Digital Relationship Reminiscence

I’m using this month’s topic for indieweb carnival as an excuse for full scale reminiscing. Reminiscing about the relationships I’ve had that have been largely or wholly digital and how technology affected my analogue relationships.

The good old days

Internet service availability started to become ubiquitous in this part of the world as I started secondary school in 1996. I think I started to use the internet daily in ‘97 or ‘98. Either visiting a friend’s house or in the computer labs¹ at school. My internet use was mostly browsing at this point, finding anything interesting or funny and sharing it with friends². I joined a few forums but mostly lurked.

During those years, my digital / online communication was pretty much exclusively with people who I already knew. IM via MSN Messenger or SMS messages at 12p a time³ with the Nokia 3210 that every single teenager owned.

First online community

It wasn’t until 2001, in 6th form college and armed with a PC to call my own, that I started to post a little more on forums and chat with fellow pirates on Napster. This was also when I embedded myself in an online community for the first time and started to forge some fuller digital relationships for the first time. I joined DeviantArt and jumped in with both feet. I spent almost every free evening there, or talking with people I met there.

This all fell by the wayside when I went off to university. Leaving home and living with 5 of my closest friends lessened any motivation for finding a community elsewhere. The emergence of MySpace, and later Facebook, made internet socialising an accompaniment to my existing relationships rather than a conduit for making new online friends.

I’m about to carry a bag of sand

Around the time I graduated, microblogging was being born. Sometime around 2007 I signed up to Jaiku. There I found a community of nerds and spent many an evening interacting. I stumbled upon the Linux Outlaws community and was indoctrinated. Google came along and bought Jaiku, and not waiting for Google to inevitably do what Google does, the community I had become a part of moved, almost completely en masse, to identi.ca.

Here is where, for the first and probably only time, I made some honest to god, full fat digital first, friends. I spent an enormous amount of my idle time on Identica from 2008 until probably around 2012. Entire evenings spent abusing a microblogging platform as a public chatroom (the XMPP support certainly helped). It was a really great and amusing time, and the only time I’ve ever been to the pub with people I’d only interacted with online.

All good things come to an end. People moved on as the platform struggled with some technology changes and my online life once again reverted to the mainstream social networks, meaning news consumption on Twitter and sharing posts with real world contacts via Facebook and WhatsApp.

ActivityPub & Indieweb?

Roll on 2017 and I hear about Mastodon, that it might be the natural successor to Identica. I dip my toe back in, as do many Identica old-timers, but obviously it’s not the same. Slowly I have started to build up a decent timeline… perhaps sped up by lock-down, and definitely enhanced by independent blogging and participation in things like 100 Days to Offload.

After a post lock-down lull, I am definitely in a phase of high online engagement by my standards. Not to the same extent as my Identica peak, but certainly more broad. With Discord communities around football podcasts, proactively trying to curate relationships via independent blogs, and recently signing up with omg.lol. I’m always on the lookout for my people these days.

I like to hope I’ll maintain this effort but I do seem to be prone to pendulum swings in this behaviour. Time will tell.