I hate typing on my phone so much.

I can look at Mastodon more seriously, but I would have to figure out… I mean a regular person wants status, right, set themselves up as an expert at something, enjoy fame, and there’s careerism. So it’s natural to them to look at who’s a big name in their field, who they want to be noticed by, who they want to be associated with, and follow those people, and craft the right kind of comments so those people will respond to them in the right way to advance their goals.

A forum, yes, that could be it. There probably aren’t many that are so alive today.

Although I am skating past the point, aren’t I, that Reddit didn’t seem to be missing this puzzle piece to the extent that Lemmy is.

I used to use Reddit some, although I would never manage to stick with it well and become an accepted regular anywhere, but it was big enough that I never realized it was a link aggregator before all else, since people were just talking about whatever in communities. I actually had to look up some fediverse site yesterday when checking what’s out there for blogging and whatnot for it to label reddit and lemmy explicitly as link aggregators, for me to really get it.

Forming their own thoughts, is it the voting, is it the culture wars? I know I have the chilling effect of thinking that my response to some article will just get tons of downvotes so why bother. And I don’t think upvotes mean the same thing to me that they mean to the average person.

Coordinating with other people, I’ve had zero success with and must just not have any clue how to go about it.

I have look at it, and if I have something that’s solidly casual, it could fit there, although I’m also thinking that if I have three casual thoughts in a day, now I’m already almost flooding the place. Would have to start slowly in that case.

My understanding is that on Mastodon, you keep it pretty short, and that you have to be followed by people by having gotten reposted by the right popular people or no one will ever know you exist. I’m not very comfortable with chasing popularity. And when I looked at Mastodon, it didn’t look very light.

It was a long time before I even learned (from reading what others had to say about their teens and early 20s) that a “normal” person was trying on lots of identities/subcultures to see where they could be coolest and most liked and also that they were looking around for specific cool people they wanted to be like and copying them.

If I try to think who was cool whom I could have wanted to be, I don’t really think of anyone. Maybe I had a strong sense of myself, or maybe I wasn’t around people I thought that highly of, or maybe I was just very certain I was never going to be cool so I shouldn’t embarrass myself by trying.

Yes, that's it.

I didn't really write what I meant in my mind. I meant before dial-up internet came to the public and they were using those other services.

Did you have to spend a lot of time fending off weird, dorky guys?

I do remember the pre-internet days, but we were too poor and rural for me to buy a modem and dial into anything.

I always kind of wished I had a pen pal back then. I was so lonely. I was looking for clips from Big Blue Marble a while back (a children’s television show I just barely remembered seeing once or twice), and there was something about pen pals being part of the show, and it made me feel all over again like oh if I'd had a pen pal back then! Although my life was so dull I might have struggled with what to write about.

I read an article in some magazine where the author talked about using email, and it did sound just mind-blowing to have a larger world than your mother and your father and the television.

I grew up in the rural US, and my family was acquainted with a family who lived in a neighboring state and had a summer home nearby.

They were so exotic, yes. Just looking at a car with a plate from a different state was a novelty. I wish I’d been bold enough to talk with them myself, but then again my mother probably would have discouraged it.

When I was first working, my officemate was from that state, and I was kind of impressed that he’d made the globe-trotting jet-setting move of coming to a whole other state. (No, I’d never been to another state myself at the time.)

Hmm, I have had olive oil be a bit peppery…but I can get that from pepper… Sometimes people talk as if good olive oil is a life-changing experience, but… I think of the day when someone insisted to me that plain fat, like a hunk of fat from a piece of meat, was supposed to be tasty to chew and eat by itself intentionally. (He was enough older than me that he was giving me some dad attitude as if I were simply wrong because I was younger.) I’d never guessed someone would want to do that. But that was his taste perception somehow.

I don’t think I’ve ever perceived crayon smell.