This is a great update and gives me a lot to consider. I was also previously very anti-social media, but instead of quitting it entirely I just moved platforms. I like the mastodon community I'm apart of and I think cohost is pretty cool! The culture is very different from places like twitter or instagram, but you do still see some of the parasocially driven behaviors replicated.

I had stopped "liking" posts and "following" accounts on Neocities for similar reasons. I have always tried to interact with people in meaningful ways through the comments, but I am partial to email. It seems like small email discussion groups could lead to some wonderful dialogues...Hope all is going well for you both online and off!

i'm another fan of email; i still use it as my main method of communication actually. thank you for your thoughtful article. it's sad that even on neocities there are people who forget we're all human.

I turned off the profile functions on here because I realized that I was uncomfortable with it. It started because people thought that they could judge me based on my opinions and experiences and then because I started posting stuff about my pagan beliefs, and then there were others who tried to make me like stuff that I didn't.

what a great read.

Red debate vs dialogue, I had this explained to me in Uni as Eristic debate (the kind someone wins and someone loses) vs Dialectical debate, in which two parties are occupying adverserial positions as a means of cutting away all that is not true in an effort to discover what *is* true. I have always found it a useful word to drop into a conversation when I encounter that type; perhaps they'll google, and learn.

<3

What a strange and specific blast from the past. I think one of my friends had this? I remember her dad surfing the internet using the TV and that I thought it was so cutting edge, especially since we didn't have the internet yet.

Sky in the UK had a fancy version of teletext around that era and if you had a phone line plugged into the Sky box, you could play games and order things from shops which were on it. (The shops didn't have a whole lot of things in them, and you could only order bestsellers.) But I'd never heard of this, though.