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.

[Horsey Chobunso]

I have felt digitally homeless a few times. If I think way back, 12 year old me was devastated to lose my first online space when Disney shut down their game Virtual Magic Kingdom. While it was the least personal of my online spaces, I got very attached to the game and the friends I made on there, even though I never really tried to keep up once it closed.

More recently, I was a big part of the Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid community as well as a moderator for a very large baseball Discord server. Both of those reached a point where it was just time for me to stop. BFTG wasn't fun any more and the community had dwindled to only those with the strongest and loudest opinions, which made navigating anything related the game rather difficult. The baseball discord had received a massive influx of The Worst Kind Of Sports Fans as all of the Sports Fans That Can Actually Be In Public returned to going outside after pandemic restrictions relaxed. We tried our best to remove the ones we needed to and keep up with our rules to make sure they understand that they can't just be chuds, but it got to be too much for me. Playing Discord cop to try to get rid of racists took so much time that I wasn't really using the Discord as a social space the way I wanted to, so I left on my own accord.

I still keep in touch with people from both of those communities. One of the BFTG players will even be in my wedding in a few months, but I've definitely feel like I haven't felt a real digital home since then. Part of it is just time. I haven't really been on Melonland, neocities, or Stoat long enough to feel at home, but I'm sure it'll come.

I hope everyone here find somewhere they can feel at home soon

[Oceansandy02]

I feel this way too. The current forum I'm in (won't mention who) started to become a but more toxic, with people starting to do bad faith arguments, and even someone telling someone to delete their account over a fan theory they had, amd they didn't get banned for it.
Another thing that is a bit minor but made ne want to leave are someone having a DNI that includes me on their linked website, which made me uncomfortable with interacting with them on forums.
I am currently trying to use tumblr and maybe dreamwidth, but tumblr has a bunch of people that support harrasment of other people for portraying dark topics, or even worse, people part of a groomming ring that supports sexual predators and nazis.
And with dreamwidth, people are hard to find on there, and it is hard to interact with others.

[sphinx]

I feel this so much. I do think I prefer the term digital nomad over digital homelessness, though. I think I've been sort of a digital nomad my whole life since having internet access.

My mom would see me spending time on a particular forum or website on the family computer for a month or two, then notice I moved on to something else. (She has been a systems analyst and a computer programmer since the internet's infancy, so she's always had a general understanding of the web ecosystem.) I remember her saying things like "Why do you leave a trail of breadcrumbs all over creation?" Or in more extreme cases she has compared me to a tornado, moving from place to place leaving a mess behind. By "mess", she means abandoned or forgotten logins, started conversations that I never followed through with, scans of my primitive middle school artwork strewn across countless community groups rather than any semblance of an organized "home base" to put it all. But honestly it's sort of how I have lived my life IRL, so it all tracks. Funnily enough I was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, and I guess that tracks too.

For most of the 2010's it seemed like my web habits stabilized. I used tumblr almost exclusively in the first half (with light FB use to coordinate things with friends) and then I used a lot of twitter and instagram in the second half. That decade covered most of the 20's and I will say everything did feel really fun and exciting and very comfortable to have a reliable "home base" to repeatedly come back to.

But at some point towards the end of the decade things started feeling very stressful and ugly and just...not fun. Maybe it was me getting older or maybe it was the web ecosystem or culture changing. Idk. But either way I just stopped using all that stuff. It wasn't something I had to try hard to forcibly detox myself from or anything like that. I just...slowed down and eventually stopped.

I started seeking out all the weird hidden realms of the internet that I remembered having so much fun exploring when I was a kid. And it's been really great. In fact, it almost feels better! And just like that, I'm back to my "trail of breadcrumbs" habits my mom chided me about. And I'm okay with that. I dabbled in SpaceHey and art boards and forums and blogs and explored countless neocities pages. There's so much cool stuff out there. I feel like I'm back to my digital nomad days. And yes in one aspect it's a little sad because it's hard to build any friendships but I'd argue it was just futile with big web (twitter/insta). So might as well have fun.

PS: All that being said, I still can't get myself to abandon YouTube. It's still my go-to for craft ideas, tutorials, and great edu-tainment series. I love all the videos essays on paleo history, biology, fashion history, and general history. History of Life on Earth (That We Know Of) is ery interesting and such a fun watch.
ALSO I still have the same Neopets account I've had since 2001 and still play solitaire on there nightly just before bed. There's also an active forum I've been going to since I was 13 and I still check in weekly. I guess if nothing else, one could argue that those are my home base. But idk.