Building Neurodivergent Community
Mar. 15th, 2026 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordI have been learning more stuff this last year and change about how I have been managing my Discord group - and apparently I DO have social instincts! They just are for operation in neurodivergent-majority environments. So it’s time to put this stuff into words, so that I can start explicitly encouraging people’s community-oriented behaviors of: appreciation for differences; tolerance for mistakes without lacking accountability; negotiation for better treatment between individuals of differing flavors; repair of relationships when things go wrong; gentle separations without acrimonious community-breaking when repair is not possible.
And I learned this just in time for everyone to start fleeing Discord! But I’m going to take the lessons I have developed this knowledge into toward wherever we end up, and ask other people about their good ideas. So:
Flexible Social Roles
Considering the stuff I have to do in public to not get punished/socially policed by neurotypical folks, I like to make the social conventions in my spaces specifically friendly for the flavors of neurospicy that I know my friends to have. (A friend of mine has house rules posted on her screen door. Maybe I should do something similar when I get to Washington?)
• ask my friends what their pet peeves and no-fly zones are. Disclose the anonymized aggregate of that data (i.e. spoilered, tagged images of clowns or spiders or needles or whatnot)
• Talk to people with fewer social skills than I have about what the general expectations are. Explicitly name allowed behaviors and what is considered harmful here.
• Talk to them about their flavor of neurospice until we can help each other integrate socially with those guidelines. Check in every 3-6 months on how people feel about the community and how they are fitting or not fitting in.
• Talk to the group about social conventions changing as I notice such things so that nobody gets left behind.
• Make separate channels for content that is harmful to some but appreciated by others. I currently have channels for nsfw content, cursed/cognito-hazard content, depressing/wack political stuff, and a channel explicitly for talking about sensitive personal content that needs non-judgment and handling with caution.
• Social roles like “the Smart Friend™️” are not useful here, but skills-based social roles where one person has a problem and I tag in the friends who are nurses, the friend who is a therapist, the friend who is a grey-hat computer security person - those are acceptable to most of the server, because we like to help people and we all benefit from the stronger social bonds formed by generosity and gratitude. I make sure to bring my own problems to the server and name them publicly, to make sure that no one, including me, is sitting on a pile of “owed” favors, because some people will not ask for help if the environment is operating under capitalist models of buying, owing, or owning favors. I never want to have people feel compelled or indebted in my social space.
Parallel Play Group Activities
People need stuff to do, and neurospicy people need stuff to do together that doesn’t require direct dialogue, stuff where they can participate and mostly listen instead of feeling on the spot. The things my particular group has needed are:
• Arts and crafts channel,
• Do The Thing channel for supporting each others’ wins and cheerleading,
• a channel for different kinds of tabletop games (which I am mostly not in but will drop in sometimes to share a fun D&D meme),
• a place to share animals and cute shit and to request specific things when one is having a bad day,
• the formerly-named Swoletariat for muscles and movement
• a channel for playful stuff and jokes and punning off each other.
Sometimes we will have parties on Discord, or the muscles channel folks will meet in voice chat to body double with each other while we work out, etc. I know some of the friend group are part of other servers for doing computer gaming, so I didn’t feel the need to split their focus by having a redundant channel there.
Community Intercession / “Mom Friend” Mediation for disputes and misunderstandings :
• When I see people have what might be the beginning of a misunderstanding, I will ask for them to define what they mean by the terms they are using. This is a newer skill that I’ve only had to use once so far.
• all of the friends have specifically agreed to try to not be an asshole. I have asked everyone to get my or BalanceBeam’s attention in DMs if they are having trouble on the Discord. I’ve had a social problem happen three times since lockdown, on a server with 31 people. Once, someone felt that they might be held to an ableist standard bc of what someone was saying about their judgmental thoughts of someone else from when they were a teen. Twice I had to take down something that was posted outside of the Cursed thread and DM the person to check which channel he was in carefully before posting brain-breaking content.
