A Minute from the Moderators

Community Care in Online Spaces: Channeling Confrontational Energy Safely (Part 2)

By Quintessence (@quintessence) | Monday, April 27, 2026

Welcome back to Moderator Minutes. This is Part 2 of our series on Community Care in Online Spaces.

In Part 1, we explored how norms shift, how those shifts create friction, and how the ways we respond to that friction can either build or erode community. We asked you to sit with a question: is it working? And we talked about the difference between reacting and responding, between correcting and connecting.

This month, we’re going one layer deeper. Rather than looking at what we do when friction arises, we want to look at what drives us there in the first place. What is it about seeing something distressing that makes us want to act immediately, and what happens when that impulse meets the realities of navigating online spaces?

A note before we begin: the posts in this series are denser than our usual Moderator Minutes. We’ll be drawing on work from several writers and activists who have spent years thinking about these patterns, and we’ll include a reading list at the end for those who want to go further. We don’t expect anyone to read all of it. We do hope the ideas here give you something useful to sit with.

The Impulse to Act

When we see something awful happening, most of us are moved to act. The worse it is, the stronger the pull. This is not a flaw. It is, in many ways, one of the better things about us. The desire to do something in the face of harm is the engine behind every mutual aid network, every crisis response, every act of solidarity that has ever mattered.

But there is a difference between urgency and intention. Urgency says: something must be done, now. Intention asks: what am I trying to achieve, and will this action get me there? When we act from urgency alone, without pausing to examine our goals, we may not know whether our actions meet them. Worse, we may not recognize when our actions actively prevent them.

This is not a new observation. In 2013, writer and organizer Ngọc Loan Trần published an essay called “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable.” Trần, a queer, disabled, Việt/mixed-race activist, wrote it after attending a large racial justice conference, a room full of people who shared values, who understood the stakes, who all “got it.” And what Trần observed was that those same people, in that shared space, had lost compassion for each other.

That observation is worth sitting with. It was not a room full of people who didn’t care. It was a room full of people who cared enormously, acting from urgency rather than intention, and in doing so, causing harm to the very community they were trying to protect.

Trần coined the term “calling in” to describe an alternative: accountability rooted in relationship rather than punishment. The idea took hold, and over the following decade, a lineage of writers and practitioners built on it. We will be drawing on several of them throughout this post.

The reason we start here is that this pattern, good people, strong values, urgency without intention, is not limited to conferences or activist circles. It is the pattern we see in our reports. It is the pattern many of us enact in our own timelines. And it is the pattern that, left unexamined, erodes the communities we are trying to sustain.

The Pressure to Do More

The urgency we just described does not exist in a vacuum. It is fed by something deeper: the persistent feeling that whatever we are doing, it is not enough.

Consider an example. Say you have spent your week writing posts to help people: sharing mutual aid links, amplifying crisis response information, sending messages of care to people in vulnerable or targeted communities. You have been doing real, tangible work. Then you log in and see a wave of news, or an online harassment campaign, or another round of something terrible, and the question surfaces: am I doing enough?

Let’s mirror something from Part 1 and sit with our feelings for a moment.

Do you feel like you are doing enough, with what is happening in the world, right now?

Whatever your answer is, stay with it a little longer. Feel your way through why you do, or don’t, feel that you are doing enough.

This is not a rhetorical exercise. How you answer that question shapes how you behave online. When the answer is “no” (and for many of us, the answer is almost always “no”) it creates pressure. That pressure comes from two directions. It comes from inside: the internal monologue that tells us we should be doing more, doing it better, doing it differently. And it comes from outside: from communities, from trusted voices, from the implicit and sometimes explicit message that if you are not visibly fighting, you are complicit.

Both of these pressures can be valid in their origin. But when they compound, they produce a specific and damaging result: we stop being able to see the work we are already doing. The posts we wrote, the care we extended, the quiet labor of showing up consistently, all of it disappears under the weight of what we haven’t done. And once we can no longer see our own contributions, we become desperate to do something that feels visible, immediate, and unmistakable.

