3pp, fyi

one might have seen fedi queers use third-person pronouns (commonly shortened to 3pp), such as ’that one’, ’that unit’, etc.

if this is confusing for the reader, this website is here to help :3

here, we aren’t talking about the third-person personal pronouns that are taught in school (like ‘she’, ’they’, etc). while most entities who use 3pp go by it/its, this isn’t strictly required.

no ‘you’

3pp means that one shouldn’t use the second-person ‘you’ when talking to someone, and they won’t use the first-person ‘me’ to refer to themselves either. so instead of this:

• you should get me coffee
• did your friend review my merge request?
• if you don’t pay me back i will rip you apart

a conversation would look like this:

• alice should get me coffee
• did that one’s friend review my merge request?
• if AB-4096 doesn’t pay me back i will rip it apart

what instead

most commonly, 3pp entities will prefer that people substitute ‘you’ with either their pronouns, their name, ID number (if applicable), or words such as ’that one’, ’that unit’, ’that creature’, etc.

exactly what words/phrases one should use is something that they have likely declared on their website or bio, so check that

for first-person, ’that’ simply gets swapped to ’this’ (so ’this one’, ’this entity’, etc. instead of ‘me’).

in inclusive writing, ‘you’ should be substituted with ’the reader’ when addressing the entity reading, and ‘one’ when addressing a hypothetical entity. when a post on fedi uses the word ‘you’ to refer to the reader, it should be CWed as such.

thanks for reading :3