I don’t recognise the internet any more. Walled cities have proliferated, filled with newcomers, settlers, and homesteaders - who invariably join each other in a race to the bottom - chasing just enough engagement to inflate their numbers without having to invest too much effort in establishing any sort of “real” relationship with anybody.
When the social internet first evolved and people began connecting through “friending”, “following”, and “subscribing”, I remember a common statistic being thrown around - a human limit of sorts. It was posited that nobody could support more than 100 friends.
I would often look around, count the people I kept in touch with on the fingers of one hand - sometimes two - and wonder if the statistics were inflated by an order of magnitude.
I became a “blogger” before the “social internet” happened. We would bookmark each other, write in each other’s guestbooks, and leave comments on each other’s posts. We would maintain blog-rolls - pages of links to those we regularly read - to help others find their way.
I can still remember the front pages of “Belgian Waffling”, “Dooce”, “Petite Anglaise”, and “Belle de Jour”. None of those blogs exist any more.
To my knowledge, only two of us still share an almost daily journal on the internet - myself, and a girl in Canada. We crossed paths back when then web was shiny and new - and took part in “NaBloPoMo” ~ “National Blog Posting Month” - a reaction to “NaNoWriMo”, or “National Novel Writing Month”. I still remember becoming friends with Lisa. I remember sitting in the office one morning, reading about her car accident. I still look in on her orphaned son from time to time - to see how he’s doing - twenty years later.
Somewhere along the way our “tribe” didn’t so much disband, as disintegrate. I suppose - thinking back - we were all “of an age” that suited the time required to share the quiet moments with each other. Life happened. Families happened. Work happened. One by one, we fell like dominoes.
Writing on the web was once dominated by either self published blogs (I wrote one of the first open source blog scripts), or one of the few “platforms” that would slowly gestate into the walled gardens that proliferate today. Wordpress, TypePad, Blogger, and LiveJournal dominated during those early years - with “Really Simple Syndication” delivering our friends words to us across open borders each day. They gave rise to everything that came afterwards - MySpace, Vox, Yahoo 360, Facebook, Tumblr, Medium, Twitter, Jaiku, Plurk, Threads, Substack, Mastodon, BlueSky, and more.
I miss the early days of the web - before the “social” networks came into being. Perhaps the thing I really miss is having the time to spend reading, commenting, and contributing to the river of consciousness that the internet unlocked.
Every few months I find myself searching for those I once knew - usually late at night - with the hope of finding perhaps one or two of the names I recall. While doing so, I invariably discover new voices, new stories, and new characters - and add them to the towering list of content I won’t keep on top of.
I wonder if “my tribe” is still out there somewhere - or if indeed it ever went away. Perhaps it’s been here all along and I’ve chosen not to see it - or more likely it has been diluted and drowned out by hordes of engagement seeking sausage machine operators pumping industrial quantities of AI generated slop into the firmament while chasing one more like, one more follower, or one more subscriber.