kata 🌊 aqua!

i posted a bunch a fuckin tweets on twitter about twitter and because this is a blogging platform I can just post them all here in a big post so my big ol rambly essay about the ethereal nature of internet friendship is after the jump

not to spend my whole day pontificating or anything but like. i met my wife on twitter, henceforth referred to as “this stupid website”. i published two books because of it. i wrote for vice and pc gamer because of this website, which eventually got me the job i have now. it means a lot to me.

i have no way of knowing what the future holds, and neither do you. musk could fall down an open manhole and get eaten by rats tomorrow and none of us would be able to predict otherwise.

i just know that this stupid little website meant a lot to me for a while.

there are dozens of stupid little websites that have meant a lot to me over the years. message boards and blogs and webcomics and social platforms and IRC chats and MMOs and IM platforms and Discord servers. some of those stupid little websites lasted longer than others.

twitter means more to me than a lot of those things, sure, but it’s not immune to going the way of the message boards i used to post on, or that Discord server that no one uses anymore, or Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast. friendship on the internet is inherently ethereal.

when I was 11, posting on a message board for fans of the cartoon “ed, edd, n eddy,” that’s when I thought for the first time in my life that, if I died, i would disappear from that community, and none of my friends there would know, and i would be forgotten.

and back then that message board—i am not shitting you it was a fandom forum for that cartoon I wish I was joking—was my entire thing. that’s where my friends were. it meant the world to me, that community meant everything.

and it’s gone now, and that’s okay.

these things happen, and we move on. you will find people who matter to you and they will find ways to connect with you no matter what. platforms and stupid little websites are just surfaces through which connections happen. it’s up to you to maintain those connections.

so yes, i have a lot of memories that are tied to twitter, and i have people that i want to maintain my connections with, but. one day this platform will fade, and i probably won’t keep all the friends and followers i had here. and that sucks.

but it’s also okay.

there are people following me right now who have never lost a platform. 18-20 year olds who came up online in an era when everything was just this. three or four dudes owning every means you use to communicate online.

i promise you it wasn’t always like this.

if you’re someone seeing twitter’s demise worried you’re going to lose all your networks and all your friends, don’t be.

some of the folks I know on here now, I met on message boards 20 years ago. message boards long since closed and forgotten.

this is not the only way.

the thing you use next will probably be radically different from this. for better or for worse nothing can just be this, exactly as it is right now, ever again, and that’s probably a good thing.

this was always destined to be just a fleeting moment in time. love it for that.