In 2016, writer and activist Maisha Z. Johnson named a version of this pattern in her essay “6 Signs Your Call-Out Isn’t Actually About Accountability,” published on Everyday Feminism and later republished by YES! Magazine. Johnson, whose background includes work with Community United Against Violence, the nation’s oldest LGBTQ anti-violence organization, described what happens when holding each other accountable drifts into punishing each other. She drew a distinction between acting out of love for our communities and acting out of fear and pain. The behaviors can look similar from the outside, both involve publicly naming a problem, but they come from different places and produce very different outcomes.

What Johnson was naming is something many of us will recognize if we are honest with ourselves. There are times when we call something out because we have a clear goal: we want a specific behavior to change, and we believe our words will contribute to that change. And there are times when we call something out because we are exhausted, because we are afraid, because the pressure to do something has become unbearable and this is the something that is available to us. The second is not accountability. It is release. And while the release is understandable, it is not the same as the work it replaces.

Where We Feel Power

There is a concept in psychology called “locus of control.” It describes where we believe power over our lives sits, inside ourselves, in our own actions and choices, or outside ourselves, in forces beyond our control. The term comes from the work of psychologist Julian Rotter in the 1950s, and it has been widely studied since.

We want to be careful with this concept, because the traditional framing carries a bias. The conventional view treats an internal locus of control, the belief that your actions shape your outcomes, as the healthier orientation. But this framing was developed within a Western, individualist perspective, and it has a significant blind spot. For people from marginalized and targeted communities, the feeling that external forces control your outcomes is often not a distortion. It is an accurate reading of the situation. Discrimination, structural oppression, and systemic inequity are real forces that genuinely constrain what individual action can achieve. Scholars studying locus of control in the context of marginalized populations have noted that what looks like a “less healthy” external orientation may in fact reflect a realistic assessment of the limitations that racism, discrimination, and socioeconomic conditions impose.

So we are not using this concept to suggest that feeling powerless is itself a problem to fix. For many of us, the feeling of lacking control is grounded in reality, and naming that is important.

What we do want to examine is what happens next. What we do with that feeling.

Here is an analogy. Imagine you volunteer at a soup kitchen. In relatively stable times, the work feels meaningful. You can see the people you are helping. The scale of the need, while real, feels approachable. Your contribution feels like it matters.

Now imagine the same soup kitchen during an extreme crisis, a climate disaster, an economic collapse, a wave of displacement. The lines are longer. The need is greater. The news is relentless. You are doing the same work, or more, but it no longer feels like enough. The scale of the crisis dwarfs your individual contribution, and the gap between what is needed and what you can provide becomes a weight you carry home with you.

The work did not become less valuable. But your relationship to it changed.

This is what happens in online spaces when the world feels like it is on fire. Even if you are showing up consistently, posting resources, supporting others, extending care, the relentless news cycle and the visible enormity of harm can make all of it feel like nothing. And when your sustained, quiet work feels like nothing, the pull toward something louder becomes very strong.

This can lead to an unhealthy relationship with the negative feelings that accumulate. You may not be able to stop an oppressive force. But you can shout about it. You can name and shame. You can find a target and direct your frustration somewhere, anywhere, because the alternative, sitting with the feeling that you cannot individually fix what is broken, is unbearable.

The shift is subtle, and it is worth naming precisely: the goal stops being “change this specific thing” and becomes “make this feeling go away.” That is the moment where the impulse to act stops serving the community and starts serving our own need for relief. And as we discussed in the previous section, that is not accountability. It is release wearing its clothes.

Misdirected Action

Once that shift has happened, once the goal has quietly become relief rather than change, the question of where we direct our energy starts to matter in a different way.

