The real solution is always to respect and build from the fluffy/spiky debate, not bury it under politeness or pretend it doesn’t matter. #Fluffy brings empathy, care, and bridge-building – vital social glue. #Spiky brings clarity, honesty, and challenge – the fire that keeps things real. Both are needed if a project is to stay alive and #4opens. The moment one side silences the other, the culture starts to rot. The second-best path, if balance isn’t yet possible, is to shift the #NGO-style fluffy language – soften its domination reflex – so it stops sounding like control disguised as kindness. This is where care can evolve into openness rather than enclosure.
The worst outcome is what we’ve already seen too often: blinded narrowness, the slow creep of civility politics that smothers dissent while smiling at best and ignoring then #blocking at worst. It’s silent damage, and it killed #SocialHub, turning what could have been a commons into a small irrelevant gated forum of insiders. You can’t maintain trust by excluding the spiky voices; you can only maintain a hollow sham.
So how can people try not to be prats about this conversation? Start by listening across difference. Don’t pathologize conflict; compost it. Assume that critique is care, not attack. Drop the impulse to manage or “align” others – those are imperial moves. Instead, nurture space for spikiness within shared trust. The goal isn’t harmony, it’s living balance – a federation of tones, not a choir of compliance.
UPDATE: my feeling and experience of this is that these types of people will with blindness destroy what they say they value for the security of what they say they don’t value. The next generation will likely repeat this mess, and the compost will likely rot, as will our environment because little real change or challenge comes from the narrow blinded path this group push. Yes it’s a hopeless mess, ideas to change and challenge this please?
