I design flags and edit videos about them for fun, for coin, and for glory. Alt accounts Erika2rsis@lemmy.blahaj.zone / Erika3sis@hexbear.net

she/xe/it/thon/ꙮ | NO/EN/RU/JP

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It seems like it goes more or less fine in practice, and I reckon this is probably because these communities end up being self-selecting to some extent. That the type of autistic person who thinks this sounds like a great idea would also be the type who’d have an easier time in this type of community, while the type who thinks this sounds like a terrible idea wouldn’t move to that type of community to begin with. And that even of the former group, that different intentional communities would end up dominated by different types of autistic people who tend to get along better. You wouldn’t just move in without any idea of who your neighbors are.

    Speaking for myself, I’ve attended a monthly local autistic adults group in person, I’ve lived with my autistic brother for most of my life, in my time in public school I had special classes with other ND students and had a few ND friends, and I even spent a year at a dorm school that teaches independent living for ND folks. So for me the idea of living with other autistic people of a diverse variety seems pretty doable. There would obviously still be a number of problems that I’d need to solve with regard to interpersonal interactions or hypersensitivities, but that would still be the case if I lived in a predominantly NT community anyways.









  • Honestly, I feel like Mastodon is kinda never going to be like Twitter, even if its user count were to grow by two orders of magnitude. There are several reasons why, as the other replies point out, but the most important (IMO) is that Mastodon is just not a profit-driven platform. And if Mastodon is not a profit-driven platform, it is not designed to maximize user engagement. And if it is not designed to maximize user engagement, it is not designed to encourage toxic behavior.





  • Perhaps normally I would do those things for those reasons, but there will always be times when I can neither talk nor leave, and don’t have a communication bracelet or smartphone on my person nor a good ‘helper’ nearby. In those types of last-resort situations, something like trying to call attention to my stimming ends up being really the only form of communication permitted by the all-powerful Zakon*.

    It might actually be precisely because this “communicative stimming” is vague/indirect that draws me to it: indirect communication is for me not subject to temporary loss in the same way as the otherwise far more preferable direct communication; and because I so often need to interpret the weird body language of the neurotypical hegemon, I might end up deriving some sort of satisfaction from “turning the tables” in a situation where it’s pretty much hopeless that I’d be able to communicate at all otherwise.

    *“The Zakon” (← RU зако́н ‘law’) is my all-encompassing term for rigid routines, as well as hypersensitivities and related behaviors, and the outwardly irrational behaviors related to masking-induced social anxieties/over-analysis. In summary, the Zakon is the compelling force behind every behavior that prompts people to ask why I don’t do the obviously much easier and better thing.