I miss the old internet, hanging out in irc channels, posting in small forums, wasting an afternoon jumping from niche site to niche site, trying to track where you were in a haze of dozens of browser windows.

A set of places, and people. True connection.

But even the modern web held some resemblance of that.

As many friends as I met in weird irc channels and niche forums, I met similar numbers on Twitter.

Now all those warm, welcoming places exist only in the past.

Part of me hopes we can recapture some of that...but I fear those days are gone. They were a beautiful bubble destined to pop.

Where once stood a diverse sprawling forest filled with mysteries now stands a managed woodland. Same raw materials, an entirely different experience.

We are not the same world. We are not the same people. Our relationship to this thing has changed.

I fully realize that I am getting older and nostalgic.

But I was once young, and naive, and truly believed this thing would save us.

To answer a common reply trend:

I clearly did a bad job at underlying the exact cause of my lament.

The reasons I left the communities I discussed is because they don't exist anymore - they were killed during a phase of the interenet that predated the rise of the proto-social networks like myspace and orkut.

Many were small hosted forums bought for beer money by startups that didn't survive the year. Others slowly dwindled into obscurity, as search engines directed people elsewhere.