I was fascinated by Usenet, having grown up so isolated, but I was too scared to post. I was at university, and I think my biggest fear was that fellow students there would see my posts and take them as an opportunity to bully me.

Been accumulating books from little free libraries but not started reading any. Brought my sourdough starter back to normal. Tried letting cinnamon rolls rise overnight. Looked into Mastodon but it doesn’t appeal to me at all.

I hate typing on my phone so much.

I very much didn’t expect tight character limits to be accepted and take over as opposed to just when you’re on your feature phone but you have something to say.

And to think in the 90s, there was the belief that the internet was going to free us from corporations (because the corporations were going to be too stupid for cyberspace or the information superhighway, etc.). I’m not sure whether that was young-person naivete or whether it ultimately came from dot-com marketers, but it was around.

Start a blog is a little like “If you don’t like the huge corporation, you have to start your own huge corporation to crush them”. Make a blog, never be seen again.

As for people giving their thoughts, it seems held back until you free it with a link or a question.

I remembered a classic brain implant story: Learning to Be Me, by Greg Egan. Not perfectly on topic, but in case you like stories.

I think I’m going to take some days to find out what my brain’s impulses are to want to do over time. Does it have any intention of having interesting thoughts semi-regularly? I don’t know that I could promise that :)

Lemmy’s format just kind of sucks for discussions and visibility. If you comment on a post from a year ago, you can expect that to not been seen by anyone ever.

Yes, that is very irritating.

The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.

Too bad they’re not very active, to the best of my knowledge.

Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts

Yeah, it’s true. I remember the stereotype of Livejournal, which might be before your time, of being teenage girls telling you what they had for lunch. They could be accused of tending toward narcissism. Me, when I want to communicate, sometimes it’s that I want to point something out, but sometimes it’s driven by a wish to socialize.

Thank you, I didn’t know about goodoffmychest or general.

I find that following hashtags on Mastodon is a good habit for sidestepping this.

Thanks, I’ll explore this. Overall I’ve so completely avoided Twitter and Mastodon over the years other than following the occasional link when I really did want to see something specific. Someone did point me to their fosstodon thing not too long ago, and all of the huge pictures and infinite scroll I found so off-putting. There’s probably some setting to improve it, though.

I did see tildes when exploring around, and it did seem intriguing, although I didn’t really look down into what was getting posted. I never get invites to anything because I don’t know people. It’s like at times I’ll feel a little interested in lobste.rs but don’t know any of them.

Thanks. I’ve proceeded to have some positive conversations, which I must have been really thirsting for.

I wouldn’t expect to find much traction. And now I’ve spent so much of today writing about this that I’ve mentally lost track of the shape of whatever I felt unable to do yesterday. I’m sure it would have been more about wanting to talk and wanting to express myself than expecting to be interesting or appealing.

One large reason I haven’t rushed to start communities is that there are some personality types that live to be a moderator, and some that totally don’t. But I guess you do it and if it reaches the point where you have to moderate and you hate it, someone else must be around who can take it on.

It must be a great skill online to know how to write in a way that can’t turn into something else in someone’s head and trigger disproportionate reactions.

Since I remember Before Phones, I’m worried that people who grow up with phones don’t know how completely crappy a way that is to interact with the internet. It makes good consumers. I remember the shift in laptop display dimensions around 2010 so they would become Movie Watching devices. And phones take phone-shaped pictures.

I suppose I’ll have to start tracking what I wish to talk about to find out what communities could be needed. Today the only ones in my head are one of no importance at all that would fit in the existing casualconversation just fine and another that made me laugh but is nothing deep and I might feed it to asklemmy at some point.

I might have to ask asklemmy where questions that are a little more factual are supposed to go. Their sidebar says they want open-ended, although probably no one pays attention.

I can look at Mastodon more seriously, but I would have to figure out… I mean a regular person wants status, right, set themselves up as an expert at something, enjoy fame, and there’s careerism. So it’s natural to them to look at who’s a big name in their field, who they want to be noticed by, who they want to be associated with, and follow those people, and craft the right kind of comments so those people will respond to them in the right way to advance their goals.

A forum, yes, that could be it. There probably aren’t many that are so alive today.

Although I am skating past the point, aren’t I, that Reddit didn’t seem to be missing this puzzle piece to the extent that Lemmy is.

I looked around for some time at the shape of Lemmy yesterday, and that’s what I found.

I tried to have blogs back in the day. People were not terribly interested, and the prospect of having to cultivate being-known so that anyone will see the thing I found unpleasant. It’s strange to think how many people are very driven to promote themselves. Self-promotion feels dirty, and writing for no one feels foolish.

Someone else said that and I wrote something about how it’s a big task for one person and a culture may be resistant to it.