paralogue.org

It's been a season of old habits for me.

That is, I think the last decade of my life has been fairly constant. I had the same patterns of doing things, the same phones and hardware, the same programs, the same places to hang out and talk. After 2005-2015 changing so much, 2015-2024 was a bit more ... same-y.

I guess what I mean is, I just spent so much time on a Mac using Discord; this entire past decade was on the fediverse, and it's sort of like the time went by but I couldn't prove it was positive. I remember negative times for sure; but overall it was more like I was constantly ... accustomed, in a sense, to sharing thought space with other people. That was what microblogs and chatrooms felt like to me: just constantly fighting intrusive thoughts that came in on a global feed, constantly charting beliefs and negotiating them across groups of people, wrestling for status, recognition, love, work.

I've been more willing to shake it up lately. I wrote a bunch of blog posts about it; I got a few devices and just accepted I would use different daily drivers for a while, and maybe they'd work, and maybe they wouldn't. And I've made mistakes, but I've also overall wondered -- what if the old habits were ... better?

I've felt similar before. I had a Dreamwidth period (I still sorta do...) where I would rarely post longer things, to fewer people. But in the broader context of these other shared spaces, my mind didn't reconfigure for the format. If you're always in chats, then your brain is in chat mode. If you do nothing but write emails, you're a bit more epistolary.

Likewise I found that the world outside of Discords sort of frayed apart. One of my first forums (besides Core Gamer, Heretic Gamer etc) was samus.co.uk. It had a phpBB board and a group of people who -- well, we didn't really talk about Metroid all that often, really. It was just a Schelling point for something else.

I had time on the Serebii boards, too. Both of these were more about playing forum games with people who shared some ineffable other thing, but the thing itself wasn't the point. We created one-off encyclopedias about creative software and enjoyed each other's company.

I wonder sometimes what it means if such a thing cannot exist anymore; if people themselves are not accustomed to the format.

I don't have a central purpose for Paralogue other than that it exists, and that people in my life give it a shot. Should that change? I don't even know. Anyway, that's just on my mind tonight.

I am me. You are you. Thank you for being here with me.

thinking back, a lot of my favorite online moments have been on tiny internet forums. like, i hung out on gamefaqs as a kid, and one of my favorite places was the board for kirby and the amazing mirror. the game had been out for multiple years by that point and there wasn't much left to really talk about, so the board just became a place for ten or so people to bullshit around, play forum games, and answer the occasional actual question about the game every few months. i remember that one of the kids was obsessed with sayonara zetsubou-sensei and tried to get everyone to watch it. i ended up taking the bait, and looking back i gotta say it's one hell of an anime to watch as your first.

and honestly one of my favorite moments when i was on rateyourmusic was when i found a link to a separate off-topic forum some people made after the official off-topic board got deleted (in an event alluded to as "the MILF wars?") and decided to hop in as a kinda-outsider. it was a neat scene, with the board comprised of a handful of shitposty queers, a few who've been around since the 2000s, and one very disturbed guy who redirected every conversation into being about how he found lars von trier films traumatizing.

i could go on but, i dunno, there's just a sort of feel you get when you stumble upon one of these internet shanty towns – like they built this space specifically for the people currently inhabiting it. i love that, and i feel like that's rarer to find now? discord has definitely done a lot to monopolize the microcommunity space by making them extremely easy to create, but by that same token they also feel painfully insubstantial – as if a stiff breeze or an accusation of problematic behavior could just blow them away…

forums were such a substantial part of my childhood and yet in the grand scheme of the internet, a pretty fleeting source of socialization.

my first interaction with forums may have been neopets, albeit i was in first grade and far too scared to interact there. only a year later, i found a neopets knockoff named subeta, and i'd rush home from school to write extensive vampire roleplays with people i'd never spoken to before on their forums. i also remember a very distinct "longcat" drama playing out on those forums.

i even remember my very first forays into digital art happening on a long forgotten oekaki board that was popular on neopets at the time.

the forums for the sims 3 played a big part in my adolescence as well -- i had my own thread dedicated to writing stories about the 100 baby challenge that i was attempting in my save file.

i think there's this distinct feeling with discord that you need to be "in the know" to enter these microcommunities. and i suppose there's a discovery system but it feels like there's too much of a barrier. like, i have to join your server, pore through all of the messages in a channel, see if there are any current conversations happening about the thing i'm interested in...

in forums, i loved that you could really just stumble in as an observer. you can take your time to check out threads and get a sense of the community without any need for commitment. and when you're ready to dive in, all it takes is a simple response to feel deeply connected and involved.

diving into a conversation in discord just feels... meaningless. or like you have to have the quickest draw in the west. i'm not writing out a long-form message like this because by the time i'm done, the conversation is over.

i miss when you could easily stumble upon a place like this. thank you for taking the first step to build a community here.

rebecca wrote:i miss when you could easily stumble upon a place like this. thank you for taking the first step to build a community here.

Actually! I've been discovering there's quite a few places like this still operating. I just sort of ignored the fact that they existed. I signed up for a few over the past week and it's been really nice. I think an underrated one for severely nerdy types is <a href='https://www.vogons.org/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>https://www.vogons.org/</a> and it has an incredibly cool theme and style.

rebecca wrote:i think there's this distinct feeling with discord that you need to be "in the know" to enter these microcommunities. and i suppose there's a discovery system but it feels like there's too much of a barrier. like, i have to join your server, pore through all of the messages in a channel, see if there are any current conversations happening about the thing i'm interested in...

in forums, i loved that you could really just stumble in as an observer. you can take your time to check out threads and get a sense of the community without any need for commitment. and when you're ready to dive in, all it takes is a simple response to feel deeply connected and involved.

diving into a conversation in discord just feels... meaningless. or like you have to have the quickest draw in the west. i'm not writing out a long-form message like this because by the time i'm done, the conversation is over.

oh i definitely feel that, and i think recently i've realized (or remembered) how freeing it feels to not have that time pressure. i don't have to fight to get replies in. instead, when i see a post that's interesting, i know it'll still be around when i have time to reply to it. the forum doesn't demand that i structure my time around it… as much.