Sometimes I miss social media. I miss the low effort of it all, I miss being able to share my thoughts rapid-fire to whoever could possibly want to hear them in the worst grammar you can squeeze into 160 characters. I grew up using the internet as a place to socialize from a very young age, starting with neopets and progressing from deviantART to twitter to (briefly) myspace to facebook. I don't think I could ever see myself really returning to these.
There is not a single social media platform that feels natural to me to use anymore. I've made it a goal to not only create a space for myself on the web using this site, but to also make more of an effort to keep up with my personal relationships. Too often in the past my brain would register seeing someone's posts online as interacting with them. I feel that this may very well be disconnecting to people, or people may not be as honest with each other due to their entire audience watching - at least this was my experience. I felt incredibly lonely despite being "surrounded" by friendly voices. I among many others was lost into the algorithm, it seems - and it feels ostracizing when it gets to a point that someone engaging with you can be as simple as getting a "reaction" on a "post" which still feels like such a low effort, however it's still not something you receive. Social media is competitive in this sense, I've noticed things like "followers:following ratios" and "public vs private account" debacles. Social media does not feel social anymore, it feels like a facade. Inspirational posts are the ones that get the engagement, it's almost like a competition at this point to be seen and heard in those sort of spaces. I see people who are desperate for human connection being brushed aside and ignored. This current era of internet makes me very sad and reminds me of how I once found real community here. Still so grateful for the connections I made at the beginning of my internet career which have followed me to this day.
Learning how to put together a website has been an enjoyable experience for me, though. A complicated one but an enjoyable one, nevertheless. I am still hoping to learn more specifics into html, and then css following that - however those are my two main goals for now. First html to find out what to put on the page, and then css to find out how to make it pretty. Ideally I want this place to be accessible on different devices as well as devices that use screen readers. I seem to remember when I would play with css on my deviantART journals there was quite a bit of eyestrain that resulted from some of my color combos, lol. It would also be cool for people to be able to engage with the page somehow but that's for a later date when I've become more proficient with html and css and can invest time in some more advanced techniques that I don't yet comprehend.
It's 6:30 so I'm about to start my day and make breakfast for the household. I'll make it a point to upload this entry after breakfast since I'm typing it on my phone now. See ya.