thanks so much for this piece! absolutely in love with it!

I'm so garf

it has been super packed, this con is def outgrowing its venue

ye! I'm still there rn, leaving monday evening

aaa hi! <3

Love my weird animals and nerds. <3

I'm happy to say I have a much better relationship towards online spaces nowadays. I have a lot of good people in my life, just on Discord instead - which has it's own problems - but cultivating more personal connections there has worked for me, been fulfilling.

I'm sure nothing I have to say about it is new, fresh, unique or the like. But it is pretty vindicating, seeing just how bad it's gotten, just what kind of crowd an emphasis on those things has garnered for the platform, having left it so early in advance over those issues.

And then, of course, it became a platform that even further emphasized those toxic traits - the drive to treat one's online presence as a brand to be maintained, to hunt out engagement to spread your popularity - the veil dropped real fast after the whole Blue thing.

I feel like ultimately I made the right call, both for myself, and given how that site's gone, it was something of an apollo's dodgeball situation, too. I externalized a lot of my frustration by pointing out how metrics and analytics reinforce some really insidious habits.