In essence, where – if anywhere – do people interact with people online?

That 90s Web is long gone, as a trend. It is still there, mind you, but it’s mostly through blogs who have themselves evolved from being a trendy space, everybody wanted to have a blog starting in the early 00-05s, to a very niche phenomenon that is barely visible anymore. But that still exists.

Many people like myself, who used to hand code websites in the 90s, are still blogging to this day. The one real change is in readership: very few people can be bothered with visiting blogs (I seldom spontaneously share a link to my blog, but regularly mention it but I’ve only been asked once its address ;).

It’s even more obvious with the younger generations who have not grown used at all to search through the World Wide Web (that is much more akin to a World Narrow Web, for them) for whatever content they might be interested in. And for those that may still read blogs, how many will not be using RSS, or even be aware it exists, making it uselessly harder for them to read said blogs.

They’re not to blame. They need/want said content to be served to them from a few limited sources they all gather around because it’s what they grew with. Hence, most of them only using social media platforms, be they centralized/corporate-owned ones like X, Facebook, TikTok, or even Substack, and so on. Or decentralized ones, like Mastodon, Piefed,… the entire Fediverse.

As far as I’m concerned, even email has almost completely vanished as a meaningful tool of communication. Email! It used to be my main means of communicating with correspondents all over the world since the early 90s and has remained so until around 2010, or maybe 2015 when it has started to dried out, and quickly so. As far as I’m concerned, email is barely a trickle nowadays. Here again people will use ‘messaging apps’, centralized or not it doesn’t change much! they have moved from a fully indendant/personal means of communicating to a non-personal one.

I’m not sure that, collectively, we have gained anything by not using emails anymore: a lot of my pasts interactions lasted much longer (oftentimes it was measured in months if not years worth of back and forth exchanges) whereas I seldom have any long lasting (or even that stimulating) exchanges on those social media platforms, even the non-corporate owned ones. But maybe that’s just me being incompetent and unable to engage in a meaningful way using those tools.

It’s a silly comparison, but I often make a parallel with eating habits.

They are a generation that will happily gather at meal time around some trendy (cheap) places, fast food, snacks or whatever they fancy, without having to worry about preparing their meal. While my own generation learned how to cook and often will prefer cooking (or at least, go to a traditional restaurant, a place where they actually prepare food, not a fast food) because one gets to pick what they eat (fresh products, nothing industrially processed) and can oftentimes eat for a similar price (it’s even cheaper to cook one’s own food) than the industrial junk food that are sold everywhere.

Edit: like I said personal websites, blogs, still exist almost everywhere one makes the effort to search for them. They’re just not searched for, so we get to decide they don’t exist anymore which is not the reality. People expect to get their content served to them in those few limited centralized places called social media… a bit like they expect to meet their partner(s) through dating apps only… Something old-me will never be able to fathom, to be honest.