[empathy_m]

I spent a fair chunk of the mid-90s to early 2000s on a moderately busy MUD with a group of people who, it turns out, were all about the same age. No idea in retrospect how I juggled this with school/friends/work - I guess kids just have a ton of free time.

Kind of drifted away for a couple decades during college and after, as other things filed up the time.

I came back decades later, after going to a memorial service for a friend who died untimely of a serious medical condition, and seeing that a bunch of the people there were from her online community. They talked about the MUSH she hung out on had been a real lifeline when she was bedbound for immune-system reasons -- it was really, really cool to see, and I went back and checked out my own place and met up with folks again.

During 2020 a TON of people all had the same idea and all logged in to my place again. There was a brief resurgence of activity (from dozens of people online to a hundred+). Very few new players, but very cool to see people who were all, more or less, the same cohort -- just grown up now. Folks have slowly drifted away again in the past couple years, and that's fine too. I'm glad it's there.

It's nice to have these subcritical, human-scale online communities. Not everything has to be a subreddit or even a 10,000+ person discord - you can just hang out on a server!