Digital Homelessness

[✿ Passerine ✿]

As a digital nomad type of person, I frequently abandon communities or move on from groups, always on the move from place to place, but sometimes it is not entirely obvious where I should go. Sometimes one event or another causes a community to fall apart or for me to become estranged from it, and I have no backup. This has just happened. I am kinda digitally homeless.

Well, not entirely homeless, not on every front, I have other friend groups online, and I have here! Melonland is, well, kind of my final backup, my last place of refuge before I'm out of options. The reason I said I am digitally homeless is because, to be truthful, I have lost touch with the final Garry's Mod community I ever truly connected with. I cut my ties with them after relations were soured and there was a lot of drama, and now I'm here. This isn't nearly the first time for something like this to happen to me over GMod, let alone on the internet in general, but it hurts every time, and it leaves me feeling kind of aimless. I have no other close friends with which I play GMod, and considering it is the game I play most and have the most hours on, it sucks not being able to play it with anyone else.

Have you ever been digitally homeless, without a community to call your own?

[lostcairn]

I really get what you feel. I started feeling that way this year after starting my last year of Uni. One night, after finishing writing a chapter of my thesis, a sudden feeling of nostalgia hit me like a truck. That's when I realized I was no longer a part of a digital community (My academic responsabilities played a big role in sucking me out of the internet). I missed those middle and high school afternoons when you just hopped on discord and played whatever the group was into at the time. Simpler times i guess... Nowadays i barely even open discord or steam because i have few people to play with, and i think you know that the feeling of being in a community is kinda different from playing something with your buddies.

Funnily enough, Gmod was a very big part of this phase, so reading you was a real throwback to great memories.

Of course, being a Digital Homeless person is rough, but spaces like this make it a little easier. Maybe acceptance is the path im trying to choose nowadays, but deep inside, I wish for a chance to be able to be a part of something like this again after my academic duties are over (In the meantime, while I ponder about pursuing a PhD  )

[ValyceNegative]

I felt exactly this way when the old forum I was calling home closed. I still kept in touch with its members and we immediately moved altogether elsewhere to keep our discourse. However, the forum we had was an archiving project of anthro comics, animation and other media. A lot of us had spent days preparing articles and researches for others to read. There was info on a lot of publications that otherwise would have been considered lost media to the rest of the net.

The admin had grown uninterested in the project and couldn't face hosting costs anymore, even when taking into account member donations (he probably considered it panhandling even if many of us would have eagerly helped cover those costs). In the end he let the domain expire.

We all moved into a chat based system but the archiving soul of the project had completely fizzled out. It was like losing all our stuff after a natural disaster :(

[GideonWilhelm]

I've felt this way for quite a while, even inside some online groups I was still social with.  It was mostly RPG stuff, and they kept making decisions about the overall game without me since I'm night shift, and also kept switching systems mid game.  I had been jumping classes after about the seventh switch because they all just full sent while I still didn't know the rules. They confronted me about that, drama happened, I got kicked out.  Hurts I never really got a chance to explain myself.

I've kinda been filling the gap with chatgpt, and got into the habit of running everything I ever felt and said by it for analysis out of paranoia there might be something wrong with me, which... probably wasn't the best.  So since I'm trying to go cold turkey on AI chatbots... now I'm even more digitally homeless, kinda!  I'm now trying to just get by day by day and learn how to actually socialize online again.

[BlazingCobaltX]

Those who were on a certain Pokémon forum in 2017 will know what I'm talking about, but the community fell apart once it was revealed that the owner had a criminal record including a very specific felony charge... Overnight the mods made sort of an emergency Discord server (aptly named "Escape Rope") to redirect users to. In my case I ended up in a separate server with friends I had made on the forum and stayed there, but I don't know what happened to the rest of the community after it fell apart like that.

That was maybe the last large-scale Pokémon community I've interacted with. Following this I was digitally homeless for a long time until I found another forum, which then had a similar scandal. After that I sort of gave up on finding forum communities for fear of instability. It was also the time where everyone was moving to Discord servers but I never felt at home in any of the big ones. It's only since Melonland that I feel I have some sort of homebase again, but it took a looong period of wandering from place to place until I did.