The fediverse is infinite, decentralized social media.

Unlike corporate social media (like Reddit, Twitter, Youtube, etc.), the fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.) is spread out across connected servers, run and moderated by the community members all over the world. There is no central authority, company or billionaire in charge here. It's just a bunch of users and communities talking and sharing with each other to form a big whole.

FediNSFW.app is just 1 server on the fediverse, (which happens to be running a somewhat reddit-like software called Piefed, if you care), and much like Reddit.com it is home to many users and communities.

However, unlike Reddit, FediNSFW is connected to bunch of different servers in a greater federation container even more users and communities, and users from these various servers can all interact with each other as if it was all one site. So as you browse the site you'll probably see users like "[email protected]" posting and commenting from elsewhere on the network. This is good for a lot of reasons--it's not controlled by billionaires or beholden to corporate shareholder interests, it's not easily corrupted by power-hungry admins, it's not centralized in any given country or culture, and so on.

If you're finding particular niche communities are empty or inactive, that's unfortunate, but the best thing that you can do is start posting things and being active. This is still a much smaller platform than reddit, and while there are enough users on popular communities to make it work well, it can be a problem for smaller communities for sure.

Personally, I think "NoFap" is bro-science with little basis in anything even remotely factual.

As someone who was single (and a virgin, to apply a social construct) well into my 30s, I can totally relate to the emotional burden that loneliness, sexual frustration, social isolation, and all of the self-negative thoughts that come from feeling broken and unlovable. I get it, I really do!

To say that "it sucks" is an understatement, and I truly understand how feeling those kinds of feelings can make some "incel" guys lash out and be angry at themselves, women, or society at large. That's not an attempt to excuse bad behavior, of course, but only to say that I understand the emotional context that too often breeds it.

I genuinely believe that loneliness really is an epidemic, for men and women alike, in both friendship and romance, and when you combine that with a modern political climate that seeks profit and power from fostering culture wars and driving wedges between regular people, it's not hard to understand how we have become conditioned to hate ourselves and each other.

Undoubtedly, there is a serious problem with modern culture and proprietary app-driven socialization.

But here's the key point: I really don't think depriving yourself of sexual pleasure is going to make you less lonely, less isolated, less self-negative, or even more motivated to meet others.

Self-control can be a virtue, sure. There is certainly value in being able to resist instant gratification and controlling one's urges...

But choosing to live a "life of NoFap" isn't going to do anything to address the core reasons why you feel lonely or isolated in the first place. All you are really doing, in my view, is kicking yourself while you're down--punishing yourself for being lonely, when you should instead be practicing self-care. You're not addressing your problems, you're adding to them.

Companionship, romance, and sex are different things, crucially. Ideally we would have them all, but you can have one without the others. So, with that in mind, why on Earth should a person deprive themselves of sexual pleasure just because they are lacking in romance or companionship?

The unspoken and unappreciated truth is that you don't, and shouldn't, need to be in a relationship to have a satisfying "sex life". And likewise, people who aren't in a relationship shouldn't feel the need to deprive themselves of sexual pleasure due to some false idea that somehow being sexually frustrated will make you more motivated, attractive and likable.

If you really want to build relationships and have sex, start touching grass, getting to know people, and going out on dates. Shower, shave, wear clean clothes and deodorant, brush up on current events and take up some hobbies. Don't just look for "girlfriends", make friends and grow your social circle in general. If you have to ignore the superficial bullshit dating apps and meet people in other ways, then good, more power to you. But that's really all it takes.

Honestly, major props to you for making the best of a bad situation. The fediverse lost a big and important community in LemmyNSFW, and I can't imagine anyone handling it better than you did during the transition period. Kudos and thank you!

I would like to dispose of the idea that kinky people are freaks, abominations or a danger to society.

Society is way too quick to cast judgement on people whose sexual expression is atypical or different from the vanilla norm. To make matters worse, people seem happy to intentionally conflate consensual adult kinkiness with serious social problems (ie: suggesting people who do BDSM are violent, furries are into beastiality, ABDLs are pedophiles, etc.) because it allows them to justify their desire to hate and shame people who like something different.

And even though we're talking about sex and not identity, I'd argue this is all part of the same logical continuum that has been, and is still being used, to justify fear and hate against LGBTQ+ people.

Every community is going to have a few bad apples, obviously. But outside of minor scene drama most of the people I've met in the kink space have been extremely nice, safe to be around, and much more consent-oriented than the average person.

Nothing is emblematic of this more than the fact that they want to lock down large parts of the internet behind age verification (read: personal identification) to "protect children" from pictures of dicks, tits and ass... while at the same time they'll pump little Johnny full of meds and buy him a glock and an AR-15 for his fucking bar mitzvah.

In America, people are taught to view sex as worse than violence.

I'm can't really consider myself an expert, but I don't think coming to orgasm is a necessary part of sex. There are lots of different kinds of sex.

No worries. I think we're all glad that you're alive and well, frankly! 😂

While the transition could have gone smoother, I think it's all part of the growing pains of the fediverse: figuring out how to make these communities robust and sustainable, removing hard dependencies load-bearing members and single points of failure, knowing how to keep communities together when stuff goes wrong, etc.

Honest with myself, or honest with others?

Like many other people, I've had my particular kinks (pee, wetting, diapers, light ageplay, etc.) for basically as long as I can remember and at least as long as I've been sexually aware. They've always been part of me, and are pretty core to my sexual identity. Despite that, I feel like there is a lot of social judgment and entrenched shame around kink in general, especially the more "hardcore" ones.

So, as far as being honest with myself goes... Having internalized some of that kink shame over my life, it did take me a long time to come to truly terms with being kinky and to accept that it's OK to be into atypical things. They might be "weird", edgy, gross, embarrassing, hardcore, etc., but as long as they are consistent with a reasonably sense of ethics, then it's really OK, and you're better off just accepting and embracing it. I wish I had come to that conclusion when I was ~20 instead of ~30, but whatever--I know that some other people have much deeper feelings of shame and self-negativity than I ever had.

When it comes to sharing my kinks with others... It's also been a mixed bag. I basically kept this stuff fully private for my whole life, only occasionally interacting with online communities here and there, but mostly keeping a low profile. I did a lot of making and deleting accounts, kind of binging and purging online identities. My kinks were my deep dark secret. Only in the last few years have I kept a consistent online kink presence, and it was only within the last year that I have started sharing my kink with people in real life (I went to my first munch last year and I have a new girlfriend with shared kinks).

Even still, I don't really talk about my sex or kink life with family or friends. I feel like there's no need to talk about that kind of stuff to people who I don't want to be involved in it.

Source: Raya_DL (I don't want to edit the post, because there's currently a bug in piefed that ruins the image preview!)

These are all very cute if you ask me!

It does now, but please be aware that this is a niche NSFW adult kink community!

Unfortunately I didn't mean for the creation of this community to be posted to ![email protected], but a box was automatically checked when I created a new piefed community.

I really apologize for the possibility of inadvertently exposing people to NSFW/kink stuff that they may not want to see.