I apologize in advance, because this is going to be something of a vent-style rant. It won't become the norm for the Misc. journals (I hope), but this is a topic that plays into a lot of the stuff on this website and in my other online activities.
I've always been fascinated with communities of people. See, I grew up in, effectively, a ghost town. There were about 5 other kids around my age in town, and we all tolerated each other because it was better than being alone, with the only thing tying us all together being an enjoyment of bike racing. And honestly thank God for that because otherwise we might've started beating each other up just to pass the time, there was that little to do in town. I also grew up with Autism. My family was aware, but I was not, not until 3rd or 4th grade, when I snuck a peek at the teacher's file on me for the Parent-Teacher Conference that year. So, as a real little kid, I was invisibly different from the few kids around me, and most of the kids at school, and I had no idea why. Of course, my babysitter had ideas, but they... felt like even more bullying. She called me "helmet special", which I learned eventually was just a creative version of the R-slur, and implied things like that I might become Schizophrenic (Because one of my Uncles is) and that might lead me to be unable to drive. Again, I lived in the middle of nowhere. Being told, essentially, "You'll never be able to escape this isolation" was devastating, to say the least.
I spent a good chunk of childhood in that isolated feeling. Through Elementary School, I think I made a total of 5 friends. 1 moved away in the third grade, and 2 of them appeared in 5th grade, and I only saw any of them at school. I had fairly limited access to the internet at the time, as my family kept having just... the damnedest things happen when we brought computers into the house. For instance, my brother and I were given a laptop to share, though our time was monitored and the parental controls pretty well enforced (My parents were definitely right on those decisions, but it means I never so much as sent a chat in Wizard101 for many years), and then the charging cable got chewed through by a litter of puppies. My parents just never bothered to make the trip to get a new charger after that. My only real connection was my little brother. We did everything together, and if you ask him, we basically raised each other. We also did beat each other up to pass the time. But through this whole time, the internet fascinated me.
In 5th grade, I was part of an after school church thing on Wednesdays in the town where I went to school. My parents were busy, and also didn't like the idea of driving home and then driving me to a church half an hour away in the evening, so instead I had to take the bus to the public library with my little brother until my parents came to take us to the church. For a while, I was generally pretty content to just read books in the time I waited, and so was my brother. It wasn't until one day I entered the library and saw two of my friends on the computers. Up until that point, I thought only adults could be on those. That's when I started going online.
This ties into community eventually, I promise, I'm just setting the stage. When I started using the library computers, I really only had basic knowledge of how to use them from the computer classes that I had in school, but of course, subverting authority was the quickest way to learn. See, my friends and I liked to play Roblox on the computers (It was a very different platform in those days), but that required a download, which the Library staff cleared off the computers every day. Computer passes were limited to 30 minutes, and we were limited to 4 passes per day, so the 10 minutes or so that it took to download Roblox every time was like precious gold slipping through our fingers. That was how I learned abiut directories and by moving the Roblox program to a different directory, it wouldn't get wiped. By sharing this knowledge, I became a hero. Of course, with shared knowledge there's bound to be leaks. Eventually the librarians caught on to my scheme and my mehtod ceased to work. But for a moment, I was a weird little community leader, and a revolutionary.
The community of "kids who got left at the library after school" didn't disband after that, but it felt like it might. This was the first time I hadn't felt alone. I felt like there were people who shared my interestsand who were willing to be around me for more than just requirement. So I set about finding other ways to keep everyone together. My role then became "internet scout". I found new things for us to do and had methods around things like needing emails for accounts (This was a time before email verification was ubiquitous, so we just... used fake emails), but eventually, that group ceased to be, as we stopped going to the church group, or some of the older kids started driving. I was once again, rather isolated.
