I stopped making friends online many years ago, probably for a solid decade or so.
It was a fallow period for my social life in general, all while I got sucked into the hamster wheel that is the San Francisco startup scene. First as an early employee, then founder, before settling into a long period of bouncing consulting and burnout.
All that changed in 2023.
It wasn’t a single dramatic event that got me to unplug, like you see in those occasional posts from friends that they’re taking a hiatus from social media. Nothing pretentious like that, like I’m some sort of celebrity that needs to make a press release to update fans about my lifestyle changes.
Nobody cared. I didn’t care. It was just a gradual slow ghosting of public spaces.
And it was fine. Until it wasn’t.
Similarly, getting back into making digital friends has been a slow boil as well.
But first, let’s do a brief recap of my history of online relationships.
It’s easy pickings these days to blame it all on Twitter becoming a cesspool but the firehose got to be too much for me years before then. And the truth is that it probably says more about my mental state in my last few years in SF, where I was battling burnout so hard that I wouldn’t look at screens in my off-hours because I could barely stand to look at it during the work hours either. My friend circle ended up being more around fellow small dog owners and non-techie regular civilians.
Enter the pandemic.
Moving to San Diego was a good change. Forcing everyone online solved some of my in-office issues, I was able to focus and crank again. At least for a solid 3-4 years until remote work’s long term second order effects became clear: constant reorgs, layoffs, etc.
Pandemic-era remote work recreated work connections, which in my world of startups can be fleeting and tend to have short seasonal cycles.
But now it’s firmly culturally established that we can spin up zooms to
Ohhh, wait, also the zoom parties for watching shows and playing games. Those died out after a while as people started going out again, but here I am still covid cautious and white knuckling it through waves that people want to pretend aren’t happening, so finding others that want to hang out online has been a boost.
This is serving as my long-winded roundabout way of describing my path to the IndieWeb movement and community:
Mastodon as Fediverse gateway drug > Joe > HWC > Blogs > IWCSD > Blogging myself > IWC chat and more blogs…
Takes me back to the friendships I formed in early web years. The blurring between digital and physical - Joe, Brett, Jason W and John Dick, Jon Warren Lentz, dude from 2advanced, the k10k crew during the AP/IXDA/??? conference, Molly, Thomas Van Der Wal, following the AP crew’s individual blogs, hunching over a laptop with Doug Bowman with some early experiments to push the boundaries of CSS on the AP site…
These were all healthy normal parts of being on the web in the early years. It was a heady mix of work and fun, and it felt like anything was possible. Degrees didn’t matter, neither did your background or employer. All you needed was to be curious, friendly and diligent.
But hey, life happens. Industries change, you grow up and have new plateaus and opportunities. And if you stick around long enough, what’s old becomes new again. I’m seeing that in particular with a return to blogging and breaking out of corporate silos that seem as dated as AOL did back then. Chat groups for communities have that early AIM vibe. The occasional biweekly Zoom calls feel just like the non-commercial user groups and industry happy hour mixers of days gone by.
Even my non-techie circles have expanded thanks to social media and my covid-cautious aversion to risky indoor meetings: IG is my hub for local cycling events and camping getaways.
Speaking of IndieWeb…
This post is my first time making an entry for the IndieWeb Carnival, a monthly writing prompt for bloggers and online creators. February’s topic is “Digital Relationships” and is hosted by Manuel Moreale - read his kickoff post here.