Tribefinding

When Web 2.0 started taking over in the late 2000s, suddenly, finding one's community was incredibly easy. Whichever niche or nerdy interest you were into, new tools for connecting over the internet made it easier than ever. (and of course all these tools had open APIs and FOSS clients galore! I remember connecting to Facebook Chat in Pidgin). For a brief, beautiful moment, it felt as if we nerdier folk were vindicated and were finally able to ride off into the golden sunset having found our people and secure in our nerdinesses.

However, it seems this had the effect of killing everything once considered nerdy from the inside. Now, those of us who resist the normie-ification and who still hang around outside the fringes have again found ourselves with difficulties in tribefinding.

At first glance, this is discouraging. I was pondering this earlier today. Then, a relevation hit me. We are used to this! This is where we came from!

Things were always like this. The late 2000s into the early-to-mid 2010s were the *exception* to the rule.

We've *always* been heterodox, weird, outsiders, who have had to find others via obscure means. It's just that now this is Gemini, the yesterweb, the Fediverse, Gopher, weird conventions, which is very similar to the situation in the 90s or so.

We can do this. We used to travel just to play D&D with people. We just gotta change our perspective.

abacushex

Back here for the first while in a long while, and you articulated that perfectly. It's rolling back to being in high school, with almost no one to connect with. Because who else in your rural offshoot of a small city stayed up till 2am after working the closing shift at a grocery store, entering a program line-by-line from a magazine into their Atari 800XL? Who else did you know that played Tangerine Dream's Force Majeure until they wore the vinyl out? No one, that's who.

But even with the enshittification of everything and the necessary retreat from it, there is still more connection and more tribe than I had ever dreamed possible. Some of that tribe are even coworkers. It's far better than high school and THAT level of isolation. So thank you for the perspective shift!

softwarepagan

I feel the need to clarify that we lived 30 minutes by highway from the nearest tiny town - one of those ubiquitous "towns" that dot the rural landscape which is really just a gas station, a school, and an old folks' home. There was a public library as well which was often my refuge.

abacushex

We have that in common then. At the time, I went to school in a different "town" nearby, there was a small grocer across the highway, smaller than your average gas station / convenience store is now, and about a quarter mile away was a truck stop that my friend and I would walk to in order to play games at the arcade there. I use the term arcade loosely- I think they had just two, Lunar Lander and Defender. And from elementary through high school, I could always be found in the library during breaks.

softwarepagan

Very similar! Though our gas station/arcade had Gauntlet :D

abacushex

Oh nice! Gauntlet required driving into the "big city" for us. Probably one of the best implementations of a 4 player arcade setup that I can recall.

softwarepagan

I'm glad it was a comforting thought to you, as well. I grew up 30 minutes from any human civilization, so I didn't have many people in my life besides my immediate family at all, let alone any who shared my interests. My father was a freelance software engineer and my sister was just as nerdy as I was (for a while) but it was a very lonely existence. This is no different - we've done this before. And yes, you are right, there still do seem to be more people around who share this type of interest.

fab

Well said! When I got my first permanent internet connection in the 2000s, it opened up a whole new world for nerdy me.

In the meantime web3.0 has arrived and everything seems enshittified. And is continuing this way. But the nerdy people will still find their own save harbours as it always was, like you said!

We create our own spaces like Gemini/Gopher or the pubnixes. And we'll continue to find each other!

softwarepagan

There have always been those of us who lurk directly underneath the mainstream. Many of us were intoxicated by "nerd culture" breaking into the mainstream and were in fact ourselves pulled into that massive current during that time. Lately I've been realizing it wasn't, say, Star Trek or whatever that we really liked - it was the counterculture, more than anything.

rav3ndust

very good writeup. i find that as some as the old guard becomes harder to find, it also becomes easier to find in some ways. as some groups that i care about has become silo'd between the twitter/fb/etc sites, the ones that are really worth keeping up with are still around on rss/gemini/fedi/etc.

this is a good way to look at things. the internet is always changing, and the things we really care about don't truly go away, just shift perspectives. we have been there before, and we will continue to find our tribes throughout the internet.

cheers, ~softwarepagan.

softwarepagan

This is absolutely true. In fact, the funny thing is, a lot of the old internet infrastructure is still around. We can still chat on IRC, congregate on forums and imageboards, games, etc.

rav3ndust

this is very true, and important to remember. i wish more people i converse with online were still on irc, but over the years most have made their way to xmpp/matrix/etc. i have nothing against those technologies since they're open, but irc still holds a lot of nostalgia for me.

another thing i don't hear much about getting used these days anymore is usenet. i used to post in different newsgroups back in the day.

softwarepagan

IIRC Usenet was basically shut down by Google and all the browsers due to the unmoderated nature of it. Google Groups are an archive of Usenet but I don't think anyone actually uses it.

teacup

Hey ~bartender, how's it going?

I'll have a blue lagoon, and a catnip'd for Smudge here

---

Starting last year, I've been dedicating more time and energy towards my little nerdy interests.

This resulted first in a wonderful trip abroad, all by myself, just to see a concert, then in a renewed effort to attend weekly meet-ups with a local linux user group.

Can't say enough how much I'm enjoying this!

All things considered, the only thing preventing me from doing all this was the inrush-energy needed to get things rolling.

softwarepagan

I love that for you!