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Back in the 90s I used to hang around on usenet, talking to strangers having fun, getting into arguments, flaming each other. Sometimes over-sharing and thinking how it's a good job nobody in my real meat-space life could read this stuff.

But none of them were geeks, and it was possible to believe that nobody who isn't a geek will ever be on the internet.

Then in the Naughties, they all joined the internet.

Oops.

Luckily, none of them knew what Usenet was anyway, or how to search well enough to find my old posts.

And it was fun for a while. My real life friends joined in the conversation, I met a lot of new meat-space people and they were mostly great!

Then in the tens, everyone started using Facebook instead, and even the normies join the internet, and it was a horrorshow of normal meatspace people taking offense at the internet's freaks and geeks and talking past each other and the flaming the the fights and arguments stopped being so jovial and everyone started taking offense at each other and blocking each other and having actual real-word fights about it.

And Facebook started to manipulate their users by hiding posts from real people and replacing them with adverts, and shuffling and adjusting their timelines.

And so I left Facebook.

And now it's back to like it was in the 90s, where nobody I know in real life ever reads the shit I talk on the internet coz they're all cloistered in their corporate panopticons.

While the conversation on the free-web is back to jovial disagreement, and fun fights, and throwing peanuts at power, and honest exploration of ideas, while mocking the censorious corporate web.

Seems a shame that all the normies are stuck in the corporate panopticon still.

But only really a shame for them.

The free web mostly seems better without their constant demands to shut each other up.