I have been joining and unjoining online communities of various sorts for the past three or four decades. I don’t know if the Usenet rec.sport.fencing group was the first, or the CompuServe HOM-9 forum. I still know people from both places.

In the meantime, I also physically moved, and had to build a whole new community in my new neighborhood, too. Mobility is tough.

Facebook was fun for a long while, and I posted a photo a day on Instagram for a couple of years. On Twitter, I tried out a bunch of different purposes and ended up using it mainly for following lists I had compiled rather than for following individual people. And then, as happens, I abandoned each of them, always for good reasons.

Now I’m trying out Mastodon, which people are hailing as the new utopian wonderland. (How are people so naive? Have they not gone through this before?) I’ve already seen something I can’t unsee on the federated timeline, and I have silently scoffed at a number of opinions, as I used to do on rec.sport.fencing and HOM-9.

But that’s what it is like moving into a new neighborhood.

I have a neighbor who parks her car on the sidewalk, for instance. Not up on the curb, across the sidewalk so you can’t walk on it. A couple of nice young persons who sell drugs on the corner make sure to say hello to me. Yeah, we have the occasional murder two blocks over or two blocks up, but on the whole my block is pretty sedate. Well, except that the cross street north of here is unexpectedly blocked off for construction, so an eighteen-wheeler tore down my street ripping down street signs and crashing into cars a couple of weeks ago, but well, you know, things happen.

My Mastodon address is @deliaturner@mindly.social. New neighborhood, new address.

Let’s see if I can get “verified” on Mastodon.