Does anyone feel like there is no sense of community online? I remember when I was a teen I would find tons of other like minded teens online and just talk about random crap, in fact that's how I got into most of my interests like tech and anime. But these days it feels hard to do that anymore, my old friends are rarely online and when they are they give terse and brief responses, like they don't even care. Finding others is impossible, I mostly watch YT as my main social media and it's entirely parasocial, the channel can talk to me but I have no real impactful way of talking to them. For example I obviously watch n0 and osakasyndrome, and while I can leave a comment, at most I get a simple heart. Of course I'm not expecting for every comment to lead to a life changing conversation, frankly there's only so much that two people can pry out of their head to contribute meaningfully to a conversation online, but I guess I'm disappointed that that doesn't happen. Even by writing this post I guess part of me hopes that I can yell into the void and hear a response back.

I feel sad that adult connections just feel like meaningless filler these days, sure sometimes you can get something great out of it, but those moments seem to be getting further and further apart. Maybe it's my problem, that I'm expecting more and feeling disappointed with less.

There has not been any community online since the early to mid 90s. Since irl space, which is geographic space, looses out to the virtual world as a place where people interact, and the medium for accessing that virtual world is individualistic (PCs, smartphones), the result is extreme egocentrism. You seek out what gratifies you, what you agree with, and only talk to those who are identical to you and say the same things. So there is in fact no communication going on. It’s more like a mirror.

Go read what older generations said about friendship, ask the older people (who lived in a pre or proto-virtual age) anecdotes about their friends. You will quickly realize that friendship no longer exists. Social encounter is mediated by commodified spaces (Twitter or the coffee shop) and consumption of images. Friends go to movie theater, they don’t talk much with each other, they communicate with what they see on screen, and go home and maybe text each other. Communication is no longer person to person, but lone wolf individual to an image displayed on a screen, in which the relationship to other persons is a side thing. So we search for friends online, disembodied friends who are just mirrors and can be disposed of or forgotten about if you get tired of them. We try to replicate what we have lost irl on the internet sucking us in deeper into the quicksand.

It's over.

>>2
With a throbbing headache I'll nonetheless attempt to refute your negativity.
I for once welcome the destruction of community, communication, and fixed spaciality. I am very happy that the living experiences of the "older people" and their friendships are being lost to history.
You may think that the collapse of the old world is a thing to be grieved over, but it is precisely the opposite.

First of all, the state of the internet is not the cause of the current state of affairs outside the internet, but rather the opposite. The manifestations of alienation and loneliness visible on the internet are solely reactions from the material lived experiences of humans through-out the world.
Second of all, social encounters and social relations are not to be praised, because their *social* nature is precisely the nature of *codification*. If we go and stare at the "friendship" of older-generations you will see that in them lies on solution, but merely the problem it-self. It is simply that relationships in the recent-past where better mediated, and now, the social bonds are starting to fold in on them-selves. The bonds of kinship, of class, the dialectic of man-woman -- all of them are collapsing. And this is not the end of the world. It is simply the end of the world as we knew it.
Third, communication is crap. There is nothing quite as filthy as watching two people attempt to bounce messages between themselves. It is the dialectic of domination -- the origin of uncomfiness. In fact the opposite of what you propose is true. The less we communicate the better off we will be. The more expression is true subjectification, the more expression and writing and speaking becomes the pure unilateral intercourse of the subject with the world, the less the tyranny of the bilateral bond will tie us like chains.

>>1
OP! There is little we can do, there is little you can do, but at the very least we should not look with nostalgic eyes towards a past that is not yours to take. Things are probably going to get a lot worst before they get better, the crisis in our contemporary world-society cannot be improved, and even if it could improve it would do so only temporarily. But I have in my life felt many consolations. This computer many denounce so much is it-self the source of many of my consolations, the gifter of many powers; and with any power there is danger lying deep within it. But we should not destroy this power, but rather add it to our own.

