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undefined_variable

@[email protected]

Has boots with pink laces and a semicolon tattoo
Volunteering in peer support

AuDHD/anxiety/bipolar

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undefined_variable , to ActuallyAutistic group
@undefined_variable@mementomori.social avatar

So, it's midsummer. I was totally unprepared for it. How fast it came, and how hard it came at me. All of a sudden half of the summer is gone. The few people I'm somewhat close to have disappeared to their cabins and whatnot. I've disappeared into a deepening depression and shutdown.

It's these kinds of holidays that always hit me the hardest. They really drive home how alone I am in this world. How I don't connect.

Some years ago I started to organize Xmas eve hangouts at a cafe I volunteered at. I knew there were many of us there who didn't really celebrate the holidays or go back home or whatnot. And that many of us felt lonely during the holidays, for one reason or another. When I talked about it with people, everyone thought it was a great idea. So, I went at it.

The first year someone else was helping out with the evening and it was a resounding success. The cafe where we held it was packed with people. Someone had made little gifts for everyone. We sang, we had so much food we had a leftover dinner the next day. Good times were had. The next year I had to organize it alone. Only a handful of people came. The third year, there were four of us, and the three others uncomfortably excused themselves after half an hour to go to an actual Xmas party. I stopped organizing them. A bit later I stopped volunteering there.

Why bring this up at midsummers? Well... Let's just say history was not my strongest subject at school.

@actuallyautistic

undefined_variable , to ActuallyAutistic group
@undefined_variable@mementomori.social avatar

@actuallyautistic Opinions and advice welcomed. Of social media, I'm only here on fediverse. And I've been mostly inactive, due to various reasons. It hasn't served me well, one could say. Probably mostly because I didn't tailor stuff for myself, but followed all those "You're new to Mastodon, here's what you should do" posts. (As a sidenote, if you're neurospicy, don't follow such things in general. Utilize yes, get ideas yes, but they are not meant to be followed!)

Now I'd like (read need, for personal reasons) to get more active, but specifically within the neurodivergent community. So what is an AuDHDer to do?

Ditch this withered generalist account of mine (I'd need to tear it down and start from scratch anyways at least) and hop on some ND instance but still stay on fedi?
Hop over to Bluesky and but just follow other ND folks?
Discord, Ceiling Cat forbid?
Something else?

Like, what has worked best for you, to connect to peers in this kind of setting? What would you recommend? What would you advice against? Mind you, I'm one of those "grew old but didn't grew up" spicyheads so... Yeah, there's that too.

Halp, please!

dzwiedziu ,
@dzwiedziu@mastodon.social avatar

@pathfinder
Matters a bit in terms of resource usage and potential failures.
Essentially you should move from larger instances to mid-sized ones, with a dedicated team with resources ability to crowdsource.

But if one is new on the Federation then this is one of those things that can be addressed later.

@undefined_variable @actuallyautistic

nen ,
@nen@mementomori.social avatar

@undefined_variable @actuallyautistic Is the problem specifically that you don't get replies to your posts?

Here, bunch of stuff to consider (from mostly an outsider perspective though):

Posting to the group is a good idea, I’d continue doing that. But also consider looking for relevant hashtags popular among the people you are trying to reach, and always include the hashtags in your posts. I think it's much more common to follow hashtags than groups, meaning that that’s how you’ll probably reach the largest number of interested people. Posting to groups may help your posts to get distributed wider in the fediverse, boosting the effect of hashtags more.

I think a huge problem with Mastodon is that people who have busy feeds very often miss posts by their close peers if the latter aren’t very active or if their online times overlap only rarely (eg. due to time zones). This can easily lead to isolation and feeling ignored, which I believe silently hurts Mastodon’s communities. If you have a busy feed, you may want to use the list feature and maintain a list of people whose rare posts you don’t want to accidentally miss. Eg. people who you want to help feel less isolated and more welcome, or just people with whom you have had meaningful interactions before. However, because you can’t of course insert yourself to their lists, this doesn’t help you increase the probability of getting replies to your own posts. At least not directly.

Explicit calls for help and boosts probably work well, just like you did now. But try putting them to the beginning of the post or CW header, and/or maybe add an emoji to better draw attention to it. Include a short explanation about why you need help, it should motivate better, eg: “Please help/boost! I need to connect to other neurodivergent people, but I rarely get any responses and feel isolated. Has anyone seen my post?” Or add something like it plus a tl;dr in a reply later, if the original post went unnoticed. Don’t forget hashtags in the reply.

Also explore different times of day and weekdays. When most of the people you want to connect with seem to be online? When they are most sociable? Could there sometimes be too many people online and the hashtags/group feeds are flooded? Can the quietest hours actually be better?

Ask people who they think might have an opinion about the matter you want to talk about, or who might be able to help in some way, or might have much in common with you. Many people may have much lower threshold to ping someone they know than write what they themselves think. And people who are explicitly asked for their help are probably more motivated to help, compared to the case where they only see your post in their feed.

Finally, people have much lower threshold to answer a poll than to like or boost or reply to any kind of post. If you can, make a poll.

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