Last year I managed to download my entire LiveJournal archives. My last post there was over a decade ago, and for at least five years my posting had slowed to every few months (at best), but all in all I wrote there for eleven years. Kind of incredible. Everything I said, and others, dumped to text and XML. Hard to read, so often I explore by means of grepping a name, or a phrase.
In addition to this, I've got an almost-complete archive of my old HTML journal, the handwritten kind, gathered in pieces from the Wayback across three or four of my old sites whose robots.txt allowed crawling.
And lately I've been thinking a bit about intentionality, and also listlessness. My fascination with the internet in the earliest days (~1996-2001) came from exploration and surprise - doesn't it feel like there's been less of both lately? Or maybe that they're harder to find? But it wasn't just that it was a way of seeing things beyond my city, my province; it wasn't just about making things, though that was fun; it was about the associated and oftentimes ephemeral community born out of the enthusiasm and lives of other people. When I search the comments in my LiveJournal archive, there are usernames (and signed anonymous users) that stand out. Burned in my memory.
Oh God and there's more. Things I'm not cool talking about publicly. But still: friendships that have lasted decades, as technologies shift, as people move away from other people and towards platforms, towards posting. Watching so many fascinating people put aside the things they did, and made, so that they can browse curated content, has been heartbreaking. I watch them occasionally toss some part of themselves into the pelagic depths of cloud databases replicated across the world. I remember when those experiences belonged to us, instead of companies like Meta.
Community, especially online, is slippery. I passed through dozens of places online over the years: StarGate boards circa 2003 with one of my university friends, the pre-purchase Harmony Central forums, Rondak's Portal and other RP zones, a variety of MUDs, poetry forums, anonymous telnet boards. Most of these left no impression. I'd struggle to remember anything important that came from these. Users or moments. It feels unfair to call places like these time sinks, but maybe they were. For whatever reason, they didn't imprint the same way.
But then there are the handful of places that did stick, or click, or however you want to look at it. For me those include dialup BBSs, online journals, the forum for fucked up teens when I was 18 (and whew, that last one's complicated). But also: the people of the poetry community on Twitter, something good in the sludge of that site. Then, geminispace.
I wonder what determines whether something holds. Probably something to do with community, which is a slippery thing. The places with the strongest sense of such, whether good or bad, are those I remember best. BBSs were the latter, with absent sysops and weird inter-personal drama. Though I've been calling (I say calling; telnetting-into) another one recently, and it's been a dream. An active, chill sysop; interesting people; _good_ people, though I suppose, as with all communities, it will at some point have an ending. I probably just need to give it time.