When the effort to ignore/mute/block hateful content outweighs the rest of the user experience... guess what happens?

It doesn't matter if you interact only with people you follow, given that anyone with a bit of an audience gets plenty of hateful replies.

My guess is that as a queer person, scarecrowbob gets regularly exposed to opinions that rise far beyond a mere difference of belief, and looks more like perpetual small doses of unmoderateable hatred. People who are willing to say that queer people are "literally demonic", for example, are not really offering some kind of thoughtful argument that queer people need to be engaging. But this toxicity is often expressed in ways that platforms are unable, or unwilling, to stop.

>or unwilling, to stop

People have been putting up with being called "literally Hitler" and "literal nazis" (to somewhat match your example) almost since Twitter's inception, and still do, to a lesser degree, though, because levelling the playing field has seemingly made many of those people leave the site. Taking a look around was just short of unbearable because of the rampant censorship and repressive tactics that skewed the site very far into wokeness territory, up until Elon Musk took over. Yet people who didn't abide by it still put up with it, fought it, or downright ignored it.

Of course, I'm being downvoted for this, but (You) can't escape reality, folks. It was a shithole and we all endured it; now that it's free from the clutches of wokeness, it suddenly becomes unbearably toxic. Great. Find another echo chamber where you can mold reality to fit your abject fantasies. This time you won't be able to force them on us, though.

It was an echo chamber, the Tumblr Exodus made society much more leftwing overall when they moved into Reddit and Twitter, despite still using 4chan memes to this day.

you are absolutely correct. this is why blueski and mastodon will ultimately fail.

People aren't built to ignore attacks on them and if they make themselves do it constantly it really has an effect on their self-esteem. See: bullying.

> only people you follow

No ads?

> Do you have to defend, or can you just ignore.

There's a concept of "background radiation" expressed in social spaces. Dealing with a constant barrage of people who hate you or your existence[1] is tiring.

[1] Or perhaps they claim they don't hate you in particular, just, you know, anyone like you who they don't know in particular.

Twitter has systematically broken the tools for ignoring it. No more mass blocklists, no more third party clients, an algorithm designed around shoving the content of the sort of idiots who pay for self-promotion in your face… I mean, no thanks.

That's the reason why people are moving on Bluesky: because there you don't have a make a constant effort to ignore posts.

On Twitter, I have a make an active effort to not click on the "For you" tab because I'll be bombarded with posts about Trump or "woke" games, which I simply don't want to see. On Bluesky, I can actually discover new content without having to think about my mental health when using the "Discover" feed.