I first built a website to share my writing in the 90's. Since then, I've had a bunch of different projects ‐ fiction, essays, poetry, videos, podcasts, games, comics. Shared in different ways, not linked to each other (mostly). In most cases, I didn't sign the work or identify myself. In some cases I had numbers to look at, and could see how many people looked at the work. In other cases, I didn't have that.
I'm proud of most of the stuff I made. Much of it isn't online anymore, but I have my own copies backed up. I sometimes feel a pang of regret that I don't have all this gathered together, showcasing everything, with my name on top inside a <blink> tag. And sometimes I am relieved that I chose not to do that.
I've been on and off social media sporadically. Again, sometimes with my full name published and other times without.
I'm a private person. I also like to make things and share them. There's a strange tension there.
Also, and this is one of the hard parts of social media, a part of me gets too caught up in engagement numbers. I try not to pay attention to that. I have used (and really liked) a browser plugin that hid all those numbers on social media. Everything was just "a thing someone said", rather than "a thing someone said with 10,000 up-blorps and 2,000 re-blorps". But ultimately, I think blogging and other slowly produced work suit me better.
I have been active on Discord to varying degrees. The best outcome of that has been making genuine friends who I have played games with and collaborated with, one of whom I met recently and others I'll hopefully be meeting later this year. Though most of my activity on Discord has been chatting to strangers who I may never interact with again, often taking part in a recurring conversation about an aspect of a game. Sure, there's a blog post somewhere that says most of whatever needs to be said on the topic of the recurring conversation but (a) it is not particularly easy to find blog posts and (2) people want to connect - they want to feel like they talked it over rather than just read it. I get that.
Years ago, I was involved in a meditation group. I attended twice a week for a long time, and it was really good for me. One interesting aspect of that time, was that once I became a regular attendee, I began to see patterns in how other people attended. Some people would come to meditation (a valuable and worthy past time which is also frustrating and boring) in need of a tool to deal with an immediate problem. A quick fix. They might attend only once, and often with intense enthusiasm before and after the session. And then they'd be gone.
If you hang around an RPG Discord long enough, you also see people coming and going, extremely excited about games and their plans to play. Maybe talking about play (rather than contending with organising a group, scheduling, risking sessions that may disappoint) is the quick fix solution to wanting to play. I've certainty spent time and energy talking about play, prompted by wanting to play.
I think the Internet is too quick for some things. Some experiences are naturally slow, and don't really fit the acceleration that the Internet applies to all things.
This post is in danger of sounding like advice. I don't mean it to. I sometimes struggle with being online, and knowing how much to engage. I'm working these things out for myself and I wish the best to anyone else trying to navigate this stuff.
✌️❤️🎲
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