Not all calling out is the same. There are differences in context, in scale, and critically, in the power held by the person on the receiving end. When we are acting from intention, we tend to account for those differences naturally. We think about who we are talking to, what we want to achieve, and whether this specific action in this specific context will move us toward that goal. When we are acting from urgency and exhaustion, those distinctions collapse. Everything feels equally urgent. Everyone feels equally responsible. And the energy has to go somewhere.

Consider this example. A large company does something harmful. The CEO makes a decision that affects thousands of people. You are angry, and that anger is justified. But the CEO is not on your timeline. The person who is on your timeline is the company’s social media manager, posting the corporate line because that is their job. They did not make the decision. They likely have no authority in the hierarchy that produced it. They may privately disagree with it. They need to buy food and pay rent, and this is the job they have.

There is a reason this feels like a distinction without a difference in the moment. When a person speaks, we naturally assume they are speaking with their own voice, that their words represent their own thoughts, their own positions, their own authority. That is how individual speech works. But corporate speech breaks that assumption. The social media manager is voicing something that was shaped by people they may never have met, reflecting decisions they had no part in making. They are a conduit, not a source. And yet, because we hear a person speaking, we instinctively assign them the ownership that comes with speech. The CEO, the social media manager, the customer support agent, all of them register as “the company” in a way that erases the vast differences in their actual authority. This is natural, but it is not accurate. And when we act on it without examining it, we direct real force at people who have no capacity to give us what we want.

If you spend your afternoon arguing with that social media manager, or ten social media managers across ten companies, you have not changed the company’s behavior. You have not reached the decision-maker. You have not decreased the harm. You have worn yourself out, and a person who was not responsible for the harm has absorbed the force of your frustration.

There is also an alternative that is easy to miss. You can call out the company without engaging with its social media account at all. You can post about what the company did, name it clearly, tag a handle or use a hashtag if you want visibility, and then not respond when the company account replies. The social media manager or their team may be tasked with responding to mentions. That does not obligate you to continue the conversation. You have said what you needed to say. You do not owe anyone a thread. Posting about a company and arguing with its lowest-ranking representatives are very different actions, and only one of them preserves your energy for the work that actually matters.

This is not a moral judgment. It is a practical observation. When we stop distinguishing between targets based on their actual power and responsibility, we spread our energy across surfaces that cannot absorb it productively. It feels like fighting. It is not the same as building.

Kai Cheng Thom, a Chinese-Canadian trans woman, writer, social worker, and conflict resolution practitioner, wrote directly about this dynamic in her book I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World. Thom observed that in social justice communities, “accountability” had increasingly become a script, a performance of the correct response rather than a genuine path toward repair. The question she posed was pointed: are we more committed to the feeling of calling out than to the work of resolving conflict?

Thom was writing from inside queer and trans communities, about dynamics she had experienced firsthand, and her observation carries a challenge that applies well beyond those communities. If accountability has become a performance, if we are following the script because the script makes us feel like we are doing something, then we need to ask what the performance is replacing. And whether we would be willing to do the harder, quieter, less visible thing instead.

That question is not comfortable. It is also, we believe, necessary. Because if the patterns we have described in this post are recognizable to you, the urgency, the pressure, the powerlessness, the misdirected energy, then you are already familiar with how exhausting they are. You already know that they are not sustainable. And you may already suspect that there is something better available, even if you are not sure what it looks like.

That is what we want to talk about next.

Channeling Energy Constructively

Everything we have described so far, the urgency, the pressure, the collapse of distinctions, the drift from accountability into release, shares a common feature. It is all individual. It is one person, overwhelmed, trying to address systemic harm through individual action, burning through their own reserves in the process.

This is not a coincidence. The patterns we have been describing are, in large part, the result of trying to do collective work alone.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a disabled queer writer and longtime disability justice activist, offers a different frame. In their book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha describes a concept they call “care webs,” networks of mutual support that are not built in response to a crisis, but maintained as ongoing infrastructure. A care web is not one person showing up heroically in a moment of need. It is a group of people who have already done the work of figuring out who can do what, who needs what, and how they will sustain each other over time.

