Two weeks ago, I was ending my Renewal article with this sentence.

Throw away the toxic people in your life, renew the connection with that good friend that you keep postponing to call.

Since then, it’s been brought to my attention the Brandon from Brandon’s Journal (don’t bother to click the link, it’s already dead) decided to delete his blog, one which was actually nice. I didn’t read it too often, but it held a good spot in my RSS reader.

I really don’t want to do this right now, but I’ve had enough of the abuse. I’m sick of having false allegations thrown my way and dealing with what essentially amounts as cyberstalking.

I’ve been on the receiving end of cancel culture here and there from people with a lot of time and not enough brains and although I don’t know (or defend) whatever Brandon said or did, I am fully aware of the ordeal he’s being going through, because I’ve been through it. Stress, sleepless nights, fear of being pushed aside, getting phone calls at home, family being spammed by a posse of weirdos on the internet with weird shit, doxxing home address, threats of emails being sent to my employer and so on.

It’s fucking grim. The internet was a fairly safe space, a place where you could learn (and teach!) various things, a place for exploration, discovery and understanding. It now has really become an unsafe space, filled with toxic people with way too much time that decide to start crusades based on the littlest thing: that usually being saying something the angry mob doesn’t agree with.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned in my professional life is to “judge the mistake, not the mistaken”. It’s so normal when you hear it, that it should be fucking common sense. People make mistakes, sometimes small ones, sometimes big ones. Sure, there are flawed people in the world, but we should give people the benefit of the doubt and stop judging them for their worst moment. But no, it seems that nowadays free speech is only free if it is the same opinion shared by the loud posse of terminally online individuals. The ones that will start a crusade because someone said a dumb shit 24 years ago on friendster over a banter with a friend and which will use that shit in the most absurd and idiotic way, only to fit in their narative and to favor their argument. If Mental Gymnastics would be an Olympic sport, some people would get more medals that a human neck can carry.

I’ve decided to write this also because of the Fosstodon Drama that unfolded over the last week as well, and the point one of the owners made:

I’m done with the drama, the constant name calling and abuse, the stress, the late nights, the whole thing. The fact of the matter is, by moving away from Fosstodon I’ll have more free time, far less stress, and more money in the bank. No brainer, really.

If you don’t know what happened, there’s very biased article about it on thelibre.news, but I’m linking that so we can extract a good quote from the moderator in cause:

There is some thick irony of being called a fascist because you believe in following laws while those calling you fascist stalk, harass, bully, lie, spread misinformation, and seek to silence and destroy you simply for not agreeing with their politics.

I’m not going to point fingers, but I’m already seeing some behavioral and sociological patterns in the failed individuals that form witch hunting posses on the internet, and I’m removing myself from those groups gradually. There are a lot of mentally sick people on the internet, and they can do a lot of harm outside of the digital environment as well. I see people bashing Elon Musk’s Twitter platform for some bad behavior it tolerates, and then proceed with the same fucking behavior on mastodon, bluesky or whatever the fuck the new fad social network is.

Failed human beings forget that on the other side there’s another person and while they act as judge, jury and executioner, willing to send to the gallows any person who has a “wrong” opinion, while calling them “nazis”, “fascists” or other really strong words. That’s just hypocrisy.

So to reiterate the conclusion of my previous post, what can you do when you can’t throw away the toxic people in your life? What to do when the toxicity chases you with every heartbeat, with every step? Remember that it’s not personal, these individuals (see how I’m looking for more ways to simply not call them “people”, which they ain’t?) will look for a misplaced word, for a take that’s one notch over the line, for the littlest misstep in order to jump on a person like ants to a grape that fell in the grass. It’s never personal, they just feed on the drama, thrive in it and they will try to take you down because they don’t understand that you’re a person as well. For them is not even real life, it’s letters on a screen. Entertainment. You’re just a character, not a person. And they wouldn’t know what that is, because they aren’t persons either. They are terminally online failed human beings. And the two cases mentioned above are not rare sights, they are just two random situations that came across me in a week where bullying happened and went to the point of where the accused person had to terminate their public digital life.

Keep in mind, if you go to bluesky, any mastodon instance or any half-dubious social network and expect it to be less of a cesspool than facebook, x/twitter is, then you’re going to be severely disappointed.