makz | From the Past to the Future

I went through the list of nearly 50(!) people I've been following since the eljay days and peeked at everyone's journals. Most haven't posted since 2012 at the latest. Many stopped updating around '05-'08. Surprisingly, the community was still relatively vibrant during these mass exodus years, as posts from '08 and '09 still received a relatively large number of comments.

In fact, this very journal has a 1:2 posts to comments-received ratio, even factoring for private posts and posts made after 2012 which largely went unread. We really used to interact heavily with each other on this platform! I feel like this level of engagement is completely lost on modern social media sites where posts are more about shared "sentiment" than shared "stories."

By default, Dreamwidth played it safe when I moved my content across platforms by giving no access permissions to anyone I had friended on eljay. This is smart from a security perspective, but I think if someone decides to come back after a decade, I'd like them to be able to see my new journal and reach out to me. Knowing I'm active by seeing some posts would probably encourage them to do that.

This leads me to my current process of figuring out how to lock my journal down in a way that is less all-or-nothing than the old-school "friends" system. It looks like Dreamwidth allows you to "subscribe" to see public posts, "allow access" to your friends-locked ("access-list") posts, but also allows you to specify who gets to see posts using "custom filter" access levels.

Aside from my "known active" user list, I've created a "custom filter" for people from my hometown, as well as one for people from summer camp. (Those two circles used to be my entire life as a teen/early 20-something.) When I post using "access list" level permissions, everyone in any group can see the post, whereas I can limit more private posts to just known active folks where I'm sure that ownership of their username has not been passed on to someone new.

All that is to say, please reach out if you're someone from my past! I can't believe I used to have 50 acquaintances with whom I communicated frequently. I'm much more of a digital hermit nowadays, and that's kind of a bummer. I hope, if you are someone I haven't spoken to in years, that you've had a great decade, and many more good ones to come. <3