I spent my New Years Eve in VR (unsuccessfully)
Browsing cohost, looking for something else, I stumbled across andi (@mcc)'s New Year's Eve post on trying to spend time in a private space in VRChat. It's worth reading the whole post, or at least I think so, because it articulates a lot of what I've been feeling about online communities since the collapse or consolidation of the last, say, fifteen years: that the potential search area is vast, that commercial interests seek to keep us where we currently are, but that communities, good ones, are still out there, in a variety of different forms.
I admit, I'm only a little interested in VRChat, and right now only in principle. From talking with friends who jumped into VR headsets early, it's interesting, but not compelling. That said, from everything I've read online, VRChat is kind of like the wild west web I experienced in the mid to late 90s, with a lot of the same properties: lots of good weirdos, the possibility to build all kinds of interesting things, with discovery of interesting user-created things a big problem (feature).
In her attempts to get online at a NYE VRChat party, andi fails, because, as she says, she's not a trusted member of the community. As a rando, it's exceedingly difficult for her to get into the party she knows that's happening, and that's by design. Immediately after making her avatar, she finds people trying to hump it; the surface of VRChat, the part easily accessible by the bored, by the not particularly technically inclined, is appalling. But underneath it is this rich tapestry of people making amazing things for their friends and the people in their community, and this is what she tries, and fails, to join.
She recognizes that her failure to get in is, in a way, a success: for a community to thrive, it needs people, and, often, protection. The rise of imageboards, particularly racist ones like 4chan/etc, has replaced the old network load DDOS (the old /. effect) with racist/homophobic/transphobic harassment. This is, in every way, worse. Network traffic issues purely on their own can be mitigated in a lot of ways. Becoming the target or plaything of genuine psychopaths, who will DDOS and stalk and swat you, is a million times worse.
So communities hide. In the old days, they were just sort of naturally hard to find. Large concentrations of racist fucks probably existed back then, too, but not in the easy-to-find cesspits of the new web. It also used to be the case that fewer people were online, probably by a couple orders of magnitude. These days, communities can be hard for the average person to find (gemini, MUDs, VR communities), but once found, if there are no safeguards, well...
So people come up with their own safeguards: in andi's case, a string of misdirection intended to make it near-impossible for randos to get in, the community cultivating a kind of inclusion-by-recommendation. This isn't so different from some of the boards I used to get on back in the day, where they weren't in link directories, and search engines sucked, so they were the sorts of things you only had an account on if you were in the community. How did I get involved in the community? A girl living in a trailer in eastern New Mexico found my ICQ details via its random chat feature, we chatted for a while, then every day, and then she showed me her site, and introduced me to the boards.
Twenty five years before andi's VRChat attempts, a similar sort of thing. In-via-vouching. And the boards never lasted long. People just spun up pirated copies of phpBB on domains they pre-paid for a year, and with few incoming links, almost none of this was archived in the Wayback, just front pages, the contents of our actual discussions ethereal and vanished. The community moving on to the next thing, or things: someone sets something up, gets word around, and the process repeats.
I mention this because in the last six months, my attempts to find more meaningful places and people online initially focused on the large - the Twitter replacement, the collection of everyone, my brain rewired since the start of LiveJournal to look for sites and platforms advertising community, rather than people and smaller groups doing the same. And I've been thinking about the serendipity of that girl, her message out of the ether from fifteen hundred miles to the south. What that opened up for me. The sites and community. Phone calls, emails, letters, mixtapes; evenings and summers hunched over the keyboard. Eventually I met someone else. Fell for them, the sweet alto of their voice. It went as expected. Sex and heartbreak. But those times gave me good friends, some lifelong, all of us now keeping up over email, WhatsApp, whatever else. And all driving home that I don't want to scroll "content" on my phone anymore, I want curiosity and intensity and discovery. I refuse to believe that because I'm no longer young and because online spaces have been hijacked by corporations and capitalist interests, that none of this is possible. All of this is possible. And so much else, too. All of this happened once. Something different-but-similar, something new and good, is possible if we want it to be. And I do.