brief thoughts on online "community"

[serpentinemalign]

what my experiences in online communities have taught me is that everyone is just kind of dealing with their own shit and everyone is traumatised not only from things in their "real life" but also a long series of community conflicts and dissolutions and web 2.0 panopticons and it feels as though most online community conflicts wind up stemming from people being at vastly different stages of their recovery from All That Shit

with the migration off of social media, people will sometimes attempt to coopt more private and personal communities like discord servers and masto instances into their replacement for Tumblr or Twitter while refusing to leave behind the paranoid mindsets that were forged there and which no longer work elsewhere.

with that all said I am sick and tired and exhausted of watching the same conflict over and over again where nobody learns anything and everyone is upset and angry. I don't blame anyone because I think I would act similarly. There is a reason I will always be a member of these communities, never a leader. My heart would be too weak to take it.

Still I feel an urge to grasp onto these brief glimmers of community with both hands and hold their flames close to my heart before they inevitably snuff out, each one sooner than the last as we continuously eat each other ouroboros style

Comments

[linky]

I really feel all of this. I used to run a community space (a discord server, which granted, went as well as it could have and not too much upset happened. Which I am grateful for given horror stories of other servers...) and it really is a lot on the heart. I'm surprised I was even able to do what I did five years ago when it comes to that. But I learned a lot of valuable things during that time which help me today in navigating spaces online and trying to grasp those feelings of community now and move forward.

But I would never run a discord again, it's just more than I can handle now.

[serpentinemalign]

ugh, yeah :( it's super impressive that you managed to do that, i hope you were able to keep good friends from your server! i definitely feel the kind of... lack that there is now. it feels like everyone is just so exhausted and fatigued from the stress of attempting to manage their online social life (if not previous communities of their own) that it is so much harder to build any kind of community that lasts. but it is good to have the experience to take forward to whatever comes next.