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First post on Dreamwidth. Excuse the likely poor prose, it’s been forever since I’ve written anything, and I gotta shake off the rust.
Do you ever have a memory you suspect might be fake?
For years now, I’d occasionally have a picture pop into my mind. A website, from somewhere vaguely in the time period of the late 2000s or very early 2010s, small but lively, filled with people I liked or even loved, burning bright but with a flame that was rapidly running low on oxygen. Black and grey, simply designed even for the time, struggling to keep up with burgeoning corporate behemoths like Facebook and Twitter. I vaguely remembered it taking the place of MySpace in my life for a short-ish period, before all the friends I made started to migrate to newer platforms, or to still-active IM clients like AIM or MSN. What this place was called, I couldn’t remember, such was the plethora of would-be contenders and long-dead services that I moved through in that period as a teenager about to graduate high school and move onto the next stage of my life. I never really gave it much thought.
The other night I had a dream about it. Somewhat predictably, the combination of time and the dreamed nature of this most recent memory caused the details to further fray, each brief remembrance over the past few years blurring the lines between reality and imagination a little more. Did this website really exist? Was I ever actually on there? Are the people I sorta maybe remember even real?
So I stumbled out of bed on Saturday morning, and dug through Wikipedia, trawled the depths of Archive.org, and searched for what felt like hours for what this mysterious website could be. And then all at once it came, a random date picked, a black and grey website, with a handful of featured profiles and there, in the middle, a photo of a girl I'm pretty sure I know. Synapses fire, something clicks. Whether these memories are real or whether the piece of wrinkly, old rubber squished into my skull simply invents them, the sight of that old haunt, makeoutclub, answers my question. Imagined, authentic, whatever, who cares? The weird, inexplicable sense of relief, the recognition, I’m pretty sure, of one of the faces on that homepage, the question feels like it has an answer.
And that brings me to Dreamwidth and my relationship with the internet today, as a man in his mid-30s.
In diving into the murky depths of the old internet, it was coming across old LiveJournal feeds, not makeoutclub, that made me feel the most nostalgic. I used to love LiveJournal. I used to love to write. When I was a teenager, I spent all my free time online, writing journals, roleplaying on forums, creating worlds and cultivating a passion for the written word that I once hoped would, eventually, lead me to a career as an author, or a screenwriter, or something, whatever, just as long as I could write. And while I landed on my feet and am so incredibly blessed to make a living from the arts, writing was not my calling. But writing gave me something as a young person that I never had, growing up in an extremely isolated, rural community. Friends, connection, a chance to feel part of this world.
It was in this glorified virtual dumpster dive effort that I discovered that not only was LiveJournal still extant, but there were tons of forks active as well, Dreamwidth (why do I keep forgetting this site’s name?) among them. There’s something about exploring this site that just feels right to me. It’s basic, nostalgic, devoid of any of the algorithms or AI or data harvesting that plagues modern media platforms, making us all dumber every moment we spend scrolling. I’m the exact right age to have seen every era of the internet, from basic HTML pages to the advent of social platforms, streaming, the move to smart devices and the ever encroaching dystopian nightmare we now face. And honestly, I'm really tired of it.
It’s not fun to be on the fucking computer. It used to be so cool. The internet used to feel like a place of infinite possibility, endless discovery and a never-ending supply of potential friends, lovers and enemies. Now it’s just a machine designed to sell you shit, and then sell your shit.
So, fuck it, man, I’m gonna give it a shot. I’m not on any other platforms. I’ve gone from a teenager and young adult who lived permanently online to being about as offline as a person can be in 2026. Maybe it’s time to try again. Maybe this’ll go nowhere, and I’ll never post here again. Maybe I’ll meet some cool people, and remember why I loved writing, why I loved the internet. All I know is that penning this felt good in a way I can't quite put into words.
Do you ever have a memory you suspect might be fake?
For years now, I’d occasionally have a picture pop into my mind. A website, from somewhere vaguely in the time period of the late 2000s or very early 2010s, small but lively, filled with people I liked or even loved, burning bright but with a flame that was rapidly running low on oxygen. Black and grey, simply designed even for the time, struggling to keep up with burgeoning corporate behemoths like Facebook and Twitter. I vaguely remembered it taking the place of MySpace in my life for a short-ish period, before all the friends I made started to migrate to newer platforms, or to still-active IM clients like AIM or MSN. What this place was called, I couldn’t remember, such was the plethora of would-be contenders and long-dead services that I moved through in that period as a teenager about to graduate high school and move onto the next stage of my life. I never really gave it much thought.
The other night I had a dream about it. Somewhat predictably, the combination of time and the dreamed nature of this most recent memory caused the details to further fray, each brief remembrance over the past few years blurring the lines between reality and imagination a little more. Did this website really exist? Was I ever actually on there? Are the people I sorta maybe remember even real?
So I stumbled out of bed on Saturday morning, and dug through Wikipedia, trawled the depths of Archive.org, and searched for what felt like hours for what this mysterious website could be. And then all at once it came, a random date picked, a black and grey website, with a handful of featured profiles and there, in the middle, a photo of a girl I'm pretty sure I know. Synapses fire, something clicks. Whether these memories are real or whether the piece of wrinkly, old rubber squished into my skull simply invents them, the sight of that old haunt, makeoutclub, answers my question. Imagined, authentic, whatever, who cares? The weird, inexplicable sense of relief, the recognition, I’m pretty sure, of one of the faces on that homepage, the question feels like it has an answer.
And that brings me to Dreamwidth and my relationship with the internet today, as a man in his mid-30s.
In diving into the murky depths of the old internet, it was coming across old LiveJournal feeds, not makeoutclub, that made me feel the most nostalgic. I used to love LiveJournal. I used to love to write. When I was a teenager, I spent all my free time online, writing journals, roleplaying on forums, creating worlds and cultivating a passion for the written word that I once hoped would, eventually, lead me to a career as an author, or a screenwriter, or something, whatever, just as long as I could write. And while I landed on my feet and am so incredibly blessed to make a living from the arts, writing was not my calling. But writing gave me something as a young person that I never had, growing up in an extremely isolated, rural community. Friends, connection, a chance to feel part of this world.
It was in this glorified virtual dumpster dive effort that I discovered that not only was LiveJournal still extant, but there were tons of forks active as well, Dreamwidth (why do I keep forgetting this site’s name?) among them. There’s something about exploring this site that just feels right to me. It’s basic, nostalgic, devoid of any of the algorithms or AI or data harvesting that plagues modern media platforms, making us all dumber every moment we spend scrolling. I’m the exact right age to have seen every era of the internet, from basic HTML pages to the advent of social platforms, streaming, the move to smart devices and the ever encroaching dystopian nightmare we now face. And honestly, I'm really tired of it.
It’s not fun to be on the fucking computer. It used to be so cool. The internet used to feel like a place of infinite possibility, endless discovery and a never-ending supply of potential friends, lovers and enemies. Now it’s just a machine designed to sell you shit, and then sell your shit.
So, fuck it, man, I’m gonna give it a shot. I’m not on any other platforms. I’ve gone from a teenager and young adult who lived permanently online to being about as offline as a person can be in 2026. Maybe it’s time to try again. Maybe this’ll go nowhere, and I’ll never post here again. Maybe I’ll meet some cool people, and remember why I loved writing, why I loved the internet. All I know is that penning this felt good in a way I can't quite put into words.
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