Hey all,

Do you ever find yourself missing "the way things were" as far as social media goes, even if you didn't get to experience much of it?

As a child of the early 2000s with parents that actually cared about my wellbeing, I didn't get to see much of what the internet of the time had to offer socially, though I was able to catch little glimpses of it. I could at least tell, even back then, that there was something special about the social sites of that era from looking over my mom's shoulder as she browsed Facebook during its golden years, or by seeing the lively discussions held on purpose-specific forums before much of that discussion was centralized to aggregators like Reddit. Something about it just seemed more fun than the comparably much gloomier modern social internet.

With the rise of algorithms and the internet acting more as a free market for the buying and selling (and stealing) of personal data, it should be no shock why there is much talk these days about the "dead internet theory". It's not even just that there is more activity from bots than real people on the web (a fact that has been proven beyond reasonable doubt by recent analysis, though I don't have a source handy), there's something else going on. The internet used to feel like a living and breathing place, now it feels more like a wasteland that we just so happen to inhabit. There was something living here, now it's just ruins in a desert.

Yet there are pockets of life amongst the endless death which surrounds us. There are people out there who remember what the old internet was like and want to preserve that feeling. There's a guy out there who uses the handle "Reject Convenience" and his website and forum are delightful. You'll see me hanging out on there and posting every so often under the name agentkilo. Coming across his forum is what finally pushed me to get this site back up and running, because hanging out there gave me that old internet feeling. I wanted to share that with my own circles, so I made rambl.

Basically what I'm trying to get at here is that there is hope left for a truly social internet minus all the bullcrap of algorithms designed to purposefully make apps hard to put down, data harvesting, and companies which have done and continue to do unspeakable atrocities for the sake of profit. Small websites are still out there and offer an alternate, friendlier web. Thanks for using this one!

-kilo