Where Did Everyone Go?

Cassidy's "Seattle and the internet" sent my brain in two directions.

First:

And y’all… I’ll cut to the chase, we have made so many friends in Chicago. In that first year we were here, end of 2020 - 2021, even though it was the height of the pandemic, we made more friends here than we did in nearly 4 years in Seattle.

I've only ever lived in one city (technically two, but moving at age 8 doesn't really count) and so my experience is very limited. But the idea that cities have very different vibes for how people interact made my brain hurt a little. I've travelled a fair amount and would have no problem connecting that Mazatlan, Mexico would operate very different than Dublin, Ireland. But Chicago and Seattle feels like they'd have a similar mentality around friends and community, not be so different that there's a term for how difficult it is to find friendship in Seattle.

Secondly:

Though there’s exceptions to the rule and “not everyone had every network” blah blah, the point is that there isn’t a big central place now to find or interact with friends unless you really put a lot of effort into it. Everyone feels like they have really retreated into the comfort of letting the feeds fill their minds with things that generally interest them in bite-sized pieces. We’ve gotten lazier and lazier, and the UIs are designed to be so intuitive and addicting that we’re just pulled in more. We don’t have the “social” parts of the social networks as much anymore.

I don't know what it feels like to be a 20 something signing up for Twitter, Instagram, or Bluesky in 2024. But as someone who signed up for Twitter in 2006 and then Twitter was my only real social network for ~15 years, it's sad to see how everyone is floundering now to connect. Twitter was where I met a lot of friends. Friends and connections that helped me to start a business. These days, I don't know what I'd do if I was just starting out?

There's certainly pockets of community still on Twitter. And people, myself included, seem to swing away and back to Twitter. And there's pockets of community on Threads, Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, etc. But nothing like the way the tech, news, and pop culture worlds centralized on Twitter pre-2021. Lots of people post to one and cross-post to the rest, which is what I'm halfheartedly attempting. But it's not nearly as fun as it used to be. The soul is missing.

It's a Little Like Podcasting

In some ways, the current world of posting everywhere and letting people find you in whatever app they choose reminds me of how podcasting has always been: "wherever you get your podcasts" lets people choose whichever app they want and get your podcasts. And that's the promise that the fediverse is attempting to bring to social media. But much like how community is so difficult in podcasting because of that openness and "whatever app you choose" mentality, I have to imagine it's going to be just as difficult to build any meaningful community in a fediverse where not everyone is seeing all the other people in the conversations flowing around.