ArtisanChat Docs

Content warnings are a complicated subject, but after you see them in use for a little while you'll realize how much more pleasant they can make the experience. And, counter-intuitively, how much wider your engagement will be if you use them properly. Tell me a terrible thing without warning, or show me a gory news picture in the middle of my feed and I'll mute you and never see you again.

But tell me an important story with an appropriate CW or a marked-sensitive gory image and let me approach it on my own terms, and I will listen to what you have to say now and in the future... and I might even boost your post for better reach.

As a reader

Not all instances adhere to the same CW policy, so if you're in the Federated timeline you may see posts that break our rules. If it's an egregious problem, report it – if it's not against the remote site's rules we may choose to silence that site to keep that content off the Federated.

If it's content that's not against the rules but that you never ever want to see, use ⚙️ > Filters to remove it from your timeline. You can temporarily filter things, like a sporting or conference event that is too “noisy” but that you don't care about seeing a little traffic from after the fact. Or you can drop things forever, like a certain daily word game.

You can mute or block a specific user, or even their entire instance. Go to their profile and click the stacked-dots menu. Blocking the entire instance is the very last menu item. (But if it's an instance that should be blocked at our instance level, tell @Artifex!)

On the flip side, if you find yourself opening every content warning you see, you may want to set them to be open by default. ⚙️ > Preferences > Appearance > Sensitive Content will give you the choice to always expand the posts. Choosing to always display sensitive images is another, separate choice.

You can also choose to never display sensitive images (they'll always be click-to-open) if you prefer.

Give serious thought to your followers when boosting a post without a CW – is it what they've come to expect from you? It's perfectly valid to ask someone “can you please post a version of this with a CW so I can boost it?”

As a writer

The first reaction most people have to being asked to use a CW is “I am not going to self-censor!” That's not the right outlook, at least for a good-faith request. The people who don't want to see your content at all will filter on keywords or mute you. But if you want to reach people who find your subject heavy but still want to engage with it and you, use a CW. People will read you more if you respect their boundaries.

Proper CW use is surprisingly non-intrusive – readers quickly develop the habit of clicking or skipping without giving things much thought.

Everybody has topics that are all-important to them

It's the tragedy of the commons: yes, your topic is so very important that it can't hide behind a CW. So is mine, and the next person's, and so on. We all have to make compromises.

Don't use a CW when sensitive-media will do

Media posts don't need a CW if the text isn't sensitive – that just adds a second click for readers to get to it. Make sure the text gives enough information for the reader to know whether to click or not.

Don't use a CW when the CW is the message

If you mention a frequently-CW'd topic in your post but it's no more of a passing mention that a CW itself would be, a CW is not necessary.

CWs are somewhat less necessary when posting unlisted

If someone is reading posts on your profile, or as part of a thread, things don't hit the same as when you're interspersed in the public feed with the cat pictures and whatnot. You should still CW your lewds and whatnot, but it's more “saying it in your living room with the front window open” than “yelling in the public park.” It'll cut down on your readers' willingness to boost, though, so it's a tradeoff.

CWs are CYAs

If someone wants to yell at you about a controversial post that was clearly marked in the CW, telling them, “You didn't have to open it,” is a pretty ironclad defense. At least, provided your CW was neutral and not itself baiting, and provided your post isn't breaking any other rules.

CWs can be subject lines

Clients vary widely in their handling of long posts. Even a “standard” 500-character post can be very tall (yes, you could make a post that's 400-some carriage returns. DO NOT). Putting a CW as a subject line gives people a way to collapse your post even if no other method is built into their client.

Uses for a CW

There are some fairly standard CW tags; even if you're just marking an image sensitive, try to have the relevant word in the text somewhere so filters can catch it.

• politics (uspol, depol, eupol etc. are also common) – The original CW. Before you say “but everything is political,” understand that “CW your politics” came from the timing of Mastodon's birth: in fall 2016. We had all come from Twitter utterly sick of an ugly US presidential campaign followed by an even uglier result. Mastodon was the only social-media place to get away from a constant drumbeat of doom, and randos showing up in your mentions to smirk and gloat. Some people still wanted to talk politics, but we also wanted not to have our goofy posts interspersed with gut punches. CW the heavy stuff, we beg you.

• covid – We've all been through some pretty deep trauma, personally and as a society, and while like politics the pandemic is all-pervasive, people still like a little buffer before anything substantial.

• death – Again, we've had too much of it lately. Fictional death, pet death, even implied animal death is often seen. If your post could ruin someone's whole day, why wouldn't you CW it?

• racism , bigotry, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ad infinitum – As with politics, this is complicated. I CW talking about racism because maybe Black people don't need to hear yet another white person literally named Karen's opinion on it. A POC may not because that's just another day. On the other hand I, as a woman, choose to CW sexism/misogyny because, as I say above, I want to buffer it and because I believe it leads to more engagement, not less. YMMV. (PS: a CW for racism is not cover to actually do a racism.)

• body horror, tattoos, injury, etc. – If your post is likely to inspire “cannot unsee!” you probably need to mark that image sensitive. Respect people who struggle with self-harm. Understand that some people are squeamish about tattoos; fresh ones or closeups almost always deserve mark-sensitive.

• alcohol or just alc – Alcoholics and recovering alcoholics appreciate the buffer of a CW (or the filter-ability).

• drug, drugs, medication, meds – Same as the above, with the additional note that you should help out the folks who use it to filter by using the first word for recreational types and the second for medicinal ones, and watch your terminology in the text as well so you don't wind up a false positive.

• food – This may seem surprising, but there's a strong “CW your food!” tradition. It's not mandatory, but it's helpful enough to those people who struggle with eating disorders or inadequate nutrition that most of us do it. Many people add veg or meat qualifiers as well.

• weight – Relatedly, talking about weight is complicated for people with eating disorders, health issues associated with rapid weight gain/loss, body-image issues – the list goes on.

• eye contact or ec – Another surprise to some people, but folks on the autism spectrum and the like often find eye contact very off-putting. Some people even CW animal or cartoon eye contact.

• mh or mental health – This CW is often less for the reader's protection than the writer's: “I'm about to be real here, so please be kind.” Many people use mh (+) or or mh (-) to prepare the reader for the tone of their post (this is true of many other CW topics).

There are a lot of less-obvious things that CWs can be used for.

• spoiler or spoilers – Make sure you put what the spoiler is for, obviously.

• emoji – Hover over an emoji to see what a screenreader will say, often preceded with “graphic.” Now imagine what it will sound like when you have a string of rollingonthefloorlaughing emoji. Saying something like “lots of emoji” or “heavy emoji use” will let folks with screenreaders decide if they have time for that kind of thing. This is generally not required for the special case of...

• Wordle – This is both a spoiler and emoji-heavy, so most people CW theirs.

• Jokes – when the feature was first introduced, the timeline was just a wall of knock-knock jokes. It was so stupid, and hilarious. You will still see it fairly often, including “made you look” type posts that are things like “some” followed by Smash Mouth inside the CW.

• Long post subjects, as discussed above

• The current hotness – As I'm writing this, the Twitter migration is in full swing, and all anyone new and old wants to talk about is Mastodon itself. This is very much like early-Mastodon days, so a lot of people have taken to tagging meta discussion as meta to cut down on its domination of the timeline so the real community can get built. Sure, people can filter, but maybe they want to get some of the info.