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= ⚠ This is a lame get off my lawn rant ⚠ =
I joined the Fediverse way back in 2016 on a recently defunct instance known as cybre.space. I never really got into twitter, but I felt right at home in the early days of the Fediverse. The stakes were so much lower, it was a bunch of weirdos and off-beat people willing to create this lil open corner of the internet with grand ideals. It's now no longer a small corner: There's millions of people here. Which is great for the Fediverse! As someone who joined because of dogmatic open source / decentralized beliefs, it's exciting to see a decentralized network grow. Feels like it's been a while since that happened on the internet, especially at the scale Fedi has been taking off.
But it does also mean, I'm not really participating there as much anymore. The fire-hose is overwhelming. And yeah, I could re-do my following list, and make lists and tighten things around, but I guess the inner hipster in me took the wheel and has put their foot down. Decided it's too mainstream now and I'm no longer interested. It's still cool. I'm really grateful for the people I met there, and the communities I found. I plan to stick around those places. Hell, I'll probably still check out Fedi regularly despite the loudness, I just wanted a place to moan, I'm allowed to do that on my website.
Right?
Since I'm still hopelessly addicted to scrolling, I did find a substitute. RSS Feeds! I'd already been subbed to heaps of content, but the flip finally happened after following people from the Fediverse. It dawned on me that I had been publishing on the internet fairly chaotically, but more importantly I wasn't actually checking out my website with any sort of regularity. It was an artefact of the way I conducted my life, entirely automated background process. The only time it was cause for concern is when I accidentally published some journal entries, and had to take them down very quickly! It's why my website is so often broken. In some sense, I was ashamed it was still broken and that's part of why I didn't check it either. It also feels so weird reading your text on the internet. Like listening to a recording of yourself, but that for some reason decided to show to everyone? Okay dude.
Subscribing to other people's RSS feeds, and listening to their inner voices as they also publish chaotically on the internet, something changed. I recognized something in their voice, something that I knew I didn't have, didn't do. I wondered why...
So here's to trying the voice. Writing these words with the knowledge that they will be read by others, not just me.
Thank you to Winnie Lim and Maya, for having authentic voices on the internet, and helping me find my own :3