The distinction matters for what we are talking about here. When you are operating alone, one person, one timeline, one set of reserves, every new crisis draws from the same finite well. The pressure to do more is a pressure on you, personally, and when you cannot meet it, the failure feels personal too. The urgency becomes yours to carry. The powerlessness becomes yours to manage. And the misdirected action we described earlier becomes almost inevitable, because individual urgency demands individual action, and individual action at that scale does not work.

A care web changes the unit of action. Instead of asking “what can I do about this?” you are asking “what can we sustain together?” Instead of measuring your contribution against the scale of the crisis, a measurement that will always come up short, you are measuring it against what your web has agreed it can hold. The soup kitchen does not become less overwhelming because you joined a care web. But your relationship to the overwhelm changes, because you are no longer the only person responsible for responding to it.

This is not abstract. In online spaces, care webs can take forms that many of you will recognize even if you have not used the term. A group of people who coordinate to amplify mutual aid posts so that no single person has to carry the full weight of visibility. A set of friends who check in with each other before responding to a provocative thread, not to police each other but to ask: are you okay? Is this the thing you want to spend your energy on right now? A community that has explicitly discussed what it is building together, so that when the next crisis arrives, its members have a shared framework for deciding how to respond rather than each person reacting alone.

What these examples share is that they move the question from “am I doing enough?” to “are we building something that can sustain us?” That shift does not eliminate the urgency. It does not make the world less frightening. But it changes the relationship between the individual and the work. It makes the quiet, sustained labor, the posts, the check-ins, the mutual aid, the showing up, visible again as contributions to something larger, rather than invisible drops in an endless ocean.

This is what we mean by channeling energy constructively. Not the absence of anger. Not the suppression of urgency. But the practice of directing that energy into structures that can hold it, that can receive it and convert it into something that outlasts the moment. A post about a company’s harmful behavior, written with clarity and shared once, is channeled energy. A thread that spirals into hours of argument with people who have no power to change anything is not. A check-in with someone in your community who you know is struggling is channeled energy. Doomscrolling until you find a target for the feelings you cannot sit with is not.

The difference is not always obvious in the moment. That is why the infrastructure matters more than any individual decision. If you have already built the web, if you have people who will check in with you, if you have a shared understanding of what you are building together, then the moment of crisis is not the moment where you have to figure all of this out alone. You have already done that work. And the work you did counts.

Sitting With It

We started this post by asking you to go one layer deeper, to look not just at how you respond to friction, but at what drives you there. We have covered a lot of ground: the gap between urgency and intention, the pressure that makes our own work invisible to us, the ways powerlessness channels itself into misdirected action, and the difference between acting alone and building something that can sustain us.

We want to close by returning to the question we asked earlier in this post, with a small shift:

Where is your energy going, and is it creating what you want for yourself and your community?

If you have been sitting with that question as you read, you may have noticed something. The answer may not have changed. But the way you are looking at it might have.

If your energy is going toward things that leave you exhausted without moving you closer to what you want, for yourself or for the people around you, that is not a signal to try harder. It may be a signal that you are carrying something alone that was never meant to be carried alone. It may be a signal that your reserves are depleted and that what you need is not more action, but more support. It may be a signal that the structures around you, the care web, the shared understanding, the people who check in, are not yet built, or need tending.

None of that is a failing. All of it is an invitation.

In our next Moderator Minutes, we will be looking at what happens when these ideas meet friction in real time: how to set and hold boundaries in online spaces, and how to de-escalate when things are already moving fast. If this post was about understanding where your energy goes and why, the next will be about protecting it when it matters most.

Our community discussions have moved to Zulip since the last Moderator Minutes. We are still inviting people in by hand, so if you would like to join us, ping us in our Discord and we will get you added.

As always, processes grow over time, and this conversation is no exception.