I don’t think I’ve ever completely felt part of a fandom community, even if the experience I had way earlier in my life was much better than today’s. I’ve written about this before, implying that online communities were “better” because their spaces were more confined, with their own set of specific rules, culture, and users accepting the community above themselves as individuals.

The relevant tacit keyword here is “identity.” Despite how easy it is to interact with others nowadays, I think today’s world feels homogeneous and boring, both online and offline. The late 90s and early 2000s shaped my idea of what the internet was for and how it worked on a social level. To me, my online identity was not meant to show much about my “real” self. My online identities were typically tied to hobbies or interests, and to the specific communities I was interacting with. When treating any subject, everything I had to worry about was the people I was talking to, not the possible outsiders. It was comfy, to a certain degree.

Remember how fun it was to pointlessly interact with your computer programs, back when access to the internet was not something unheard of, but still quite limited? It was a time when many PCs were presented as with multimedia capabilities, a term that never seemed able to retain a concise meaning. It was also a time when having floppy disks or CD-ROMs with promotional goodies was simply fun, from exploring the directories and files to actually using the files for their intended purpose.

I recently came across an article by Mihnoír on his personal website, where he voiced his feelings about what I’d call the bastardization of nerd spaces. Actually, he doesn’t refer to these spaces as nerd ones, but from my reading that’s what he’s talking about. I must warn you: what follows contains my interpretation of Mihnoír’s thoughts, which might be way less accurate than I desire, but I hope it’s close enough. And if you haven’t followed the previous link yet, keep in mind you must be over 18 to visit Mihnoír’s site.

Many digital artists have always been very very protective about how much they allow others to share their work. That’s reasonable: when you make something available online, it might end up being used in ways you wouldn’t approve of. And of course, pride plays a role too. It’s possible that you don’t want you work to be devoid of context, such as an easy way to find your online space (like your account on a social media platform, or anything that clearly shows your autorship). It pains me every time I see someone on Discord uploading a drawing that they didn’t make, without even providing the name of the artist. I think, however, that there are more ways than the obvious ones to share what you’ve liked while being respectful to its creator. And they can be applied on static sites like Neocities’, too.

Actually, it’s not that relevant that it’s Neocities: I could be using any other web hosting provider. But it is a bit relevant.

I’m here because the Internet sucks.

I can’t depend on big platforms

Around the year 2020, the state of the mainstream side of the Internet (which goes beyond the web) made me feel exhausted enough to give Mastodon a chance while moving away from most of the big platforms. I stayed there for about 5 years, but I ended up leaving, dissatisfied with the kind of people and culture I found.