My body tends to be read as femme by people who only see porn of me, but I'm very aware of my middle aged, masculine/perceived male status, communication style, and demeanour when interacting with women in general and people younger than me specifically.

My solution is to be cautious about initiating interaction and to operate a strike policy, where if I overstep or behave inappropriately with someone, I apologise then cease interaction, as it would agonise me to make someone feel threatened or uncomfortable just because I'm bad at navigating parasocial or interpersonal stuff.

That means that I chat with people in those groups less than I might otherwise, which reduces the network effect and functionally means that I see less of them to boost, even when we're both on lewd/sex work fedi.

More generally speaking, I've definitely noticed, as you mention earlier in this thread, that people tend to like/boost/comment on lewd posts (especially images) less than on non-lewd ones.

I've also found that softcore/cheesecake pics get more interaction than hard kink/highly explicit images. (I have also observed patterns about gender presentation but that's a bit of a deep dive.)

Written posts seem less susceptible, but my erotic writing nonetheless mostly goes less viral than my Stong Opinions About Social Justice, for example.

Law degree ftw

Touching people with bargepoles is fine if done consensually and gently.

> I realise it's a sticky area

The question, legally, is what made it so sticky. That has a strong bearing on the likelihood of the commission of an offence or not...

I realise it's a sticky area (DV victim in a kink relationship and also very kinky human) but surely we can do better than what we have!

Sadly, especially when it comes to sex (kink isn't sex but that's a different discussion) that isn't where the government land.

One also sees the "but they cannot have consented to that" deployed broadly by activists too, generally in the context of seeking control over other people's lives and behaviours, ignoring the fact that many people do, in reality, consent to such things.

It is indeed a challenging, and politically and socially motivated, grey area.

(I find it difficult to read Brown, for instance, as anything other than homophobic.)

Sure - as I say, it will depend entirely on what it is. Plus, some communities tend towards some kinks more than others, so what you see in one place may be not be a representative sample.

Whether this is "most" or not though is, I guess, beside the point, as it seems that we all agree that there are commonly enjoyed activities which might be hard, in law, to defend.

Sidequest topic, I think we'd be better teaching people how to do the harder "will fuck you up" stuff safely (or at least more safely) if they insist on doing it. Because it beats them being dead.

If a server is blocked, this cuts you off from any interaction with your friends there, or if the block happened before you will never find your friends there to begin

@neil @alexisbushnell