Wow, it sure took me a lot longer to get to this point than I anticipated. This one is kinda gonna be a ramble, and it's gonna jump betweeen lots of topics. Future posts will generally be more focused, but this one is for me :P
I'm finally writing my first real blog post here; it feels quite cathartic, after how long it took me to actually get a blog together that I'm somewhat happy with. Admittedly, in it's current state it's the bare minimum of what's passable, but I'll work more on the actual layout over time. So! You may be wondering what took me so long. That's a bit convoluted to answer, but I intend to do so here as well as explain why a formerly terminally-online Twitter girl like me would end up gravitating towards a place like this.
I've been on the internet from a pretty young age. When I was a kid, I'd browse Tumblr, Quotev, the Minecraft Forum, and loooots of old game forums. I've always been fascinated by the internet from even before I was on it; I still am, it's so easy to find a cool site that hasn't been updated since 2009 and find myself getting lost in the tiny parts of history in the forgotten corners of the web. When I found out (surprisingly late) that there's a place like this to host free personal sites that's pretty active AND everyone likes to pretend it's 2010??? I HAD to get on that. Someday, I may move towards hosting my own site elsewhere; I don't want to put ALL of my faith in Neocities forever. Maybe I'll copy all of my files and manage the site on here and Bearblog, but I'd like a domain that's fully mine someday. My own loserdanceparty.com... imagine that :P
All of this is to say that despite the allegations? I LOVE the internet. Despite all of the short-form slop, right wing propaganda, and the concerted effort of major corporations to replace human expression on the web with LLMs, there are still corners of the net that have remained mostly unscathed; there are still websites that give me the same sense of joy and wonder as browsing the web did when I was a hopeless teenager without much of a life offline. Truthfully, I worry for the kids who are getting online even younger than I did. I won't sugarcoat it and pretend that the internet didn't have it's issues when I was younger too; I got on around the major social media boom. MySpace predates my time being a certified internet girl, but I was there when Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, and Google+ (if you know, you know) were starting to dominate the collective consciousness of my middle school in the nothing town I lived in back then. Everyone acted like you were a loser if you didn't have a smartphone; I got my first one when I was 14, I think? Before that, it was browsing from the communal tablet or school computers.
In many ways, things haven't changed much; social media has never truly been a place for genuine human expression; even if you don't care about likes or whatever, your posts and their ability to stay up and be viewed by others is entirely at the whims of algorithms owned by corporations who need an advertiser friendly platform more than they need oxygen. And so, like most things in the modern age, capitalism ruins EVERYTHING. One thing that has changed is how bold advertisers have actually gotten these past few years. I use an ad-blocker, so sometimes I forget how bad it really is. But every once in awhile someone will show me something on their phone and there's ads EVERYWHERE. Hell, half the reason I ditched my smartphone in favor of a flip phone (Kyocera A202KC btw, which will receive it's own blog post very soon) is because I got tired of my phone trying to advertise to me even in the basic apps that should just be functional, like weather or contacts. I won't even get too much into thhe digital assistant/AI thing in this post, but it all made me hate my phone. Even when I was a doomscroller in my middle of nowhere town without a car, desperate for human connection, often times there wasn't much to be found. I have a few online friends, but very few of them are ones who knew me from Twitter, Tumblr, etcetera first. When I moved up north, there was people who acted like they knew me better than they did after recognizing from Twitter, and that only made it much clearer to me how disconnected social media can be from real, human interaction.
I do not intend to imply that you cannot make real friendships over social media; however, I think that the old days of forums and chat rooms were often a healthier and more sustainable place to do so. Even Discord servers for a specific interest can be a great place, since that's the closest we really have to either that's used on a large scale now. The issue with social media in particular is that by nature, it gets really easy to forget that no ones online persona is a true reflection of self. Even on something as personal to me as my own blog, there are a lot of nuances of interacting with me in person that don't really transfer here. It helps a lot to get into the habit of calling your friends, especially video calls! But on social media, the connections you make are turned into a numerical statistic that shows on your account for the world to see. While the effects of social media engagement metrics have been discussed time and time again by people much smarter than I, it's undeniable that lots of people at least to an extent do want likes if they post. SO many people will post ragebait or really misinformed takes to jump on whatever issue is trending, and fairly little of what's said is for the sake of discussion anymore as much as it is trying to have the perfect opinions and dunk on those who don't. The panopticon has become real, and it's in everyone's pockets.
