Blogs, forums, and sites like Twitter used to be a haven for people with autism. That internet is gone.
  • YourHeroes4Ghosts@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • EngineerGaming@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      I 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)

  • CosmoNova@feddit.deEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    It’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.

  • al177@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Eternal September has happened before, and it will happen again. One service is enshittified, another takes its place.

  • jamiero29@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I do feel some of that old school internet randomness on Lemmy though. It’s been really good to find my way here.

  • bermuda@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      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

    • mathematicalMagpie@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      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).

      • EngineerGaming@feddit.nlEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        I 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.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Reddit/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.