The dead online

I started to reflect over my online life the other day and this is the great analysis I came up with:

My life online started when I was eleven or twelve, when I got my first own computer. I even had  Adobe Premier on it, and having that software made it possible to make videos on that computer. My friend and I made probably 10-20 videos of the ponies we took care of and edited them, and uploaded them onto Youtube. We made those videos for strangers and I spent a great deal of time to bond and network with strangers on Youtube (in English, and I was fucking twelve, how the fuck was I able to network???) and we had dozens of subscribers. All of which were strangers to us.

My friend and I were in the end too different to share the channel and when we stopped making videos (when I was 13) I created a channel of my own. It's the same I still use, just with another user name.

Because I was used to talk to strangers on the Youtube was the step to continue networking in other realms easy. I was very active on Youtube, but also on Fanfiction.net, onto which I wrote horrible fanfictions. I talked to many different strangers, and had fun. A great deal of my social life was on the internet and for me it was obvious that I made content for strangers from other countries.

I lived for my life online when I was in secondary school. Because I felt so hated in real life, online was where I belonged. I thought. Buut let's not forget my extrovertness and my awesome social skills, so isolating myself was never an option. I just combined being online with real life interactions. And my pony ofc.

And then, 2011, I joined tumblr. Man, it's been a ride. I've had the same blog there for seven years! And god it has changed during these seven years. But there was a time when I spend about an hour just going through my feed. These days it takes about 1-2 minutes to do so, because most of the people I used to follow are inactive.

So now then? I'm not as active online anymore as 7 years ago, and I no longer deliberately make content for strangers because the stakes are sooo much higher than they were ten years ago.

And I kind of miss it. Life online was fun. It was great. Even if everything I did was a secret to my friends and family, it was fun.