this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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I look back pretty fondly to the days when we didn't call social media "social media" yet. Seemed a lot easier to make friends back then and it was a lot more uh, social. Although even in the early days of Facebook, I made some interesting friendships that started as poking battles. Looking back now, those days were fulfilling something in me that I didn't even realise.
In the real world (especially fresh from school where you have to wear uniforms and boys have to have boy haircuts and girls have to have girl haircuts and everyone gets separated and categorised), I would always end up with male friends first. But my online self was making pretty much exclusively female friends. That other decades long friend I mentioned before was someone that I actually met in a chatroom on a South African app called Mxit lol. I honestly miss those days and a lot of the cool people that I was friends with for a while (GothMoth and isawred, if you ever happen to be here and scroll past this, hi it's me, Zaphod_Beeblebrox).
And apart from longing for the "good old days", I'm gonna say that ever since I had certain awakenings and started questioning things, from starting out terrified of saying the wrong things or being seen as an imposter or invader, I have found the LGBTQ+ community to be 99% welcoming, open minded, warm and friendly people. From the few communities I interacted with on Reddit to here on Blåhaj. I've come across nothing but encouragement and acceptance. And it warms by cold black heart. So to everyone on Blåhaj, even though I haven't made personal friends with anyone, you rock and you're all my favourite people. And it makes me kinda sad that I took so long to get here.
And one more positive that happened in recent times. You starting the Women's Stuff community. I was battling to enjoy Lemmy before that and you brought something that puts a smile on my face daily, even if I mostly just read and lurk. And your acceptance of non-binary people into the community means the world too. Small act, but it's something that brightened this confused individual that doesn't know where they belong's skies a little.
Edit: actually just realised that the moment I stopped making online friends was the moment I ditched everything else for Reddit lol.
what, when we still called it "Web 2.0"?
Not sure what we called it to be honest. I didn't even have a computer yet and mostly accessed from work. I'm talking the days when my haunts were the Mxit app on my dumb java phone, the chatrooms on the Offspring's website (somewhere around the release of Conspiracy of One), MySpace and a South African alternative scene forum called MakeSomeNoise. I think MySpace was just MySpace and didn't have a special term.
I used the internet as a kid in the '90s a little bit too, but that was mostly for finding cheat codes for video games back then.
Edit: also not sure I understand how "web 2.0" refers to forum sites and chat rooms in particular.
"Web 2.0" was the buzzword for websites that featured user-provided content rather than content provided by the site creator. "Platforms" in the "platform vs. publisher" distinction that was getting a lot of discussion five-ten years ago.
Huh, in all these years, I thought "web 2.0" was just describing a new design style or monetization method or some shit. Had no idea it was referring to user created content. So thanks for the history lesson!
I definitely heard the term back then but yeah, I just assumed and never actually bothered reading up on it or anything.
Technically it was both a new design paradigm and a new monetization scheme, in that you'd get people to provide you content for free that you collect as revenue or even subscription fees on.