Why Am I Doing This?
I don't always know what is going to push me in the end, but after becoming increasingly dissatisfied with my experience on social media, it was recently completed research that was the final push to delete my accounts on the last remaining texty-chatty services I was using.
It wasn't even the article's main conclusions about the rightward move across most platforms, but rather, the finding that people both younger (18-29) and older (65+) than my social media addicted cohort were much more likely to just not use any social media at all.
Surely, if millions could just, like, not log in somewhere and scroll their way to misery and distraction, then I could too!
So I did. Delete, delete, and delete. Mercilessly. Without a second thought. No stuttering. In one fell swoop, Bluesky and Mastodon joined the ranks of Twitter (deleted 2022), Facebook (2012, 2018), Instagram (2018, 2019), Tumblr (2015, 2017), and others I am probably forgetting (Peach? Ello?).
I will miss the nice people I had chatted with over the years, but the cost was just too high.
Dreams of a Smaller Web
At the risk of nostalgic indulgence, I do miss when the web was smaller. It's not as if people were nicer or anything like that. Newsgroups, boards, and various chat protocols like IRC had plenty of vicious and nasty people who knew how to really spoil a nice time. Fortunately, there were also countless ways to find and participate in community and you weren't left to sign up to one of maybe ten websites where everyone else was.
All of this brings me to wanting to make a website like this one. One that has a bit of the look and feel of the sites I made in the 1990s on GeoCities, In the Tokyo neighbourhood, as a then-young then-closeted-but-wanting-out trans woman looking to profess her love for shows like Ranma½, You're Under Arrest, and Dirty Pair might do. but without the frames, image maps, or JavaScript rollover button shenanigans.
(Also, admittedly, I did kinda miss working in something as simple as basic HTML & CSS in a text editor.)
