Ha, it’s very easy to have strong principles when you’re a weird shut-in who spends all their time online ( definitely not me /s ). It’s not exactly as demanding to be here as so many make it out to be. Unless you’re running your own instance, it’s just making an account on someone else’s server, you just get a little choice in what kind of server you sign up for and where its hosted n such.

It’s not like making an impact on your bills like committing to only eating organically grown vegetables as well as ethically farmed chicken, beef, and pork because you’re against pesticides hurting insect populations and only want animals who aren’t in industrial farm hell. You have plan where to shop for foods matching your principles of minimal harm to animals and ecosystems, and the cost may be significantly higher than non-organic or factory-farm produced food. There is a larger buy-in on your principles in this example, a larger impact on your daily life and routines.

Making an account on a relatively niche set of sites on the internet is more like just being a stubborn nerd. Not to say our reasons aren’t often valuable principles in themselves, just that standing by those principles is often easier and cheaper to do online than very impactful real life principles. It’s easy to talk big game online and be a bum in real life. It’s easy to make an account once and then its as easy as typing in your username and password.

All you need to be principled out here is a halfway functioning old laptop running Linux (“I use Arch btw” -Lemmy probably) and an internet connection fast enough to load a website. It’s not big stakes.

Further, there’s a gap between being principled, and having good principles while being a regretful fuckup because you didn’t live up to your own principles. I’d wager there’s a lot more of us in the latter group of regretful fuckups.