Knitting is a complete dumpster fire
One of the founders of ravelry (the biggest online knitting community) casey/"cassidy" forbes literally trooned out in a pathetic attempt to dodge criticism for his shitty redesign and now is banned from interacting with people on his own site lmao
People get up in arms about nebulous charges of racism that make Tumblr fan art drama look like a garden party. Here's a fun intro article
https://quillette.com/2019/02/17/a-witch-hunt-on-instagram/
This. I've been on Ravelry since just after it started (way back when invites etc), and watching how it's gone from informative to utter fucking shitshow of woke bullcrappery has been as depressing as it has been hilarious. I quickly stopped bothering with any of the messageboard stuff when it became illegal to not kiss editor's ass in exactly the right way/anything even remotely negative was met with howls of RAVELRY IS NOT CUSTOMER SERVICE and other shit. A simple question will have you labelled racist/sexist/ignoring the plight of disabled dyslexic African pygmies before you know it. And that was before all the one-uppery of "my yarn is more expensive and exclusive than yours". They even attempted a vague farms-esque group where people would talk about drama on other threads, but it's modded to hell and back and of course you're not supposed to actually say mean things. Then the banning of anything to do with Trump, and the saintly Casey (may allah bless his lucious toneails pbuh) trooning out... Utter fucking joke.
I like that you can buy patterns there from all over the world. I hate that there are shysters who blurt out some 'recipe' that makes a shapeless lump and then complain if you give their "pattern" a bad rating. What narks me most is the way so may posh young women wax lyrical about how wonderful they are for carrying on the skills of their ancestors, how very green and environmentally friendly it is, and how they should be paid fairly for the time they spend when knitting an item - all the while having no fucking clue that back in the day women knitted because if they didn't, then had no clothes, and they used whatever shit, cheap yarn was available for the same reason. There's a tonne of elitism in knitting, all the while claiming they're the most woke and communist anarchist greens of all.
Thankfully not many trannies make inroads into knitting as it takes a lot of practice to actually be able to make good stuff. You can't say anything even remotedly terf-ish on Ravelry, of course, but the worst I've seen was some fat ugly lass with a pube beard used as a model on the "Knitty" website (the predictable vest she was wearing was shit, anyway). There's more representation from gay men than troons, at least MtF troons (no idea about Aidens, I avoid the messageboards), and some are pretty good at their craft. Stephen West can fuck off though. His creations are mostly shit, and all about getting his face on the page rather than his patterns. Did he troon out yet?
I've been waiting for some sort of cross-cultural beef between the Russian contingent (which seems pretty big on Ravelry) and the woke westerners, but perhaps the language difference keeps the two sides apart. Which is good, because although it's hard to buy Russian lace patterns right now (sanctions etc), those things are gorgeous and I'd be annoyed if Russians got banned from Ravelry for being unwoke like Republicans and anyone who said the word 'Trump' were.
My other hobbies are mostly utterly overrun, sadly. Apart from gardening. Trannies only want to grow weed. Can't grow much stuff in a basement aside from that, I guess.
How much of a Ravelry reject contingent do we have on the Farms?
