A Brain Dump

17 Aug, 2026

A warning up front: this is not particularly edited or crafted. It's more of an ejection of some pent up feelings and thoughts and I'm spewing them into the void to get them out of my damn brain. It's kind of a bummer, so move on if you're not after reading some sadposting.

A forum I'm a member of recently went through a bit of drama whereby the admin announced that the site was officially in maintenance mode, and no substantial changes would be coming in future. This was in response to several prior posts which received a lot of attention asking for specific new features to be implemented. The response has been varied and loud. Much like here on the Bear Blog community, we all love to have meta conversations around the platforms that we participate in, particularly when those communities hold a strong identity as a part of the small web. To be clear, that forum is going nowhere. It has resources enough to run for years into the future, and the community is small but highly engaged. But it's gotten me thinking (always dangerous).

I recently deleted my old Reddit account and switched to a new one, since the old one contained elements of my deadname involved, which I was not keen on. And... it doesn't feel the same any more. I exclusively browse old.reddit.com, but a recent change has rendered the default sort to be the engagement-maximising Best filter, rather than the far superior Hot. Switching to it every time I want to browse is an element of friction that has me reconsidering my involvement in the site altogether. I don't post or comment much, and never have. But the quality of the content and conversation has declined dramatically in the past few years, and now the site is pushing me to what it thinks will keep me engaged the longest. The real boiling frog moment was the close friend who introduced me to Reddit in the long ago telling me that he's quit the site.

I also recently started charging my phone on my desk overnight. This is a massive change from the last I-don't-know-how-many years, where my phone has acted as an alarm clock (and past-bedtime distraction device). This has in turn changed how I treat my phone more generally; I have forgotten to pick it up on my way out of the house multiple times, for example.

This has all happened in quite a short space of time, and it's had me reflecting on how I use my phone, and the Internet. I grew up with the Internet of the early 2000's: MSN messenger, MiniClip and PopCap games, Neopets, Kings of Chaos, MySpace, and forums forums forums. And I find myself yearning for those days quite a lot. I don't enjoy texting on my phone, and much prefer to type messages on a proper keyboard. Online shopping feels icky on my phone; I want a bigger screen for it (yes, I know, very millennial of me). Social media is too algorithmic and ad-riddled, and I can't seem to edit my top 8 no matter how much I Google Kagi.

A few weeks ago I had a short chat with my friend who recently quit Reddit, and my brother-in-law asked me about the culture of Reddit (I responded very much in a grandparently "sit down and let me tell you all about the olden days" kind of fashion). In both of those conversations, we talked about how the Internet used to be, and how we used it before it was in our little black rectangles in our pockets. Something I realised was that Reddit once felt like a refuge. It was similar enough to my experience of The Old Internet that I actively wanted to be there and spent a heap of my time on little communities there. In the early-mid 2010s Reddit still felt small, nerdy, deliberately janky, and emblematic of what I loved about the Internet as a youth. It was like a bastion of my youth. Today it's a loud rabble, and even the smaller communities that I still occasionally visit are filled with less and less interesting content, or increasing amounts of AI slop getting through the moderators' defences. Or both. It feels like I'm no longer who it's meant for¹.

Anyway, Tildes is having a small identity and longevity crisis, but I still like it. It's got that early Reddit vibe to it, with a lot of very smart people adding to very considered conversations. I sometimes hesitate to consider Bear Blog a community, but it has the broad shape of one; albeit far looser and less structured than somewhere like Tildes or even Mastodon. I still find myself looking around for new communities to participate in. Although participation is a loose word for what I do. I mostly lurk. And so what am I looking for? More content to fill the needy dopa-fiend in my brain? More community to feel part of something? Nostalgia at any cost?

I think I know, and here's where this rambling, possibly incoherent diatribe has been going: I wish I knew how to make friends with people. Both online and off, I have no earthly idea how it's done. The friends I have are incredibly dear to me, and there are definitely points in my timeline where I didn't know them or wouldn't yet consider them friends. At some point I just made friends with them, but I don't know how I did it, or when. I just did. I think it's in no small part due to their persistence, rather than any of mine.

A swathe of people I know have made some of their closest friends through the Internet in one form or another. I know people with Tumblr friends, forum friends, AO3 friends, IRC friends, open source friends. But I have never understood how this is done. And I think that's why I find myself community hopping over and over and over again. I'm looking for friendship, but I don't know how to get it. It's like arriving at a party full of people you don't know, and everybody's already chatting in their tight-knit little groups. I have no idea how to insert myself into those situations. I think I keep going to these different online spaces in the hopes that someone there is just waiting for me to arrive, and is determined to befriend me (not literally).

But it never happens. People I "meet" online seldom rise past the level of familiar face in a crowd. I don't know how to get from there to... whatever is above that. I wish I did. Sometimes I feel very lonely, and I see people in communities I'm a part of talk about making such great friends there, or meeting up in real life. And it makes me feel lonely, and inept, and like I'm somehow broken? It's a reflection of real life as well. It's like there's this invisible wall between me and other people whom I might actually want to befriend, and I have no way of breaking it down because I don't understand what it's made of.

And so there's not really an ending for this post. It's a 1200-word morose ramble, getting the words out of my brain just as quickly as my fingers can tippy tap them out. I have been looking for community on the Internet for as long as I've been online. I'm not nostalgic for being able to make friends online. I'm nostalgic for having friends online. Those, of course, were my friends from school and immediate surroundings. Over time those friendships have eroded, slipped away, or been subsumed into WhatsApp group chats which are, to this day, still very active. And we still meet up! So what am I complaining about? Am I even complaining?

The Internet feels like this massive city, full of opportunities and songs and stories and people with a rich tapestry of experiences. And I feel like I am a ghost within its confines, cursed to only observe as all those people twine their tapestries together, sing new songs, and spin new stories. I wish I could join in. But I don't know how.

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