True Life
Wednesday, May 20th
If you spend time reading pages on Neocities, you'll see a lot of folks' stories of adopting a personal site as an alternative solution to the personal and societal problems that social media creates. I'm one of those folks -- I've read How to Do Nothing, I have a weird third-party cell phone, I use Firefox, etc. I always feel like it's dramatic to say this, but my mental health pretty much forced me to cut out social media as much as possible. As my Bipolar symptoms got more pronounced into my later 20s, I couldn't just think my way out of the spirals of rumination and irritation that social media would trigger in me. I had to put it down altogher and try to figure out what actually mattered to me in my social life, and relationship to the internet more broadly.
I've read a lot of peoples' descriptions of all the things they cut out of their internet diet, but I've seen fewer of what people actually do online in their daily lives. One of the things that keeps you trapped on blue websites (the term I have coined for any site or app with an infinite scroll of user-generated content) is the feeling of now-ness, the sense that everyone is here and this is where it's happening, and the anxiety of missing out once you log off or put your phone away. Even if we know this is an illusion, what are we looking for once it's broken? I think it is useful in the social and political mission of convincing people to divest from social media companies to demonstrate what the alternative to scrolling is actually like.
I'm sure it'll be made obvious through context clues, but keep in mind that I am a queer (and out) able-bodied adult in a relatively large city in the US. A lot of the years I spent being chronically online were when I was a teen, or lived in a place without a queer community like the one I'm part of now, or had other problems that were preventing me from living my best life. There's nothing wrong with being where you're at, but that doesn't mean things can't or won't change.
Without further ado, an internet friendly numbered list:
1) Real Life
I have a furry partner, several very close furrry friends, and I live with furry roommates, in a furry city. I'm really not lacking any connection to the community outside of conventions. I'm quite extraverted and have a very active social life. When I feel lonely, I can just talk to someone I live with, or who lives down the street from me. Things weren't always this way: even when I lived in five-person households in college, I'd still struggle to maintain friendships with people I didn't see every day. My internal and external circumstances have worked out well enough that I don't need to be online all the time to satisfy my need for social interaction anymore. I wish it didn't take nearly a decade of living on my own to make it happen, but it's all been worth it now that we're here.
2) Group Chats
As an extension of Real Life, there's the ever-growing network of furry telegram chats for meeting friends, planning events, hooking up, and getting into weird arguments. I don't like big group chats where people just kinda yap all day, they're a drain on my attention. I have a couple of small groups I talk to folks in, and mainly use them to plan times to meet up irl. Same goes for Discord, at this point there's a few severs that I've either been in for years and talk in daily, or that I use for planning local events (mostly DDR meetups).
3) FurAffinity
This site has become my homepage as of late. As a kid, I was big into using Neopets, Deviantart, and Tumblr to browse and share artwork. The joy of diving deep, exploring new ideas and tastes, and developing your point of view through art is unattainable anywhere else IMO. I will always prefer an actual art-sharing site to a blue website where people just post stuff to fill out the algorithm.
As an aside to that: You can either sit with your nostalgia for how the internet used to be, or you can go to the place where it's still like that -- FA is that place! And Neocities (the next bullet point down) is, too. I'm planning on writing another post about FA, and how to use non feed-based social media sites for folks who either don't know or forgot how.
4) Neocities
Almost every day I'm at work, at some point I'll sit down and open up the front page of Neocities, and just browse sites for 5 minutes until something requires my attention. On days when I have more time, I'll browse sites by 'last updated' and see what people are up to in relatively real time. And on the best days (like today, actually) I'll have enough time and attention to sit and write a full blog post to put on my site while I'm clocked in. I've spent entire weekends at a time just immersing myself in learning to write html and css more fluently, reading web revival related articles, and looking into different ways of being online. While Neocities does have a social aspect, (site updates and followers/following) I find it really easy to ignore that feed and just focus on sites. I've also started finding friends who also have Neocities sites, which has been a great way to let you know who around you may be more like-minded to you than you think.
5) The Library
Shill alert! I actually work at a library right now, so getting paid to mess around on Neocities should be nothing compared to this. I hope I don't need to give you the whole song about why your local library is awesome and you should use it more. Reading is fun and good for you, you can check out movies and music for free, and there's probably all kinds of stuff you don't even know about going on that you're missing out on right now. The library is also just a safe and relaxing space for me to be, and I love going out of my way to visit as many branches in my library's system as possible. There's also plenty of online libraries you can accesss; Internet Archive is probably the best example. To get you started, I really like the way that Internetbasedghosts uses IA to archive obscure music releases. You should also check out their site, it's my favorite on here.
Yes, that's it! I realize two of these things are not even necessarily on the internet. But that's okay, there is more to life than what's on your computer screen. =]