online presence, the web, and community

I've been thinking a lot about posting lately. Some time ago, I went off most socials. My engagement with it had been an outlet of sorts, but never in a truly authentic or meaningful way. i just used it as a means to express myself in a way that fit in with the current trends, whether that was shitposting or sharing avant-garde images or trying to promote various social causes. That was all fine and fun, and it was in its own right a form of self expressison, but there was always this air of isolation? hypocrisy? that I think stemmed from it being on a platform that didn't really foster individuality, and instead profitted over engagement, and manipulated emotions, and changed features. More or less, instagram was turning into tiktok and it became harder and harder to operate what felt like an authentic online presense within those confines.

I took a break from all that. I stuck to Twitter which at least felt like it gave me some utility. I considered it a form on information intake (stay tuned for a full post on what i mean by that). It was a great way to discover new people and new ideas, but i never really found myself feeling a part of that.

I think what likely held me back to some extent was my desire for anonymity. In general i hold a lot of reservations about what data big tech collects about us. But specifically I hold a very unique name. You would not need much more than my first name and a google search to find every reference to me on the web that there is. While i don't truly believe that everyone who reads my silly thoughts will immediately try to find out everything about me, I do think it played no small part in keeping from presenting an authentic self online. Alts didn't end up helping with this either, probably because i had very small base.

I tried have a stint with tumblr, and i still want to keep that up. I think it's one of the few bastions of corporate-online that still has a soul. But I want to keep this post focused on a little something else, so i'll spare that for now. I guess broadly my thoughts on social media have only gotten more and more cyncial with the twitter purchase, and also web3 is repulsive. I might make a follow-up post on the fediverse etc. but i want this post to be a little less cynical and more on the joyful side.

What i want to get at here is the cool parts of the web.

the cool web

This may be best explained by describing a feeling. I probably first experienced this feeling as a kid, with my first computer and an internet connection. Being in complete awe of what i felt was infinite creativity and possiblity. It's what led me to spend hours on MS Paint. It's what led me to fruitlessly type machine code from a book into nothing at all. To collecting screensavers, to installing themes, to pirating media. It's what led me to my current career.

What i mean here are online areas where people are creating to create. A lot of what I enjoyed wasn't monetized. It was colorful and fun and hacky. It felt like an extension of the self that created it. I suddenly felt that again when i learned about the Gemini Protocol. I came across and explored cadence.moe and it fucking ruled. I then found sadgrl.online and got more inspired. Then I found more sick stuff on neocities, with Everest's work allowing me to fully transcend. These spaces felt like a little glimmers of what society could look like if there was an internet without greed. I can't say this without at least attributing some amount of the feeling to nostalgia. But it was one of the more invigorating feelings i've had. Invigorating enough to dust off some web dev skills, rent out a VM, and scrap this little website together.

And so here I am. This being my first post here, I hope it serves as a thesis. I'm planning as treating this as a mental space. It will likely have a mix of long-form/thought out posts as well journal-style entries for any interested parties. I'd be happy if this served as a springboard for meeting new people with similar interests (webring soon maybe). I'd also be happy if this is just for me and I can coast off of knowing my thoughts are going somewhere and maybe useful or inspiring to someone.

an anti-capitalist angle?

There's probably something to said about this notion of online community that is detached from the big players. If i create good content on a large platform, it's the platform that is profitting. By pushing more content to web1 style hosting, and not running ads. It in some ways prevents capitalists from profitting off of our labor (posts). It's left as an exercise to the reader to determine if that's a real anti-captalist argument.