The Autistic Soul of the Internet Has Been at Death’s Door for Years. Its End May Finally Be Here.
The Autistic Soul of the Internet Has Been at Death’s Door for Years. Its End May Finally Be Here.
Blogs, forums, and sites like Twitter used to be a haven for people with autism. That internet is gone.
Very good first half of an article that I resonate with. The internet used to be a lot of small villages where oddballs were generally accepted or at least expected. Those villages have been abandoned and bulldozed to make place for Megacities lead by corporations and something was lost along the way. Everything has become a little bit more lonely and less organic.
Unfortunately the author seems to have hyperfocused on their small Twitter bubble a little too much if they didn‘t notice how the site has been a dumpster fire since 2015 in anticipation for the 2016 US presidential elections. Musk is not a turning point, just a continuation of where the site has been heading for a long time.
29It's less that they were abandoned and bulldozed to make place for corporation megacities and more like that the people running those villages moved to the big city because they liked it there better. Now the village is abandoned, yes, but the villagers were not forced to leave, they left on their own accord.
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As an autistic who has been online since the early 90s, this article didn't speak to me at all. My autistic internet comprised IRC and USENET, and it died when LiveJournal died. I still have close friends from those days, when I have no close friends "IRL"- I can't say that for anyone I met on Twitter or Facebook, in fact I found both of those platforms to begin enshittifying looong before any of the NTs began to notice it.
I don't think it's just because I'm an older AuDHD woman, I think the existence of Facebook and Twitter from the mid to late 00s killed the autistic internet.
26@YourHeroes4Ghosts @hedge I started a couple years before that, in the late 80s, with BBSes. Facebook and Twitter in particular have felt like the beginning of the end. Socializing online was suddenly less about meeting new people, and more about catching up with people you knew in high school, which is a big no thanks from me. My friends in high school were from the BBSes, so I didn't need to recapture those relationships on some other website.
5I am Gen Z, and besides Lemmy, most of my online life is IRC and XMPP (plus a certain video game, if it counts). Some people there, including me, have personal websites. This internet is not gone, it is just smaller than it used to be)
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Not a single mention of discord despite it being a haven for neurodivergent people... I know the article is mainly about forums but IRC-style chats are very very closely related to forums.
22Reddit/Lemmy is more akin to a forum than discord.
Discord is more like a fusion of Teamspeak (VoIP) and a chat and a bolted on forum system.20Yep that's why I wrote the whole second part of my comment thanks
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I hate discord as a social network. The only thing I use it for is my weekly TTRPG group and messaging them. I can't understand how people enjoy using it as a place to just... Browse
14The people who like discord, don't. At least I don't.
Discord for me is a place for small and medium-big groups. A place, not like social media, but like IRC. A place to make friends and get to know other people. And I have met tons of new people there! A lot of the people that are close to me now I have originally met through discord.
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I despise Discord. It's an information black hole. Everything is closed off, unindexible, unscrapable, borderline unsearchable. If someone posts something useful on Discord, good luck finding it after a few months, let alone a few years. Meanwhile, I can find forum posts with useful info from over a decade ago. If Discord the company dies, everything on the platform dies with it. There's no internet archive for Discord.
It has a place as a chat app, but its use goes far beyond that. Some subreddits used it as a Reddit replacement, companies use it for tech support, and entire apps are built around it (eg. MidJourney).
10I despise Discord for being centralized and spying on people. And sometimes holding people's accounts hostage until they dox themselves.
I much prefer IRC and XMPP. Light, selfhostable and not obeying by some single big company's rules. And Mumble for voice calls.
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I do feel some of that old school internet randomness on Lemmy though. It's been really good to find my way here.
15This must be authors first recession. The easy money is drying up and that means an extinction level event for some websites. Large sites are consolidating or changing, but new places always spring up like the mammals rose after the KT extinction. When Geocities was dying, we got Myspace which died and we got Facebook. Reddit is dying and we have Lemmy. AIM servers were turned off half a decade ago and people still communicate online. Something new always comes along. TikTok is now the place for Asian creators to go after they were whitewashed from YouTube.
The article reads more like a coming to terms with Twitter dying and that's all. I am only a couple years older than the author and I missed out on Twitter completely. It was just never a thing for me. But my TikTok account is half a decade old and a place where I can experience my culture without it being whitewashed or mispronunced. And I'm the guy still checking email with alpine in tmux like it's 1999. But one day, TikTok will also die; who would have thought it would be Rand Paul of all people who saved it from Facebook congressional lobbying?
Relax, the internet will be here.
13It's funny how small a bubble they seem to have been in, because in my recollection Tumblr was always seen as being much more ND-friendly than Twitter.
There is always another website to move to, another chat app to talk on, another forum where people will coalesce together to discuss their particular interests and identities.
Hell, we're on one right now.
9A well written article on some of the changing tides of the internet, but it seems to miss the forest for the trees. Every website goes through a process of enshittification or at least of cultural relevance or peak participation which shapes what it looks and how people interact with it. Even during these periods of change some people thrive and others do not. I think its fair to talk about seeing a particular flavor of interaction or website disappear from your immediate vision with no clear alternatives in sight, but it's also quite clear that the as others have stated the author clearly hasn't set out on a pilgrimage to check out large slices of what's out there on the internet. There are platforms with tens to hundreds of millions of people out there which are hardly mentioned (such as tiktok, mentioned elsewhere) which have thriving autistic communities. Hardly no mention is given to platforms more dedicated to chatting than posting, or the plethora of tools which facilitate the creation of communities which float between those which primarily are virtual but host occasional in person meetups.
I'm also a bit confused about why the author believes it is dying? They don't seem to talk a lot about how these folks are being pushed out, so much as perhaps they are being more difficult to find. Rather than being in the town's center, they are lost in the crowd? If that's what they are lamenting, then perhaps they should be mostly avoiding platforms above a certain size. You wont find many oddballs in a sea of normal people, and the size of places they remember from their childhood, where they claim these individuals were around were much smaller. I would argue even more strange people exist on these massive platforms today than they did back then, it's just that their voices are lost to the sea.
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