I want to be stupid, I want to be contradictory, I want to be evil, I want to be immoral, I want to be incomprehensible, I want to directionless and contextless and girlfriendless and jobless, I want to scream at the void with no expectation, I want to tremble with psychosis, to gnaw at myself in neurosis, I want to embrace the hope of the futurists and the dreariness of the nihilists.

I don't want arguments, or explanations, or sciences, or stories, or goals, or conclusions, I don't want to split the world into individual-collective, subject-object, friend-foe, reality-falsehood, thing-image, mirror-window.

PRAISE THE END OF THE WORLD, PRAISE THE VOID, PRAISE THE SUFFERING IN ME AND OTHERS, AND THE SCORN I FEEL EVERYDAY OF MY LIFE BY ALL WALKS OF LIFE.

>>3
And let's be glad it's over, eh? Old chap. What a bore it would be were it endless.

>>4 Humans are social creatures, we need to communicate and work together. The whole we have any of this technology and science and culture is because only humans have developed language, language which is used to communicate and be social with other humans. The whole reason you are on this site right now is because you want to communicate with others. There's a reason why prisoners get sent to solitary confinement.

>>5

Humans are social creatures

Next thing you tell be is that man is the political animal.

The whole reason you are on this site right now is because you want to communicate with others

Wrong, I am treating you as an inanimate object right now, don't you believe for a moment that anything I say is anything other than pure mental masturbation, I do not believe that this words on the screen are anything more than a quick-time event, I have no sort of identification with a supposed "human" that might stand behind the semantics I see on the screen and that might have some sort of subjective mental state associated with those words. That would be the greatest of folly, that is indeed the basic folly of communication, to think that the purest of affections, and the purest of sentiments might render themselves into words.

Soon, bourgeois society and their morals will be ripped asunder. Soon the codes of society will disappear. Soon will teleology disappear, soon will all this subtext disappear. Soon the associations and assemblages formed by humans and nature and rocks and silicon, soon they will be freed from social relations. The criticism of political economy is the criticism of the social determination of mankind.

The whole we have any of this technology and science and culture is because only humans have developed

Leave the past to the past, and the future to the future, what once was will not necessarily be. All things want to remain in being, yet only nature and its attributes is eternal.

>>1
social media platforms intentionally try to do away with "community", because this is a barrier to entry, a moment where you might stop scrolling and notice what you're doing. Much better to show you another mildly amusing or mildly infuriating post, which keeps you on the app for longer. But there is plenty of community to be found outside of that space. Join a pubnix.
>>2
Maybe this is a good thing.
>>4

lived experience

I hate this phrase. There is no other kind of experience! it's redundant!

>>7 >Join a pubnix.

How do I do that?

>>8
if "join a pubnix" isn't enough information for you to be able to do it then you shouldn't join a pubnix.

Community still exists, this thread seems to be predicated on a self-centered view of the concept which is fine, but the matter of the fact is that this is an individual issue. "Community" wasn't lost, maybe worsened or bastardized or less interesting, but people still engage in communities, you just don't have any commonality with the average person today than you did when you were a teenager.

This does not mean "get with the times oldfag", but its just what it is, I think its better to process this as a "I'm different in a niche way" than as a "This concept is dead because I can't enjoy it", now if you think the communities of today are generally abysmal dogshit that's a different sentiment entirely that I do agree with, people are just more annoying to talk to generally.

People need to reckon with the fact that life just tends to get worse the older you get, you could blame everything else for that but its not really going to fix anything.

Also an addition to a point in >>4 , a lot of modern social media (the typical ones) are dogshit for actually fostering communities and engaging socially (this does not mean its impossible, but it happens in spite of the service, not because of it), that's not their goal, their goal is to hollow your brain out with content that keeps you glued to your screen, everything else is mostly a veil for that purpose.

