17 Feb 24: Making real friends on the internet since 1998
A history of my long journey through various forums and places on the web and how they spilled over into real life.
Hi friends. It’s February 17 and I find myself able and ready to write. What a blessing.
Some content news before I get into today’s story:
You’re invited to my online class / salon “Life and Work in the Rhythm of the Seasons” on Tuesday, 27 Feb 2024. Please join here, description on the event page.
This week I went viral (2.5+M views), because I posted advice on a forum and shared it on Twitter. It was controversial and people shat on me left and right. A very interesting experience for someone wanting to “get involved” (last week’s post). I was originally gonna write about this, but something else came out. But if you wanna hear about it…
…my friend
had me on her podcast, where we discuss a lot of timeless developmental topics, family stuff, and also the above Tweet and its implications.I made a video on how to ask an oracle (like the I Ching) a good question. Prompted by my friend
— thank you!
Today’s topic: Making friends on the internet since 1998!
The Early Days: Gaming
I love forums, I re-realized this week. I spent my life on forums. I started using the internet in the 90s, before age 10. My mom was an early adopter (for German standards), and so I was sending emails in 1998 or something. The first websites that captured my interest were gaming advice websites (spieletipps.de, RIP). My first online writing was some advice on how to turn in a circle on the spot in Mario Kart 64. It may have looked silly but I was 8 or 9 when I posted that. Pretty cool for a kid.
My alias was ELSIMO, by the way. That was a play on Bart Simpson’s graffiti tag: EL BARTO.
I later found the spieletipps.de forum and talked to some people on there. I didn’t have too much to say in the beginning. That changed when I became part of the Nintendo forum. Under the alias mastaofdisasta (yes, I know) I joined the local Golden Sun community. One of the best games ever, in my opinion, and my first foray into JRPGs. I never played Final Fantasy, but I had Golden Sun.
Somehow that part of the forum died or was closed down, and one guy who was very engaged there, created a spin off forum, focused on Golden Sun. I happened to be there at the right time and I signed up right away. The new alias was schnibbel.
This was a homage to Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth, one of my first video games I played with my uncle. In this game, the Schnibble is a mystical entity that is believed to have the ability to cause peace and prosperity to flourish in times of need. I thought that was an appropriate name, and to date it is my “true” nickname, even though I kept changing my names across different communities and contexts.
At this point I’d like to ask any entities and spirits with bad intentions, to please not abuse the knowledge of my true name. Thanks.
Because I was in early I started poasting. For real, I used most of my daily internet time poasting in pretty much all of the threads on this forum. It was a well-organized forum in the classic BB board style. It had ranks based on post count, about 50 members, a few moderators, and everyone was somehow engaged. We had collaborations, contests, creativity, and inevitably, clashes. It was a mini hierarchy, a little society, where I played a relevant role. I think I racked up well over 2000 posts and became a moderator later on as well.
Getting to know the admin better, I found out this dude was 12 years old, when I was 14. At the time the forum started I was 11 or 12, so he must’ve been 9 or 10. Proper wiz kid. He ended up getting really into Flight Simulator, posting these big ass flight reports of his virtual flights.
He had a great eye for detail and an impressive ability to execute. Looking back at this, it’s showing me that I always end up hanging out with some sort of autistic crew lmao.
Teenage years: Metal
My friend Nico from school was lurking the Gamestar forum and we were both reading the magazine quite a bit so I signed up there, and ended up posting a little bit. I think I made three accounts there in total over the years: schnibbel, clayman and life shatters. I was actually talking less about games and more about music at this point. There was a well-established metal thread and metal was becoming my main thing from 14 onwards. The later two account names reflect this: clayman is an album and a great song by In Flames, and life shatters is a wonderful song by the band Desultory.
I didn’t really make lasting memories in the Gamestar forum. It was interesting, there were a lot more adults and the socialization was a bit more meaningful. I definitely remember being a bit over the top here and there and getting a helpful “reel it in” from some of the elders there.
My other friend Nico, who I met randomly on the bus (different story, please remind me to write about all the people I “randomly” met who ended up playing major roles in my life), became the singer of my band and a big music guru for me. This guy was hanging out online all day, knew all the best music, and also knew a bunch of people in the German metal scene. So he told me to sign up to the Metal Hammer forum, and that was a life changing experience. He is now a very skilled photographer and, as always, a great tastemaker.
The true nick schnibbel returned and I was active there for years. I developed my music taste, made friends, pissed people off and promoted my band together with Nico. Our band was called Dissolving. We later, well — split up. Or, you might say, dissolved. Our one release was called Demo 09. I’ve never been that happy with the production but it’s a good piece of history I look back on fondly.
My best friend Sebi aka SOL1DUDE, my founding partner and main composer at Dissolving, continued our/his work as Dahlian. He completed the vision we built of a sort of concept album, and it turned out truly excellent: Moonlit, by Dahlian.
But back to the Metal Hammer forum: It was very lively and I made many great friends there. We had regular meetups (“Forentreffen”), sometimes for a party, sometimes just camping out somewhere, sometimes visiting gigs of the various bands that were active in the forum. We constituted a very well connected part of the German metal scene, and it was a proper joy to be on tour with a bunch of beer drinking, hell raising cats. And my corner of this world, as always, was pretty nice and relaxed, and not too rowdy (well, mostly).
Friends
From these meetups we shared pictures and stories and created real friendships that partly still last, or are at least still represented on Facebook. And I think this is such a fantastic testament to making friends online, because this level of connection is just not so likely to happen, if you have special interests, or a certain neurological makeup, which makes it less likely that you will just automatically fit in with the people, who are around you physically.
I mean, I posted on forums for years and almost none of my real life friends and acquaintances knew about this. That was just my own little world. But it was entirely meaningful to my day to day. It gave me meaning and purpose, and as mentioned above, a little society to be part of, an identity, sometimes a little bit of responsibility. I cannot imagine who I would be without these places.
I know that my social muscle and my writing muscle would’ve been much weaker. I would probably have less faith in the possibility of finding my people.
Instead, I found my people like four or five times in my life already. What usually happens at some point, is that I change my external and inner landscape, take some timeless friends with me and leave the scene behind. That’s what happened so far.
I’m not sure how it will be with the current Twitter scene. Because everyone’s an adult, and changing at what seems like the same rate as I or faster, I feel quite confident that I have found and still will find friends for life and maybe a longer lived scene.
But, who knows, change is the only constant, and I would be a fool to discount it. All the more reason to enjoy this golden age of online connection we have right now. God only knows how long it will last. We better savor it.
Cliffhanger: Esports
This piece is concluding itself and I have to go, but I want to give a little cliffhanger: my forum history is not completely finished. After the metal timeline concluded I got into esports through StarCraft 2 (also thanks to Sebi). I spent some very meaningful time on tl.net, back when Team Liquid was just a forum and not an esports team.
The nickname: drooL. My job: StarCraft commentator. That led to new internet friends, and finally my work engagement with Twitch, which led to my career success, which led to my sabbatical. A story for another day. Subscribe for part 2!
Thank you for reading this, and I’m very interested in your experiences with making friends online. If you’d like to share in the comments, feel most free.
Many blessings and much love
S