Where this REALLY gets insidious is that this is the case with most political issues too, ones that have real, genuine ramifications on the world around us. I've met far too many people whose political stances are more for show than anything; communists who act like they're above everyone else for having read a few books, anti-intellectuals who insist that there's one perfect idealogy and it just so happens to be theirs, people who post photos of protests and other political actions so everyone knows how involved they are in whatever issue will make them look virtuous in the moment. Most of these people ARE coming from a good place and do want to make a genuine change at least to some extent, but many don't recognize that a site like Twitter that suspiciously have gotten bolder with pushing ads for right wing grifters (including the sites owner!) truly is not a space for these discussions to happen in good faith.
The reality of political activism is that it's messy; there IS no correct opinion or way to go about it. Every major revolution in history was enacted by massive groups of people, and no two people really have the exact same opinions on everything. Thus, serious political discussion becomes impossible on a platform that incentivizes being the MOST virtuous leftist above having hard conversations where you have to try to understand those who might see things differently than you. And I haven't even gotten into the bot problem yet. Again, these discussions are important to have, but as long as they are tied to engagement? That will ALWAYS be a factor of how people discuss these topics on said platforms. I'm not trying to "both sides" or say you need to respect and agree with EVERYONE'S opinion, that's at your discretion at the end of the day. But it IS important to understand that at the end of the day most people are not cruel and irredeemably evil, and you're going to have disagreements even with people who are pretty close to your beliefs.
Even more importantly, I want to emphasize that the only way (and I repeat, the ONLY way) to make real, tangible change happen is by getting more involved in your real world community off the net. I'm sure there are places where good faith political discussion happens, but if your activism ends at going to a protest so you can get photos for Instagram or yelling at obvious right wing trolls online you HAVE to understand that wasting your time on that instead of talking to the people around you is much more convenient for the billionaire ghouls and politicians who are content to let the "revolution" happen only on social media, and not in the real world where it might actually affect the machine in any meaningful way. The revolution IS happening, even if it's a lot more boring and tedious than it sound in the books. It starts small, and it starts with talking to people around you.
And so, we get back to WHY I'm here instead of social media. The tl;dr is that I love when the internet is a place where I can make my own space that's mine; I can write whatever I want on here, no matter how rambly and disconnected some of it may be. I can code my own website, even if it looks a little messy and barebones right now. I can talk to people without wading through hundreds of ads everyday, and we can have conversations without the incentive for likes and the fear of looking cringe looming over us. I like having my attention span back, I like that if someone wants to see what I'm up to they have to make more of an effort. For now, Neocities fits my needs, so I'm here. I also will fully stand by social media (and smartphones themselves, to a lesser extent) being a useful tool for counter-insurgency. Almost every major site is owned by SOMEONE who gives some portion of their money to the United States government in exchange for being allowed to operate without regulation or concern for the tangible effects our little distractions can have on the real world. I'm also a gay transgender furry and they don't like me on social media, as proven by Tumblrs Mass Transgender Woman Banning Algorithm.
I'm really excited to finish this websites layout; I can't wait to have all of my different little pages where I can share all of my creative stuff to the world on a site that's truly mine. It's so much fun, even if css can be really frustrating. I recommend it to everyone, whether it's on Neocities or other platforms like it. Most allow you to import documents, so you can even use a website builder and copy the code if you're not up to learning html yourself! Most of my future blog posts will probably be written and published at once and will be a little less stream of consciousness, but if you read all of the way, thank you! I also want to say that I don't want my takeaway here to be that you CAN'T have a smartphone or use social media at all, but rather to be mindful of your digital consumption and to make sure you pay attention to the real world around you too. It's beautiful out there :)