It's been a little while, what did I miss?

[Kistaro]

Hey, folks. I'm Kistaro Windrider, and I think I said a few things on the old Dragon Realms but wasn't too active. I was more active on other dragon forums, some 15 years ago - Baxil's (tomorrowlands), Tysha's, and Shiari's, mostly - and I miss them all. I drifted away from LiveJournal, too. Once I graduated college and entered the workforce, I felt like I never had enough time to write anything worthwhile, so I didn't say anything, and just drifted away.

I wonder how many of us it happened to. The short attention span created by Twitter and the keyboards (or lack thereof) of modern smartphones, which for some reason I find myself using more than my computer even though I am a professional computer programmer pulled me away from classic forums, but they were such better places - mostly because they weren't owned by ad companies trying to figure out how to compel you to interact with them, how to sell the site itself to you, for more ad impressions. It feels like everyone got pulled into that for a while, but we're breaking back off into our real communities again. At least, that's what I hope, and rejoining here is part of bringing that about anyway.

I'm quieter than I want to be on forums but when you get me talking I'm hard to shut up, I think a lot of dragons are like that. Nowadays, I'm a software engineer at a huge tech corporation (partially responsible for what I was complaining about in the last paragraph, naturally). I have a complex cosmology that I should get in the habit of talking about more, which is intertwined with my concept of myself as a dragon. I hope to talk about it more in relevant forum topics here, if that topic gets going again.

What have the last ten years been like for you folks, meanwhile?

[Rakeela]

Yay, Kistaro!

Real communities have the power to protect people.  The automatic exploitation of modern advertising is about as anti-community as it is possible for a thing to get without malice aforethought, and the platforms that are designed to enable advertising are thus hostile to the formation of communities.  It used to be typical on the internet that people did not value exploitation, but flew to many places to find what was unexpected.  Too many of those who watch for manipulable others then infested the internet, and platforms were designed in support of them at the expense of those who did not value exploitation.  It is good to return to the forumite pattern.  Any particular forum may fall, but if the conduct of being a forum is adequately valued, forums generally will multiply.

Be yourself in many places.  Meet people in spaces where they can be known.  That is the protection.  Monetized and manipulated spaces defy both real connections and the expression of an authentic self.