Sometime shortly after I entered the 6th grade, I obtained my first ever internet-capable device that was all mine. It was a Nook tablet. I was given it because my Dad had recently upgraded to a NookHD. I still have fond memories of the little tablet. At first it had parental controls on it, but only for purchases, since I didn't have my own money yet. Also, side note, up until this point in my life, my parents hated the idea of paying for a digital download. we never got any digital games for the Wii growing up or anything like that. It wasn't until Netflix started primarially being a streaming service that they relented on this stance at all. This may have affected my stance on a thing or two. Anyway, that changed when I got a job working for my dad later in the year, so that doesn't matter. Once I had the device for myself, I started to realize that the internet couldn't be my own until I had an E-mail address. Without that, I had no YouTube Account, no social media, and I couldn't even be sure that I would have any way to replace stuff I bought in the Nook store if anything happened to the one I had!
So naturally, I lied about my age and made a Gmail. I... actually first tried not lying about my age, but that attempt got shut down. It took me three days to even consider the possibility of lying. Yeah, I never really had a Rebellious phase... Anyway, Once I had that, the world opened up. I made (now deleted) social media accounts, and went wild with them. I had a time where I made an RP account that changed characters every once in a while to whatever I was really into at the time, going from Future Diary to Fire Emblem and so on. That's also how I first encountered Pornography, and ended up accidentally part of a weird little ERP group on Google Plus of all places. This would be the second time I considered myself part of a real community. I interacted with members of that group fairly regularly, in both an RP setting and out. I want to stress: I should NOT have been in that group, but I was having a good time, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That community only ended when Gogle Plus went down. And... Fankly I'm glad it did, because I had started trying to make Youtube content at that time, on Wednesdays, at the library, and didn't want things to follow me around as I realized what exactly I had been doing. But once again, I felt alone.
This part is... still ongoing but has been largely unsuccessful. It started with my Youtube Channel. I had been inspired by a YouTuber who did Roblox content whose name I've forgotten, and when I stumbled into the "record" feature of Roblox, I connected the ideas and got started making Roblox videos. The record feature was meant for making clips, so it didn't have any mic input, so I just recorded and uploaded nearly silent Roblox Gameplay videos, Once per wednesday, every week after school. This went on for a while, I have a Whole retrospective on the progress of my channel, on said channel that I still make videos for to this day. Through those efforts, I had hoped to gain a following, to make a community of some sort. To this day, I have not broken 100 subscribers, and only a fistful of videos have gained even triple digit views, but I have made a few friends on this journey that I still have today. I met most of them when I started streaming as a vtuber, or from when I started making RPG Maker content.
However, the early failures to build my own communities (First 3 years) culminated when I got Discord in my Freshman year of High school. A classmate of mine who was into D&D introduced me to it, and to an RP community called "the Hub" (Yes I know what it sounds like. No, it wasn't like that). The people there helped with my worldbuilding and map making skills, great people all around.
But from there I got into a Discord RP server called The Persona Roleplay Club. This would be the first time I got seriously invested in a community. I headed up a cause to keep the memory of Persona 2 (and 1, but mostly 2) alive on the server, as well as generally promoting activity. I posted what I called "The Daily Maya" which started as a post of a different artwork of Maya frm persona 2 each day, until I ran out of pictures, then it became the same one each day. I made some good friends there (Though I didn't realize most of them were actually younger than me, I figured most people who played Persona games were in High School themselves, at least). Eventually, the server grew to a fever pitch, and my energy for Persona waned. I stayed in that server for a while past that, until the people I had grown the server with and the very founder of the server left, at which point, I left. I'm still friends with some of those folks, I have them as friends on Discord, though I have to admit I feel awkward about reaching out to most of them, and I really jsut wait until i find something that I think they'd be interested in to send any of them a message, to make sure they're alive.
Overall, I've been in and out of a number of communities through my life so far, but I have... yet to find a place to stay, so I keep trying to build my own, I guess. Recently though, I think I've grown to accept that people in the communities I interact with do actually remember me. With a number of Discord servers, I eventually fall out of being hugely active, and then I would feel awkward about coming back. In the past couple months though, I've confronted and deconstructed that feeling by just... going for it. What I found is that, yeah, they actually remember me and were glad to see me again. Now I just to figure out a way to reach out to individual people like that without feeling like it looks like my accounts been hacked and I'm going to try to scam them or something. I'm open to tips.