and almost every forum subheading had postings from only hours prior. So this was an exciting sort of rediscovery of what I imagine is a fantastic resource for her... I found myself really trying to sell her on this Rootschat forum. At some point during that conversation I guess I came to the conclusion that I place more importance on this resource than I had perhaps realized. Maybe I just didn't want to acknowledge it because I was frustrated. If I was on the fence about how I wanted to proceed here well, I had just unintentionally made the case for staying.
This build thread is really the only place I ever considered posting publicly at all. Reddit, Facebook, etc (even IG in my opinion) just aren't organized for this sort of intellectual shared space
over time. The overwhelming majority of content here is totally above-board and productive, and I have consumed a not-insignificant portion of it in the last few months. To come across individuals who are clearly just disrupting a conversation because they feel politically threatened by the subject matter was not surprising, but still disappointing. I recognize that I should not let the "bad apples" poison the bunch.
To that end,
@Tejon7 I appreciate the sentiment and as a sort of middle path, I will maintain the build thread and go back to lurking the other sections of the forum. It seems there are already enough opinions going around for the lot of us, and I'll be better served by focusing on progress.
