About Content Warnings on Mastodon

— Energy Management from a Spoonie Perspective

As a spoonie (spoon theory) it took me a while to formulate my thoughts about content warnings (CWs) and the value they serve to me. While these thoughts have been percolating for a very long while, disability has come in the way to actually complete this piece. However, with the recent popularity of Mastodon, I figured it’d be worth a shot to complete this piece of writing because I think there’s a lot of nuance here that gets lost, even with the generous 500 character limit on Mastodon.

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Content Warnings on Mastodon as a feature

I want to quickly explain that while there are distinctions to be made between Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes as concepts, through out this article I will be referring to Content Warnings (CW) as the feature on Mastodon (and other ActivityPub software). This is to clarify that the CW on Mastodon is a field, where you can put in a small piece (or very long piece) of text, and fold away the rest of the body of the text behind it. This can also be described as a Content Note, or simply a subject title in some cases. As you can probably understand by now, there’s a lot more utility to this field than only adding warnings for content that’s possibly triggering. So in that regard the…