Ultimately like what, 70% of people online will use these sites so if your complaints are directed to not finding community on twitter or something then you were looking in the wrong place anyway

>>4
This is a great example of Western Euro dog shit thinking. The Western cult of freedom and future-orientated world of progress is so utopian (even in its most moderate liberal form) and unrealizable that those who believe in it are ultimately compelled to destroy the world itself. If what they want is physically impossible, then the world must burn. They tell us not to "look to the past" but their future is simply a banal repeat of American frontier colonialism in which the dog shit Euro has turned himself into a post-human god, a sad regurgitation of manifest destiny.

>>7
Its not just social media companies. Many institutions seem to be structured this way. Society increasingly seems to be set up to force you to socialize in very narrow contexts. Just look at average codes of conduct from employers. A whole host of things, from asking personal questions to dating a co-worker, are now banned. You don't get the girl's number at the office, you meet women on apps only. There's a lot of corporate propaganda that goes into this. Its like how car companies threw their money around to change the infrastructure of cities. From Twitter to Tinder, they have redesigned the internet and now they are throwing money and influence around to reorder the fleshspace.

>>9 See it's people like you that ruin the internet for the rest of us. You're the reason everyone is so siloed and isolated online, instead of typing a simple response explaining what the hell you are talking about, you decide to deride and attack me for no reason. You and people like you are the reason everyone is so hesitant to reach out and connect with new people, you just assume everyone is identical to you and browses gtard threads and uses arcane programs all day, and when you meet someone who isn't a carbon copy of your putrid ego you sneer in disgust. I can see the smugness radiating from this post, I can see the massive unjustified grandiose self masturbatory psychopathic rotten self that is you. All that insight into your being from a single 105 character post. God knows what would happen if I had to read anything longer than that from you.

Does that really sound like someone others would want to engage with? Does that sound like someone others would trust, respect, or even tolerate? No. It sounds like the very reason people are withdrawing from one another, the very reason every corner of the internet is calcifying into bitterness and distrust. You are not just unpleasant, you are emblematic of everything that has gone wrong with online interaction. And the saddest part is, you don’t even see it.

>>13
see. this is why i said what i did. what is the very first result from ddg on searching join a pubnix? you don't know im sure, so allow me to tell you. it's tildeverse. an iota of curiosity, that's all i demand. frankly im surprised you've made it to this site, and that spark is the only reason i felt any inclination to nudge you with "you really have all the information you need to solve this question yourself, please do try" but you don't. instead of taking my comment for a challenge to be overcome, you immediately cast blame. if you are unwilling to do even this much how much less will you be willing to do? a pubnix filled with your types would be a community of whiners always demanding someone else fill them with what they could easily find if only they cast their eyes around. this selfinfantialization is what is wrong with "communities" on the clear net, and why people with any self respect have left those "communities".

>>13
It’s not my fault that you are incapable of reading my response to you. And you should examine your own posts before you lecture others. You whine about bitterness and not explaining yourself, when you write barely coherent nonsense and thump your chest about treating others as objects. You want to be free of social relations, yet you are oddly invested in how we socialize with you. You are anti-teleological, but then tell us X or Y thing will inevitably happen as history grinds on. You are a fool.

Think there’s plenty of them, although they do tend to blur the line between community and cult, specially cause it’s usually a caste system, there’s the main idea, the idol, the preachers and then the followers, quite fucked up and can cause people to unknowingly separate and detach from real life connections based on empathy and equal understanding, sad really, specially when you realize people’s disposition towards fascism.

Real question though, could you say that the denpa community blurs this line too?

>>15 That's not even my point, I'm not saying that I couldn't google it and figure it out, but that you took that opportunity to attack me and put me down, even if you wrote a simple "Google it", or didn't even respond at all, it would have been better than what you replied with.

