Difference between ribbing and bullying?

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How exactly do you tell the difference? I'm pretty much at a loss here, I can't tell the difference between friendly ribbing and banter and comments that turn way nastier, or later I find out it really was vicious.

The problem is that I can't tell the difference and I mostly ignore what I think is ribbing and banter, and try to give some back. But people can misinterpret this and s**t can escalate.

But if you ignore it totally or shut it down, then people act offended and like you're being the mean one.

Well if a comment comes from a family member or close friend who isn't angry with me, then I feel its usually safe to assume it was more joking not an attempt at bullying. Though it would be harder to tell with people I don't know, and I am sure I could take things personally if I took a comment out of context or whatever.

I'd say the main difference is bullying is when someone intentionally tries to make someone else feel bad, the other is not meant as meanness but can sometimes be taken that way. Can be hard to tell at times.

I've gotten in a lot of trouble confusing bullying with friendly teasing.It's very hard for me to tell especially since I think some of my family members do have malicious intent, at-least sometimes. I wish teasing didn't exist.

Probably, if a person isn't responding in kind, then what you are doing is bullying.

Usually I don't engage in banter or friendly teasing. The problem I have with it is misinterpreting friendly teasing as bullying and then family (usually) or others getting angry at me for being over-sensitive and starting a real argument when the other person was only joking. Also, I've done the opposite (though this was more when I was a child, a young teenager) and believed bullies when they said they were my friends and just joking or trying to help me and let them escalate the bullying and teasing until the whole class was laughing at me or something. I had a similar situation with a workplace bully as an adult, I thought she was engaging in friendly teasing but it turned out she was a bully.

*Occasionally I've had the opposite problem of people getting offended by my friendly teasing but the two times I rememberer were when the banter was initiated by someone else and I just kept it going too long to the point that it annoyed the other person. I don't tend to initiate banter or friendly teasing myself. It leads to too many misunderstandings.

I don't know how I can tell, I just can. It's just something I can sense. Also I don't have much trouble with reading facial expressions and all that sort of thing, so I usually know when it's just banter. Sometimes I don't quite always know what to say back, so I just laugh, which is good enough. I know that my social reflexes are just slower than average, so the right things I should say come into mind seconds or minutes later, and each time I feel annoyed with myself like ''ohh why couldn't I have thought of that at the time? It's too late to say that now!'' Sometimes I think of something to say back straight away, and I like it when that happens.

I think the difference between "Ribbing" and "Bullying" is that ribbing is 2-way between friends and bullying is when someone with low self esteem picks on someone that is vulnerable.

As an example; an aquaitance of mine often pokes me in the side when I am trying to concentrate on a group discussion. I poke him back.
What he does is very annoying, but it isn't bullying.