If you are in your late thirties to mid-forties right now, there is a good chance that you have spent most of your life in a cycle of making some sort of home on the internet only to have it crumble beneath you like chalk and having to start over.
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@evacide I've been through a few, especially on chat clients, but the Twitter diaspora was a big one for me. I'm glad Mastodon is seemingly immune to platform killing stupidity like that.
@evacide I've never thought of it this way but it's definitely true. Long dead niche forums, MMOs, etc.
@evacide Why the age restriction? Some of us started with Usenet and/or bulletin boards ... and some decades earlier with amateur radio.
@evacide
I just realized the internet is a sand castle.
50s and 60s, over and over.
@evacide shameless-self-advertisement: We exist as a forum for 26 years, and we're definitely aiming for a few more anniversaries :).
But yes, we've seen other forums come and go, and it's a shame to see a community vanish :(.
@evacide and me just ambling about the web... homelessly.
@evacide I built my own website in 1997 and still have it.
@evacide I miss the days before the internet
I'm in my late 60s and it's like that ;^)
@evacide everything breaks, except irc
@evacide stop it you're hurting me! Yeah I got sick of it, finally started self hosting my own website and I'm trialling my own instance of masto (actually, hometown) vs Forte to see which I like more. Now I just need my IRL friends to get in on it.. this is literally the first thing I started writing about on my website https://amfernee.com/2026/04/08/where-is-social-media-going/
@evacide : I don't remember agreeing to you posting about me 😅
@evacide A global DDoS attack – and let the internet go to hell xD– just kidding, but it’s tempting
@evacide There were a group of us who formed around the Looking Good forum on the Television Without Pity website in the 00s. When that site jettisoned those forums, we moved to a new forum site. Then that site was bought by someone else before shutting down. These days we still see each other on various social media platforms, but we don’t have the “home” we used to, just a Facebook group.
@evacide Back in the 90s I found a web host that offered PHP+MySQL without any forced ad banners (!) on their free tier. Good times. The web archive still has some remnants of my old site from those years. 🥲
@evacide started with Livejournal
@evacide I feel for those who built community, and that community isn't organizing together to just shift over en masse to another location (example Fediverse) but I do think businesses who put all their eggs in someone else's basket were a bit short sighted. Governments even more so! Use corp media, sure, but not exclusively!
@evacide mIRC, geocities, ICQ, myspace, wordpress blogs, Google Wave, twitter, clubhouse, ... Just what comes to mind right away 🥲
@evacide It never should have been considered permanent.
I do feel sorry for folk who’ve built up audiences to support their ventures to have billionaires destroy them and really am not sure what an answer to that is except somehow making our governments ensure billionaires can't happen and anti-monopoly laws are enforced.
@evacide masto is my twelfth social platform if you include forums and IRC as single entities 
and it's by far the best, even with all its problems 
@evacide one more reason to have a persistent handle and a fursona.
The chalk may crumble, but I will find my friends again.
@evacide The Temple […] grows cold and strong, but the wind blows stronger, cold and long
@evacide let me see... IRC, ICQ, Forums and message boards, Facebook, MMORPG, Twitter... yes, pretty much. I feel a bit like a drifter now. No real home. Just go in and out, take what I need, wave hello, and carry on.
@evacide @sstephenson as always we poor Gen Xers get overlooked
[goes off to fiddle with my gopher site]
@evacide
Google+ says hi. 😏
@evacide it's true but then we built it on the sand of private billionaire beaches, that's on us, maybe we let the sea take it all and start again on firmer freer ground.
@zoneghost @evacide
I would love this. How do we do this without being billionaires or nation states ourselves? To my mind, the only way to accompliah this is to seize the means of production.
@evacide is that old enough to have had a geocities page? 😊
I still kind of feel like the idea that we would all have "homepages" linked together by common interests and spontaneous social networking was one of our better ones. Fediverse is pretty cool too though...
@evacide usenet (which probably betrays my age)
@evacide There was a shooting more or less in my vicinity today. My first reaction was to long for the days when a simple text search on Twitter would have been enough to figure what was going on.
@evacide Letting big tech companies host and own your accounts was a mistake. In the early days we hosted our own stuff, our own websites, email, etc.. We need to go back to that. Not your keys, not your home.
@evacide keep the chalk for the inevitable indigestion
@evacide it's true