I've worked (well actually interned, but still) for software companies where I was clearly near or at the bottom of the barrel in terms of performance. I barely solved any tickets, I pushed broken code that caused the server stack to slow down by 3x, missed meetings, etc. I wouldn't admit that to anyone IRL but I'll do it here because it's anonymous. Anyways, point is, I had every reason to be attacked and made fun of, yet no one did, at worst I got something like "you should work on X". If everyone got verbally disintegrated when they asked a seemingly innocuous question, then every company would be bankrupt, everyone would be pissed at each other and no one would learn anything. Maybe I'm biased because I've had this experience, I don't know, but it's something worth chewing on.

You are anti-teleological, but then tell us X or Y thing will inevitably happen as history grinds on

I see your point, but know that inevitability is inherently scientific, we can make models of reality and use it to predict future events with near perfect accuracy. Society is the same way, but the immense amount of variables make it difficult to make accurate predictions. I don't claim that things will inevitably transpire, but that the evidence points strongly to one side versus the other.

i disagree entirely. stronger, perhaps you would have been able to perform better in your role had someone had the gumption in this padded room society we have built to tell you to get your shit together. we need less padding, more prodding, less sedating security, more vitality inducing abrasion. I will confess to the slight appeal of a lmgtfy response, which i'm sure you would have taken with offence, and I didn't mean offense. As i (9) stated, the intention was to poke any curiosity which exists within you. the not responding route, would indeed have been my tact for any other space. this would have been in stark derision. do understand, nearly any reply at all is not scoffing, it is a complete lack of reply which should be taken this way.

not that performing well in such a role would invariably be a good thing, in fact to purposely do as you have done ineptly would probably be a good thing. more wrenches in the works. grind the machine to a halt. but this is a completely different discussion

>>18
well i didn't know that's how that worked :\
and now i wonder if i should even explain what i did.
"i am 9 and 9 is not 15" is what i intended for my name there.

>>17

attack and put me down

all he implied was that if you can't look up basic information you probably don't deserve to get spoonfed and provided instant gratification lol, this is extremely true btw, and the fact you went on an even more unhinged rant about it is more telling of you than him. Putrid ego? Self masturbatory psychopathic rotten self? really dude? lmao. You got offended at being implied to be dumb and non-curious, take it as it is because you didn't prove otherwise (still haven't).

>>16
Almost every niche social site is somewhat "cult" structured in nature, the owner of the site ultimately owns the greatest means of distribution of ideas, whether you found the site because of their rhetoric or because they're the most "notable" poster of the site. So stuff just naturally trickles down due to the sentiments of the owner, and the sentiments of the owner tend to be deviated from their grievances with prior existing social media.
N0 actually talked about this partially in a blog, and I have some other opinions of the concept, because you could honestly call the entirety of the indie web "cult like" in a very loose sense, but perhaps that is a different topic for a different thread.

Maybe this is why there isn't a sense of community online. One interaction descended into this fucking ratpile lol.
No one wants to deal with this shit, everyone is a landmine waiting to get set off, myself included.
I could have just ignored this thread, but now I've written 953 characters about it.

I suspect a lmgtfy link probably would have been a better response, even if it seemed ruder - you're on the internet, you *absolutely* do not need someone else to explain shit to you unless your search didn't produce results or you need specific clarification (and in that case, you better say that). This is eroding a bit, because search engines are measurably shittier these days, but it should still be the first line of action.

The text of >>9 as written seems to be addressing the following in a sideways manner: a public *nix server community is absolutely not going to be welcoming to someone whose first response isn't to look shit up first.

I relate to this. In the past, it was easier to find weird people to talk to. As the internet has been adopted by more and more people, we've seen an atomisation of online communities which is similar to the atomisation we are seeing with irl communities. It's everything happening all at once. I hate it and I am sad.

