Beyond Selidor

I'm still in touch with most of the people I knew from my fan forum days — it's just that we don't use those forums (or the IRC chatroom that we set up): we use Facebook DMs or WhatsApp, or just go and have dinner with each other when we know we're in the same city, and we talk about the incidental events of everyday life, or media we've recently watched/read, or gossip about mutual friends, rather than all our conversations being devoted to the books that original brought us together.

I worry about things like separation of work and fan life and back end development when as a teenager I just cut up a random picture, stuck it in a table, and called it a day.

I worry about this a lot — not for myself, since that horse really has bolted (it's incredibly easy to link my real-world identity to my fannish one based on things I've said over the years on Dreamwidth, and I basically operate on the assumption that anything I've done online has to be something I'd be comfortable with everyone in my life knowing, without making any deliberate efforts to connect the various parts of my life together and hoping that I'm unimportant enough that no one else bothers to do so in a malicious way) — but I worry a lot about it for younger fans, and just younger people in general. The old DIY internet that I'm lamenting here was so small and fragmented, and it was just one part of a person's life. Now the social, communal internet bleeds into everything, and there's much more pressure for things to be joined up and connected, preferably under a single real-world identity. It worries me a lot.

I've heard exactly the praises you're singing about Neocities — I really must have a look!