Finding A New Internet Home

When I published my post about Belghast's passing the other day, I noticed this draft sitting in the backend of my blog CMS.

It was drafted in August of 2023 and I had a few initial notes as seeds for ideas I could build out into a full post.  That's pretty typical for how I used to jot down thoughts that I would later craft into a full blog post.

Without giving you the exact words, my notes essentially boiled down to the fact that Twitter was in rough shape and felt like it was on the way out, I was trying out Mastodon, and I was feeling a little unmoored on the internet.

Now it's three years later and Twitter is essentially dead (for everything I used to use it for anyway), I haven't used Mastodon after that initial few months of 2023 experimentation, and the closest thing I have to a "home" social media is Bluesky.

But even Bluesky just doesn't feel like a true home.  It feels like the place I go to scroll a few times each day when I want to get a pulse on what's happening in the spheres of the internet discourse that I find interesting.  I don't really post there much at all.  I do occassionally but it's few and far between.  I suppose if you want to reach me or see my random reposts and very infrequent posts... feel free to follow me @grnmushroom.  Honestly, sending me a DM there is probably the best way to reach me in a publicly accessible way if we don't know each other offline.

As a millennial, it's not my first (or last) time picking up my digital roots and finding somewhere new to put them down.  We've been through this before, whether it was ICQ, AIM, MySpace, Facebook, Forums, or anything else we may have personally been dug deep into.

But something feels different to me.  I have to admit, maybe it's just my phase of life or my current age.  Maybe it's a "me" thing and I'm just nostalgic.  But... something feels different these days.

We had a rise and fall of social media being used for actual social purposes over the past few decades.  Social media is more and more dominated by corporations, advertising, and people that have some degree of following.  Social media is less and less where we go to actually be social online.

All of my actual social connections have migrated.  I have group texts with people I care about.  I have a private slack with a group of online friends I've known for years. I've dipped my toe into a number of Discords that seem like they're really strong communities, even though Discord communities haven't really stuck for me personally.

I can't help be feel like we're in a transitionary period again moving away from social media.  The rise of people I know that are actively trying to be on their phone less and who want to spend less time scrolling has been fascinating to watch.

I don't know where we're going.  There will probably be a backlash that tries to revive some of the old internet style of interactions.  I bet we get the backlash reaction that results in a new rise of webrings and forums and things like that.  We already see some of that in the recent re-rise of email newsletters over the past few years.

But, I don't think that'll be all.  I think we'll continue to see new approaches emerge.  I can't wait to see what else people come up with.  And, at the end of the day, I hope we all find an internet home we're happy with.