Yeah. We probably should.

Changing our behaviors isn't a binary, though. It takes effort. Sometimes it takes changing the world around us first to accommodate new behaviors, or waiting for the right opportunity. And given all the other things we should also be changing, prioritizing matters.

Finding a Lemmy alternative is somewhere on that list. Is it anywhere remotely near the top? No. There are a great many other things to do. It's probably closer to the top of alyzaya or Chris's lists than mine; close enough, it seems, to be carried out even.

But it isn't about trying to figure out who's a shit and point fingers at them while loudly demonstrating non-shit behaviors. If we actually want to make the world better, we need to figure out how to work together rather than just glue everything in place.

People are so defensive about being wrong. And why wouldn't they be? Whether you look at how things are set up in school or the cruelty and corruption of the prison system, or the poverty-reinforcing measures set about in our banking and credit rating systems, the elements that we need to grow past push this tendency to categorize people and sort of socially compartmentalize their various experiences.

End up in the right categories and you don't really have to worry. Companies will throw free cellphones at you just for breathing. End up in the wrong categories, and you're going to have to struggle against a system that's built to keep you from getting back up.

We can spend eternity playing with the categories, moving around between them or building or diminishing their relative social power. We can change the criteria that we categorize people by, or try to keep them the same. But in the end we're not really going to make much forward progress until we let go of thinking we know the potential of every human being at a glance. We don't.

What we can do though is be patient, speak our minds honestly, set boundaries, allow others their own autonomy, and try to help ourselves and other humans open up and grow rather than close off and shrink.

In any case, the world is complex. It's silly to try to boil it down into absolutist binaries. It's also probably really bad for your cortisol levels.