meghan9436

It's been a minute, hasn't it? I feel like I am back in high school as I write this. It took the better part of an hour to get this journal set up as I navigated through numerous site errors, and bugs. Surprisingly, I didn't get angry as we now live in the modern era where we just expect everything to work fine. Instead of feeling frustrated or angry, I found the whole setup process endearing. But, it's entirely possible that my perspective is biased as I look at this through the rose coloured glasses of nostalgia. Indeed, it has been nearly 20 years since I set up my original LJ. It felt like an exclusive club. It was invite only, and my journal was friends only.

So what is my purpose?

Part of the reason I came back here is because I am not entirely happy with the direction of modern social media. When I originally signed up for Twitter, my intention was to follow my friends, and artists that I like. But as time went by, I began to notice that the chronological timeline pretty much disappeared. From there, I began getting advertisements and posts cluttering up my timeline from accounts that I don't follow. I found myself wasting a lot of time sifting through my timeline to get to my friends' updates.

I found that Facebook was no better. I temporarily reactivated mine for work, and I quickly saw that they too kept spamming my home page and my email. Over the years, I saw people beg and plead with the social media giants to give us more control over the algorithm, but these requests went ignored. Simply put, it's not profitable for them to provide us with a better end user experience.

As a result, I found myself spending less time on social media. I quickly found that many of my friends were retreating to Discord where we could talk to each other directly. In a lot of ways, it felt like a return to MSN Messenger. Back in those days (1999-2003), we didn't have a 24 hour news cycle. Of course we had LJ, and bbs/php message boards, but updates on those were much slower than they are today. We didn't get any notifications when another party was typing. Sometimes we would find that another user would answer a question quicker in the time we took to to reply, or we would be surprised with a brand new page to the thread after we hit that reply button.

Those days were not perfect. But it provided me with social interaction with like minded people, and an outlet for my creativity. Most importantly, we weren't bombarded with the information overload that we experience on social media today.

As I start this new journal, I hope to integrate it with my YouTube channel. YouTube too, is far from perfect. Not only do we have to deal with the algorithm that puts us in information bubbles like Twitter and Facebook, but I also noticed that it is difficult to share community posts. I also hope to inspire people to return to the decentralised internet of the 90s, where we will have more control over how we express ourselves, and how we interact with others. I haven't quite decided how the YouTube integration is going to work yet, but I'm sure that I will figure it out over the course of this new year. (I realise that we're already into the month of February. （笑笑）)