I think the problem we have online at the moment is people need to learn to compartmentalise themselves again. We don't need to be sharing our entire lives, every aspect of ourselves, all on the same platform. Alt accounts on the same website fall under this too.

I get that it's extremely convenient to simply have one place to hang out and see everyone's lives, but that sort of convenience is what has turned the internet into an unpleasant school playground in the first place. When everyone is all on the same site, everyone can see you.

I miss IRC, I miss forums, I miss various IM services, not because we had to have multiple accounts or multiple clients, obviously that shit's inconvenient. But that compartmentalisation creates spaces with specific purposes, and insulates individual circles from causing widespread apocalypses every few months when something goes wrong.

The other great thing about the old internet was that we had moderation and muuuuch smaller scopes. 10,000 or so members pales in comparison to millions and millions. This is what's great about Mastodon - that moderation on a smaller scale and the compartmentalisation of spaces - Mastodon's fault lies in people treating the biggest instances as the place to be. It's how we have .social as without moderation or how snouts became a cesspit of outrage puritanism.

I'm online to share a general vibe with people I care about. Massive conglomerations frequently make this difficult either because of their own interests or because there's simply too many people on them. I don't want to share the same website as some TERF.

I know the big place is kinda Discord now, and I don't strictly hate Discord's UX compared to the likes of Skype, but the treatment of it as a replacement to forums is misguided. Forums work with their various sections because, as websites... like, actual websites, not web 2.0 web apps - there's less pressure to engage with the whole thing. Discord is a chat app, it's designed around interacting with every facet of it, and servers with 12+ chats or something are just too much.

I've been thinking about going back to Tumblr and dropping my Twitter, even before this whole thing happened. But Tumblr shouldn't become the new big thing either. Tumblr has different functionality to Twitter, or Mastodon, or whatever, and putting aside how much Tumblr hunted down my friends, it's functionally better for me since it allows more breathing room for making big posts like... well, like this, for starters.

We need to learn again to use different sites for different purposes. We can't keep putting our entire livelihood in one thing owned by some guy who does not care for our queer furry asses.