Hello? Anybody out there?
I miss this place. It's eerie that the site technically still exists. The old house is still standing, the lights are on, the door's unlocked, but no one's home. Except the squatters of ONTD.
Is there any place online that's like LJ used to be? Maybe one of you still has notifications on and can tell me.
I know LJ had its share of drama but I still remember it as, on the whole, a healthy place that complemented rather than drained from my life. Tumblr was fun for a minute but in the end all it did for me was to plant a cop in my head, monitoring every thought for compliance with the exacting yet ever-shifting ideological standards of, like, 23-year-olds who also believe they're structurally oppressed for being kin with the Onceler. I joke but I really had that cop in my head and leaving that place has been a long, slow process of coming back to my own mind. But no other place seems much better. Nowhere does it seem like you can slow down, reflect, write and read in longer form, get to know people beyond the surface, not be ruthlessly mined for every scrap of data, not constantly fear reprisal for one or another violation of someone's personal ten commandments.
Despite the bleak tone of that graf, I'm actually doing well right now. It's all relative, of course; I've been in a rather bad rut for quite a while, but now, suddenly, I'm seeing several bright lights at the end of the tunnel and I feel joyful. Also, we finally got a cat and he is very, very good.
See?
But still, there's a hole in my heart that used to be filled by sharing real thoughts, in writing, with people who gave at least some of a crap about me as a person. And whom I cared for in return.
Does such a thing still exist? Can people be enticed to actually use it? Something in the Fediverse, maybe? Ugh. Help me out here.
And tell me how you're doing, if you're reading this.
P.S. The "Modern Post Editor" is cute. I love the part where you select some text and hit delete and, naturally, it duplicates said text. As one expects.