anon · 2mo
Was just reading your journal posts and this line struck me. "the journal was sort of the surface of the community, your public face. what wasn't seen: all the side chats on AIM, on ICQ, the occasional emails. the friendship that grew in the unindexable point-to-point (and person-to-person) connections." How did you make real friends online? I feel embarrassed and overly forward trying to get to know people on neocities, especially women (I have 0 romantic interest but I worry that they are (rightfully) wary of me) and the shy-seeming people who's writing I enjoy most.
slowly, i guess, and organically. it was a different era, because one of my best friends, who i still talk to almost daily 25 years later (!!!!), was someone i met via icq's random chat functionality. she and one of her friends were looking for guys their age to mess with, found me, and we realized we thought we were cool, and kept talking regularly. days become years very quickly. this'd never fly today - literally, a search by a/s/l?!?! - but was how a girl from new mexico, and her friend from canada, found my random self. serendipity.
that was one person (well, two). the rest: a few via emails, via guestbook messages back and forth - via forums that encapsulated the scene we had and little else. it wasn't like reddit where you could easily wander through a billion different subjects, where the connections (imho, anyway) seem shallower. these were places where we dropped by every day, sometimes stuck around for hours, trading messages, and of course our icq/aim numbers were displayed beside every post. people'd reach out. your screen would start flashing as you were scanning messages. chat's fun. we were young. we had a lot of time. the evenings seemed to go on forever.
leave guestbook messages! maybe drop an email and tell someone you like their page. don't second-guess yourself. people list those things on their website for a reason. it's nice to receive these things, to know that a few people here and there like the effort you're putting into things. & you remember some of these things, many years later! it's funny how this works. i remember someone slagging me off in my guestbook because my site had an unglamorous layout (pretty similar to my neocities site). she got dogpiled in my guestbook by a bunch of my friends, who saw her message and weren't going to let that stand. i remember messages from a girl from portland, who was fascinating and who i've since lost track of (o that era of no last names). i remember one from an ex, a heartfelt one, long after she'd left me.
just do things. you're not a creep for existing online! &, on a similar vein, thank you for your question!