smaller communities seem to want to get smaller, i talked about this with some people on a porn forum a few weeks ago. back in the day maybe mid 00’s small communities actually cared to get people in and got shit done together, remember when bull sent chrischan 1000$ from people in the forum? i think this forum is not bad at all and most people here seem to be honest and cool. but this isn’t really a “community” as we are not doing anything together actually. if the anonymous function got nuked the forum would 100% change (not sure whether that would be good or not)

i would be ur friend denpa

>>24
only if you promise you’ll never be anyone else’s friend

yeah its all gone, idk the illusion kinda fell when i turned 20, maybe its just age that destroys it, i no longer get that air of excitement that it had back then, it makes me genuinely sad, i wish i could feel like that forever, but funnily enough people not being offline enough kinda, makes it all feel like an act and all those internet peoples of the early days that made it feel interesting and unique are either gone or got swallowed by the mainstream, or just left out of nessesity and now its just those kids who grew up on the internet trying to put together the scraps and maybe get a high out of it one last time.

I have my doubts about all of these online spaces. They're filled with self-absorbed crazy people!

I feel interests are still represented in smaller communities, and for those I have found some useful info and it has kept me interested over time to learn more, and to see the others as imparting their useful tips and advice. But the problem I find is that I had to dig deeper to find them. It's hard to find a community if it's so small that the breadcrumbs are only scattered through profiles, rather than search engines.

It seems communities do exist like this, but they're somewhere out of sight on the YouTube and the Reddit and quite often you have to find it yourself. Because google aint doing that no more

I find it a shame that when I want to go deeper into topics, I am limited by my own knowledge to find things that fit what I'm trying to find. For example, with the Depp v Heard trial, the whole spectacle of online discourse made it hard to even find factual things about it. I don't know enough about how law works, and I doubt I'll fully know. But there isn't much representation from what I gather of actual analysis that isnt about farming clicks or views. Instead its media talking more about it, and people are limited by that.

All this wall of text was to say, that it's hard to find and connect with communities, when people are too busy getting whipped up in a frenzy, and saying their opinion. When I want to learn. I want facts, I want to see where the useful knowledge is. It feels like it was purposeful by the big sites to direct users to their sites, to the point that it has destroyed communities all over the net

>>4

There is nothing quite as filthy as watching two people attempt to bounce messages between themselves. It is the dialectic of domination -- the origin of uncomfiness. In fact the opposite of what you propose is true. The less we communicate the better off we will be.

I understand that you have Schizoid personality disorder and can't comprehend the most human desire you can think of, but this attitude leads nowhere. Everything humans like to do can be reduced to some pathetic desire, perhaps that's how it is. However, those things are still worth doing because maintaining a good friendships makes most people happy. I feel like you're being disingenuous to pretend like what you can't get this very human thing.

tyranny of the bilateral bond

I don't know if you experienced some kind of trauma with some friend, but you're insane if you mean this seriously and not just as an attempt to seem above it all. I don't think your view on people, society, and the world gets any more accurate the more time you spend in social isolation. It's actually the opposite, experienced other people, living with them, being emotionally invested in people, be it a friend or a relationship, is what makes your world view more accurate since you can speak and reason from experience and not delusions you collected while sitting alone in your room.

>>29
Are you kidding me, this thing is like heroin. Like I talked to someone briefly couple days ago. Made a stupid joke and it made them smile and it was like a lance of heat flying through my rib cage.
The thought you're having right now will affect the starting point of the next thought. If you give any power to what people say, any authority to their judgement, if you let them influence the thought that you are having, then the inaccuracies will accumulate and it will spiral more and more off course until you are living in an alternate reality where you can do anything. Where even if the world was destroyed you would still be happy. As long as you harbor any hope that you'll ever be understood or loved as you love you will never understand how things really are. Even after giving up everything else this can have you screaming on the floor. People are the enemy of truth and silence is its only friend.

I suppose that I've known my family members for much longer than anyone online and that I stand to inherit and pass on more to them. I was also in the same classes with a few people for almost a decade straight through primary and secondary school - which extends past my longest lasting online connection of 6 years. That aside, the communities I know deeply online (small discords, IRC, steam) are all as or more communal than my offline ones. My co-workers constantly change and we only really have interactions as personal as the kind I have constantly online a few nights a year. Church is just kind of awkward at mass and we dont really do much together outside of that - the occasional trips we take are not any more epic or passionate than meetups. And my family's kind of whatever as a community. We have good individual connections between ourselves. So no, I dont think there's much community online but I dont have any better offline communities to compare it to. My friend became a Monk, I bet his community is swell. Maybe? Idk.

