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.
Post
Replies:
81
Boosts:
12
@evacide or late 50's 😁
@evacide i think this is true of most people who've been online since the early to mid-90s (i'm older than mid-40s and it's true for me, who got online around '92)
@evacide not only that, some of the homes I made myself and crumbled due to my own neglect!
@evacide I started a blog again. This time in my mid/late 40s. This time it's really gonna... ah hell, who am I kidding.
Seventies .. but yeah
@evacide MetaFilter and Mastodon keep me grounded; they remind me of ‘the good old days’
@evacide Shrug. I started my own website and wiki in 2001. It's still goin' strong. My aws bill is about $30 a month.
@evacide this is good imo. Cultural permanence is fundamentally unsustainable and should not be idealized.
@evacide Honestly, you can reduce the lower end of the range. I'm 34, and I was not on the internet in any community capacity at all until age 16. This still describes my experience. My younger brother would probably say the same.
@evacide fresh out of Meta, all services. It's so strange and unusual but now that I'm really distanced I can see how genuinely toxic it had become and the mess it was and had been for a long time contributing to my already fragile sense of well-being.
@evacide Yep, started on the Big Three as a fledgling (Facebook, Insta, Twitter), then moved to Reddit, then moved to Bluesky, and now I'm fully on the Fediverse.
@evacide gotta say, really what @dillo is cooking up; Gemini was/is a good effort for curating communities around text but Dillo provides just enough of a rendering engine to scratch the aesthetic itch, while still being a bona fide web browser, which i think would be helpful in feeling a sense of normalcy as we all move our works and community spaces to federated Wireguard nodes or whatever other underground thing
@evacide yep. Never felt more burnt by any of them than Twitter.
@evacide one platform I haven’t seen in the replies is Xanga. That was a big thing when I was in high school.
I’m glad that data is long gone now!
I do miss alt.discordia!
@evacide I …hey. Yeah.
30+ years stuck in the rinse cycle
All you needed was CU-SeeMe, a 30 MHz Mac, a greyscale Quickcam, and a 33.6 modem. Text chatting with video. It was produced from 1993-98 and it's use lingered into the early 2000s. Still miss it.
@evacide Happened to my own site after Square bought the host, tripled the price, and removed every feature I used.
@evacide Does 48 still count as 'mid-forties'?
@evacide I'm barely in my 30s and I feel this. Part of why it frustrates the shit out of me how hard it apparently is for people to move services when one enshitifies
@evacide My default Signal notification sound is now the ICQ "Uh-oh!" sound.
@evacide The reason I'm on mastodon.social is because it seems the least "run out of someone's basement with no clear legal structure or succession plan" of all the instances. I want my toots to last a bit!
@evacide fifties here. And same
@evacide early 60s and you've seen this happen over and over
@evacide @LabSpokane The key is to not make a home in property you don't own. 🤷🏼♀️
@evacide cringy it may sounds but since the BBS days I've always felt like a 'digital nomad', purely people you like to hang around, don't always want to stay together for long periods of time.
in the past i hosted my own BBS and echomailing network to get some 'stability' to my online circles. but in 2026, it would require non-trivial $ to host due to the sheer scale and noise in feeds.
sometimes everyone gets off the bus except you, maybe new passengers will come along for the ride, or maybe you'll drive alone into the sunset... it's important to enjoy the journey, not the destination.
I guess.
@evacide two of the forums that I basically grew up on are still going, but the one that was very much my first internet home had some very vocal alt-right folks that the admins refused to ban, so I stopped visiting around 2016. Tried to go back a few months ago only to find some long-time members basically cheering on the Gaza genocide, so decided it could fuck off into the sun forever.
@evacide oh, yeah, sure. So, are we just being goth about the past or do we wanna burn the networks and take everything we're owed? I'm down either way.
@evacide multiple times. It’s almost like profit-driven things aren’t supposed to exist.
@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.
