Talking to Your Friends Online
you (yes, you) should have fun online more. everyone is always mad, and they forget why within the week. social media makes you this way on purpose.
you can be critical without being a loser. some people act critical to feel intellectually superior to imaginary people. these people miss the point. the only reason to be critical in the first place is to try and improve something.
Be Safe
there are a lot of problems with the internet that we like to ignore. often you’re expected to ignore these problems and allow them to hurt you if you don’t want to get weird looks from people.
don’t let companies own you
most of my friends are on discord. they won’t go anywhere else because their friends are also on discord, and their friends won’t go anywhere because all of their friends are on discord too. you get the idea.
the solution to this is stupidly simple: always have your friends on more than 1 app. in my experience, this has been an unpopular idea. take bsky for example. i don’t care much for it or the people who run it, but it was the only other pot of water twitter users seemed willing to hop in to after their own pot started boiling. even so, the majority stayed for the bubbles. early reactions to bluesky, even before it was completely terrible, ranged from mockery to hostility.
make a space for yourself
discord and reddit won’t take care of you. there are greener pastures and empty gardens waiting for you to come and make a home.
make your own website
making a website is easy and free. there are many great tools that can get you started if you don’t know what you’re doing. i first learned HTML from w3schools. to get your site out on the web, neocities and gitlab pages are both very reasonable free options.
need social media that bad? try federation
the fediverse is fairly popular. artists and other people who may depend on twitter for their livelihood will not be able to switch unless you go first. consider it! if you’re a furry, the furry fediverse is a good starting point. anyone else: god help you.