The increase of bandwidth over the years for transmitting information means that said information does not need to be carefully and consciously curated for the most effective ratio of conveyed information to potential understanding at the other end. The necessity of that curation means that we used to not be able to afford to not be individual and vulnerable and thus more serious, courageous and invested, which lends itself to, no, is a requirement for sustaining communities. We now have bandwidth in excess to not only transmit noise on every possible frequency but also to apply transformations and distortion to proper signals as well. That's like pouring a whole bag of seeds on the ground and then blasting them with a pressure hose because you don't have a watering can. No wonder communities do not flourish. The web infrastructure and technologies that are in most widespread use are by design not suitable for nurturing communities anymore. The fact that it (online communities) happened is an accident of circumstance and youth. This infrastructure exists for a purpose and that purpose is economic commerce for the sake of gaining power and control. Any non-commercial endeavour trying to exist on the fringes of the web will inevitiably be tainted, grow sick and die simply by being planted in the same toxic soil. The great promise of the cyberspace was that it collapses space and distance in the meatspace allowing us to be closer to each other. Ironically it also collapses the distance between the exploitative, inhumane economic commercial interests and the spaces that wish to use these same technologies for building meaningful and humane connections. They cannot coexist. It is either/or: commodities or communities. One will vanish before the other unless we take action. You must take action.

As to OP's parasocial YT viewing, which I can relate to, all I can say is that I have recently developed a profound distaste for video. I object to photography on philosophical grounds as constant exposure to the objectivity of the camera lens is too much for us. It drains any passion and potential for action and desentisizes us to the objective reality we are supposed to confront with shock and awe. It is antithetical to art which is supposed to envigorate us by its subjectivity. It's exhausting. We need the world to remain subjective for us to be able to process it and not have it stamped on us; for us to be able to form our own ideas which will in the end map more or less around the objective world. Absolute knowledge of the world is impossible but this absolute shallowness of the objective image is much worse than ignorance. Some have taken to acceleration to combat the objectivity of photographic tyranny by multiplying images, mixing them into collages and hyper-stimulating themselves in an effort to escape by means of a centrifugal force the self-referentiality that is the closed circuit of objectivity. That is basically post-modernism. When everything is subjective nothing is and you arrive at the photographic image which is purely objective. Impotence. We need to return to free experimentation within a structured central narrative that allows space for it to happen while also acknowledging the importance of hierarchies. The early web was indeed anarchic but that does not negate consent to common rules and since the early web was also small and the userbase highly technical, they came in with a wider overlap of shared values with each other than a randomly selected pool of people, which again is required for forming true communities. The gates to the web being open for everyone is not a catastrophe in itself but combined with the malicious design of social media platforms and the conflicting purposes of the underlying infrastructure that leads to alienation, the outcome is a calamity that is exponentially magnified. People are hyper-individualistic drones in a hivemind that does not serve its own best interest. It has ceased to function and the workers are trapped in it.
And there are no good YouTube videos. The half-decent ones are already audio only rambles that would have been even better as an article/blogpost. We need to cleanse our environment of superfluous images and return to the basic word. That is of course too much to ask for most people but we must lead by our actions. This place being a textboard is a good example. Alternative protocols like Gopher and Gemini are good on paper, as are pubnixes (which often offer hosting services for these protocols), but they tend to attract only a very narrow subset of technically minded individuals. I don't know what is to be done. The best I can think of is to urge you to poetize. Create something. It will most likely not be a seed that will grow into a community in the present, but a trickle of water that will nourish the roots of some community in a distant, more humane, future.