Chats and forums

This summer, I was invited to join a new community for people who write and was very happy to join. I was part of the “original group” if that makes sense in a steadily growing community. The group started as Signal group and for a while, it was lovely to be part of it. Then we grew to around 40 people. All lovely people whose writing I had been following for years and who I loved chatting with. I was busy with other stuff for a few days and when I returned to Signal, I saw almost 200 unread messages spanning half a dozen interesting discussions. That’s when it hit me. Not the amount of unread messages but the ephemerality of the discussion. Over the past few years, I have intentionally changed my habits. I have left (or significantly decreased usage of) social media platforms like X, Instagram and LinkedIn because I got annoyed at the algorithms pushing content and everything being “send and forget” type stuff. I have instead focused more on reading and writing blogs, participating…