@MerlinJStar@weirder.earth (if i wanted to answer your question focusing on the most essential aspect: CWs were for kink communities to ensure that engagement with their content was safe, sane, and consensual. early mastodon had a lot of people into hypnosis, noncon, forcefem, etc kinds of content and that's not something you just post without a CW.

but the other thing i would stress is that they came about in the first few months of the Trump presidency when a lot of people were feeling very burned out)