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 felt this a little too hard. I’ve about given up on trying to be social online.
@evacide I tried FB briefly, because there was the chance to catch up with family, then a spell on Xitter in the 140-character days, then as they went toxic I started slowly retreating back to a few of the quieter BBSs, then I found the Fediverse :-)
@evacide It's like that scene in Hot Fuzz in the flower shop. BBSs (God rest them), GEnie (God rest it), Usenet (God rest it), eWorld (God rest it), LiveJournal (this one still stings), the entire Flash community (God rest it), Twitter (no comment) ...
@evacide 53 here, same.
@evacide @eestileib might be time for me to jump back on IRC
@evacide yes correct. Also my physical home tbh
@evacide Early 50s, but ya.
@evacide pre-Facebook waspeak internet for me. Tons of personal sites all with their own weird personalities and no Facebook
@evacide Generation Jones would like a word.
I'm happy to say my first, late 1994 website is still on-line, but okay, it does need some updates. My 2nd oldest site is based on a Usenet list (remember those?) and it's been on-web since IIRC 1997. (Yes, needs updates.)
But sigh. My office site. I'm just waiting for people higher up the food chain to decree that I have to migrate all of the 'useful' parts over to www.wordpress.gov, because I've seen that happen and the results have been… sad.
@evacide Always a digital suitcase packed…
@evacide Generation Jones would like a word. I'm happy to say my original late 1994 website is still on-line, but okay, it does need some updates. My 2nd oldest site is based on a Usenet list (remember those?) and it's been on-web since IIRC 1997.
But sigh. My office website. I'm just waiting for the people higher up the food chain to tell me that I have to migrate all of the 'useful' parts over to www.wordpress.gov, because I've seen so much of that happen and the results have been… mixed.
@evacide The “blog” I started in 1997 is still going strong. (Quotes because we used “weblog” for a few years before “blog” was invented.)!
@evacide The modern world is much the same.
@evacide Yet somehow more stable and less contingent than I or most of my friends' offline lives have been over the same timespan.
@evacide Well, here we all are, at any rate.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@gusseting/116560133519730274
@evacide
@nihilistnomya your online home turning to shit is hitting all of us.
We're a bunch of digital nomads aren't we
@evacide Been there, done that.
@evacide ultimately brings us here and to self hosting all the things
@evacide that one hurt.
@evacide You didn't have to do me in like that
@evacide multiple times. I even ran my own BBS for a time way back in the days of 14.4k modems and two phone lines.
@evacide In my early 50's and have decided that the only way to win is not to play. :)
@evacide I've been in the same IRC channel for over 20 years but the virtual nomadism is otherwise real
@evacide Worse is that those new platforms somehow get worse.
The game Starsector has a subreddit /starsector and a very active Forum at fractalsoftworks.com.
Which one do you think is better quality wise? Going to reddit to get better at the game is like going to the butcher for vegan recipes. At least the memes are ok
All things beautiful lack permanence
@evacide Not only on the internet
@evacide I feel if you build on sand you should expect it to sink.
@evacide hahahaha, literally there's a whole group of us who met on a nerd comic forum in the late 90's to the 2000's and we're on like our 4th round of making new social accounts and linking back up to each other. 🙃
@evacide Our retirement has been partly funded by a chance meeting on a Compuserve forum.
@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!
