I’m old enough to have experienced some of the analog days, but we were too rural and poor for me to participate online.

I read an article in some magazine back in the day where the author talked about using email, and it did sound so amazing. And then when I eventually had internet access, yeah, when I traded emails with someone in Italy, mind-blowing. I thought the internet would make everyone outgrow small-mindedness!

I suspect cloud storage would have sounded old-fashioned and "mainframe" at the time.

Even though I was too poor and rural for internet services, I am old enough to remember the analog days, and this is very interesting what you're saying about the narrow perspective and then broadening it.

Like I remember the nightly national news on television and accepting it in the way of a kid who's bright but hasn't seen anything of the world very far from his house. Maybe the wider world seemed like something that happened only on television. Whatever Tom Brokaw said seemed like probably what was happening out there.

But I think I would have expected at least a Southern cop to fuck anyone over whom he didn't know, and we knew that cops liked to sit at the bottom of a hill with an unexpected speed limit and ticket the public all day.

I can remember being a little bit aware of adbusters in the late 90s (IIRC, they were trying to sell something called black spot sneakers, and I kind of suspected they were just being like any company except with different rhetoric), can remember seeing that there was some company called Loompanics (I think) that sold every kind of crazy book. I knew that alt.2600 existed, but I didn't really understand it.

But, beyond that, I don't think I recall the broadening as clearly as you do. There was probably a good bit of waking up that I didn't do until the 2000 election happened, saw how the people around me regarded it, etc.

I've never heard of Spin! I'll watch it now.

Thank you, that was careless of me. I intended to refer to before dial-up internet came along for ordinary people.

Lemmy’s format just kind of sucks for discussions and visibility. If you comment on a post from a year ago, you can expect that to not been seen by anyone ever.

Yes, that is very irritating.

The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.

Too bad they’re not very active, to the best of my knowledge.

Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts

Yeah, it’s true. I remember the stereotype of Livejournal, which might be before your time, of being teenage girls telling you what they had for lunch. They could be accused of tending toward narcissism. Me, when I want to communicate, sometimes it’s that I want to point something out, but sometimes it’s driven by a wish to socialize.

I didn't really write what I meant in my mind. I meant before dial-up internet came to the public and they were using those other services.

I grew up in the rural US, and my family was acquainted with a family who lived in a neighboring state and had a summer home nearby.

They were so exotic, yes. Just looking at a car with a plate from a different state was a novelty. I wish I’d been bold enough to talk with them myself, but then again my mother probably would have discouraged it.

When I was first working, my officemate was from that state, and I was kind of impressed that he’d made the globe-trotting jet-setting move of coming to a whole other state. (No, I’d never been to another state myself at the time.)

I tried to have blogs back in the day. People were not terribly interested, and the prospect of having to cultivate being-known so that anyone will see the thing I found unpleasant. It’s strange to think how many people are very driven to promote themselves. Self-promotion feels dirty, and writing for no one feels foolish.

I do remember the pre-internet days, but we were too poor and rural for me to buy a modem and dial into anything.

I always kind of wished I had a pen pal back then. I was so lonely. I was looking for clips from Big Blue Marble a while back (a children’s television show I just barely remembered seeing once or twice), and there was something about pen pals being part of the show, and it made me feel all over again like oh if I'd had a pen pal back then! Although my life was so dull I might have struggled with what to write about.

I read an article in some magazine where the author talked about using email, and it did sound just mind-blowing to have a larger world than your mother and your father and the television.

Did you have to spend a lot of time fending off weird, dorky guys?

I hate typing on my phone so much.

I very much didn’t expect tight character limits to be accepted and take over as opposed to just when you’re on your feature phone but you have something to say.

Thank you, I didn’t know about goodoffmychest or general.

Was your family reasonably well-to-do?

I was half-expecting you to say they got the first bill and hit the roof because no one had really grasped what was going on.

I wouldn’t expect to find much traction. And now I’ve spent so much of today writing about this that I’ve mentally lost track of the shape of whatever I felt unable to do yesterday. I’m sure it would have been more about wanting to talk and wanting to express myself than expecting to be interesting or appealing.

And to think in the 90s, there was the belief that the internet was going to free us from corporations (because the corporations were going to be too stupid for cyberspace or the information superhighway, etc.). I’m not sure whether that was young-person naivete or whether it ultimately came from dot-com marketers, but it was around.

I think I’m going to take some days to find out what my brain’s impulses are to want to do over time. Does it have any intention of having interesting thoughts semi-regularly? I don’t know that I could promise that :)

I did see tildes when exploring around, and it did seem intriguing, although I didn’t really look down into what was getting posted. I never get invites to anything because I don’t know people. It’s like at times I’ll feel a little interested in lobste.rs but don’t know any of them.

Yes, a cool artifact. Thank you. Did you (or your family) end up using CompuServe much?

I have look at it, and if I have something that’s solidly casual, it could fit there, although I’m also thinking that if I have three casual thoughts in a day, now I’m already almost flooding the place. Would have to start slowly in that case.

Someone else said that and I wrote something about how it’s a big task for one person and a culture may be resistant to it.

I can look at Mastodon more seriously, but I would have to figure out… I mean a regular person wants status, right, set themselves up as an expert at something, enjoy fame, and there’s careerism. So it’s natural to them to look at who’s a big name in their field, who they want to be noticed by, who they want to be associated with, and follow those people, and craft the right kind of comments so those people will respond to them in the right way to advance their goals.

A forum, yes, that could be it. There probably aren’t many that are so alive today.

Although I am skating past the point, aren’t I, that Reddit didn’t seem to be missing this puzzle piece to the extent that Lemmy is.

Thank you for being welcoming.

One large reason I haven’t rushed to start communities is that there are some personality types that live to be a moderator, and some that totally don’t. But I guess you do it and if it reaches the point where you have to moderate and you hate it, someone else must be around who can take it on.

I get that a question brings more engagement, but if I don’t have a question, I don’t have a question. And I might have a thought I want to put down in writing, and maybe someone will read it. Even if no one happens to read it, putting it where someone could read it and not just on paper or a nowhere unknown blog can feel better.

Healthier, maybe less combative from getting a better understanding of who someone is.

Start a blog is a little like “If you don’t like the huge corporation, you have to start your own huge corporation to crush them”. Make a blog, never be seen again.

As for people giving their thoughts, it seems held back until you free it with a link or a question.

I’m not thinking specifically of deep thoughts or shallow thoughts, but when I happen to think of anything, it could be nice to communicate it to other people where it might spur thoughts for them or conversation or even just put it down in writing even if no one cares. If it’s casual enough, there is casualconversation, but if it doesn’t fit in the box well, it doesn’t fit in the box well. Or not even thoughts exactly as I might want to talk about what I did today or saw today.

That’s the spirit!

I expect it would be too much for me alone. And do I put them all in one poorly-named general community that I make that ends up a grab-bag, or do I make lots of communities that I only touch once in six months when I happen to have a thought or experience in some topic and I also happen to remember that I even have that community to write in?