💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~liamvhogan › blog › fediverse.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:44:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Earlier today I said this, with respect to the very large numbers of people coming to various fediverse and mastodon and other instances:
I work in heritage, a field that’s intimately involved with feelings—of the values and significant aspects of the past we associate with places, with memory that makes identities, with anxiety over change and the terrible sense of loss, but also (I’m sorry to say) with the desire to stay the future.
And I can read a lot of those feelings of significance and loss for long-term fediverse denizens who had found comfort until now in a small internet, and whose instances are profoundly altered now
The feelings are real and powerful and there’s a genuine loss here, I think.
I hope newcomers are able to approach the pasts of the new places they’ve come to with that heritage sense of appreciation and understanding of significance.
As the proportion recedes of people on here who are fixated on finding, and fucking, Bigfoot, so too will posting about that large cryptid remain a cultural memory; somewhere out there. Always hungry, very hairy, inexplicably attractive
I don't know what effect the influx of people will have on my own use of aus.social, I can well see myself shifting to a smaller, more obscure, instance.