• Me and the other person who technically owns the server (long story) are good at neurodivergent people and how nerds, specifically, have social friction and misunderstanding-type-things. We haven’t had to really broker any treaties between anyone yet, but I think it makes people feel safer and more able to share, knowing that gently and privately, corrective measures will be taken when proverbial toes get stepped on. They know that they won’t get slapped down or ostracized for making a mistake, and that we will try as many avenues as we can think of before we have to lose them as part of the community.
• To this end, we encourage the:
Jewish 4-part apology
I heard on a podcast with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg about a 1,000 year old method of apologizing invented by a philosopher which we could stand to learn a few things from today.
The Maimonides version:
1. Verbally acknowledge what you did and the harm you caused. Take responsibility.
2. Express contrition; state your values and how you failed to live up to them.
3. Make restitution and make things right between you, if possible; provide accountability.
4. Change your behaviours so that it doesn’t happen that way again.
I encouraged folx to read the full thing in my Discord space, and we haven’t needed anyone to use the whole thing publicly yet, though someone may have used it privately by now, I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that knowing BalanceBeam and I are prepared for conflicts to happen is a piece of why my server gets so much traffic for such a small space where half the people on the board have never met in meatspace.
Me:*gives myself a gold star for doing a hard thing*
And I learned this just in time for everyone to start fleeing Discord! But I’m going to take the lessons I have developed this knowledge into toward wherever we end up, and ask other people about their good ideas. So:
Flexible Social Roles
Considering the stuff I have to do in public to not get punished/socially policed by neurotypical folks, I like to make the social conventions in my spaces specifically friendly for the flavors of neurospicy that I know my friends to have. (A friend of mine has house rules posted on her screen door. Maybe I should do something similar when I get to Washington?)
• ask my friends what their pet peeves and no-fly zones are. Disclose the anonymized aggregate of that data (i.e. spoilered, tagged images of clowns or spiders or needles or whatnot)
• Talk to people with fewer social skills than I have about what the general expectations are. Explicitly name allowed behaviors and what is considered harmful here.
• Talk to them about their flavor of neurospice until we can help each other integrate socially with those guidelines. Check in every 3-6 months on how people feel about the community and how they are fitting or not fitting in.
• Talk to the group about social conventions changing as I notice such things so that nobody gets left behind.
• Make separate channels for content that is harmful to some but appreciated by others. I currently have channels for nsfw content, cursed/cognito-hazard content, depressing/wack political stuff, and a channel explicitly for talking about sensitive personal content that needs non-judgment and handling with caution.
• Social roles like “the Smart Friend™️” are not useful here, but skills-based social roles where one person has a problem and I tag in the friends who are nurses, the friend who is a therapist, the friend who is a grey-hat computer security person - those are acceptable to most of the server, because we like to help people and we all benefit from the stronger social bonds formed by generosity and gratitude. I make sure to bring my own problems to the server and name them publicly, to make sure that no one, including me, is sitting on a pile of “owed” favors, because some people will not ask for help if the environment is operating under capitalist models of buying, owing, or owning favors. I never want to have people feel compelled or indebted in my social space.
Parallel Play Group Activities
People need stuff to do, and neurospicy people need stuff to do together that doesn’t require direct dialogue, stuff where they can participate and mostly listen instead of feeling on the spot. The things my particular group has needed are:
• Arts and crafts channel,
• Do The Thing channel for supporting each others’ wins and cheerleading,
• a channel for different kinds of tabletop games (which I am mostly not in but will drop in sometimes to share a fun D&D meme),
• a place to share animals and cute shit and to request specific things when one is having a bad day,
• the formerly-named Swoletariat for muscles and movement
• a channel for playful stuff and jokes and punning off each other.
Sometimes we will have parties on Discord, or the muscles channel folks will meet in voice chat to body double with each other while we work out, etc. I know some of the friend group are part of other servers for doing computer gaming, so I didn’t feel the need to split their focus by having a redundant channel there.
