"Permanent" Account, eh?
I suppose it all comes full circle eventually, and I find myself here again. Resetting my password was a pain.
In the post I linked to above, I waxed poetic about trends in social media, including "microblogging." As the world, the Internet, and former bastions of social media all collapse and fall, sliding into the abyss, I find myself thinking ( Read more... )
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Glad you got your password reset. I lost a couple of accounts because I closed an email account without changing the settings on the journals.
Third spaces... LJ was a place where people go, and they just gravitated towards the people they liked. It seems to me that other places seem to be interest-based, and there's less openness about our lives, so there's less reason for people to gravitate towards others. Or am I totally wrong? What do you see happening?
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People are still finding their people, I'm glad to say. It does seem more clustered, siloed than in the past. I note that some of the main communities I'm on are on discord, which is also essential gated. Worse is the trend for knowledge bases and other resources to migrate to discord, where the information can't be indexed, nor can it be archived on the IA Wayback machine.
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I find it weird when people talk about Discord as a place. It always just seemed like a channel of communication.
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I'm no traditionalist and I never have been. I'm fine with things changing, as long as I like the direction they're moving. tbh, I think it's good to have multiple platforms to interact through; part of the flaw of the facebook model is the assumption that your friends will automatically be friends with each other. When everything you say goes out into a single agora (which I sort of described as the "vomit" phenomenon in that old post), it changes what you communicate and how. I generally wouldn't talk about things on facebook that I'd put on twitter, and I definitely wouldn't talk on either about most of the stuff I journal about here. I don't know if this has exacerbated the echo chamber effect, or if that was always bound to happen.
It's just a shame that the scifi future we ended up getting was the cyberpunk dystopia version, rather than the post-scarcity Star Trek kind.
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I struggle about social media a lot atm. I find it so empty for the most part, and almost impossible to randomly meet interesting (real) people like I did back in the early 2000s. I mean, e.g I met random people at FB poker chat rooms and some of them I even visited (in Singapore). I could not even dream of doing that now in that way, but I suppose Threads is now a good way to find people for dating (the algorithm is very strong there but in a good way it seems). But I yearn mostly to meet people face to face. There's never a shortage of good people in one's life. Though the basics of life are in much better places than 25 years ago :)
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Empty is a good word. It's full, but full of a lot of nothing. I rarely meet new online friends face-to-face anymore, though I know that's not universal. Twitch has been great for that for some folks, but it just seems like it's much more work these days than it once was. Of course, I'm older and more settled now; not as likely to go a few hours just for a casual meetup.
I hope this remains true for most folks! I'm very happy to have a great, supportive friends network (and I have to remind myself that if cool people want to hang with me, I must be cool, too). I think a lot of doomsayers get their jollies from saying negative things and then seeing those happen. I'd always rather be wrong and see people happier. Humans have always found a way to connect, and I think that will continue indefinitely.
You're making me want to try Threads. 😅
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