Community Intercession / “Mom Friend” Mediation for disputes and misunderstandings :
• When I see people have what might be the beginning of a misunderstanding, I will ask for them to define what they mean by the terms they are using. This is a newer skill that I’ve only had to use once so far.
• all of the friends have specifically agreed to try to not be an asshole. I have asked everyone to get my or BalanceBeam’s attention in DMs if they are having trouble on the Discord. I’ve had a social problem happen three times since lockdown, on a server with 31 people. Once, someone felt that they might be held to an ableist standard bc of what someone was saying about their judgmental thoughts of someone else from when they were a teen. Twice I had to take down something that was posted outside of the Cursed thread and DM the person to check which channel he was in carefully before posting brain-breaking content.
• Me and the other person who technically owns the server (long story) are good at neurodivergent people and how nerds, specifically, have social friction and misunderstanding-type-things. We haven’t had to really broker any treaties between anyone yet, but I think it makes people feel safer and more able to share, knowing that gently and privately, corrective measures will be taken when proverbial toes get stepped on. They know that they won’t get slapped down or ostracized for making a mistake, and that we will try as many avenues as we can think of before we have to lose them as part of the community.
• To this end, we encourage the:
Jewish 4-part apology
I heard on a podcast with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg about a 1,000 year old method of apologizing invented by a philosopher which we could stand to learn a few things from today.
The Maimonides version:
1. Verbally acknowledge what you did and the harm you caused. Take responsibility.
2. Express contrition; state your values and how you failed to live up to them.
3. Make restitution and make things right between you, if possible; provide accountability.
4. Change your behaviours so that it doesn’t happen that way again.
I encouraged folx to read the full thing in my Discord space, and we haven’t needed anyone to use the whole thing publicly yet, though someone may have used it privately by now, I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that knowing BalanceBeam and I are prepared for conflicts to happen is a piece of why my server gets so much traffic for such a small space where half the people on the board have never met in meatspace.
Me:*gives myself a gold star for doing a hard thing*
no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 11:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 12:03 am (UTC)You are very awesome indeed and I like the idea of helpful explicit rules of what is ok and not ok. They make me feel safe, as an ND person who is *probably* unlikely to say anything too offensive, but is VERY likely to worry that they will.
I have a friend who runs a read through group and is also very good at this sort of thing. He has also run in person read throughs which I’ve been to and the amount of admin he does in advance is just amazing. People like you two make the world so much better for ND folk (and indeed NT folk) to thrive.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 12:24 am (UTC)I will definitely be posting the general guidelines tonight, and reposting them if and when we flee from Discord.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 01:30 am (UTC)We’ve just finished the radio play of Lord of the Rings. So, like, every other Thursday, we’ve been doing an episode.
Merry, the organiser (not the LOTR character!), puts up a thing to find out who is coming in advance, and then he fits parts to each person, having done a quiz before the very beginning to see what characters we want to play/dont want to play/what types we’re ok playing (eg country accents, can you sing, speak elvish, be a baby, child etc; do you want lots of lines or just a few…).
Each time we’re a different character, to give everyone a chance to shine and to get a good part. So I was Frodo, Sam, Galadriel, Farmer Maggot, random orc, grumbling men, Gimli, and Treebeard, over the course of the 13 episodes. (I missed a few, and I’ve probably forgotten some background characters I played.)
Everyone who is doing it is *really* good (and there’s me as well) and really friendly and supportive; there are the kids of some of the folk involved, too. But the Discord server has different channels much like the ones you describe, also! Not nearly so many or so many serious ones, but there’s also a vent one which is very separate from the general chat one for example, so you know that things are not necessarily going to be content safe on the vent one.
(In the in person ones, we act them out properly as well - as properly as you can when you have to have the script in one hand, obviously, but…)
no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 02:44 am (UTC)And your read through group sounds like so much fun!
no subject
Date: 2026-03-16 04:58 am (UTC)Yeah, Discord was the Facebook Messenger app killer...and now what is going to replace Discord? Sometimes I think we were better off back on IRC.