Spoilering because it relates to my last post. It's also long and I sound like an old fart.
I've hoped to engage with more lucid dreaming communities so I can network some more. I feel out of date, and I've heard murmurs that certain communities have highly active discussions about events and new developments. I was intrigued by the idea of knowing firsthand about events and conferences.
However, this week was disastrous and demotivating.
I tried participating in a certain group recently. There were some nitpicky and petty members who badmouthed people behind their backs, and it seemed permitted by the mods. There was a lot of misinformation being spread because of telephone-style information propagation. Articles that referenced blog posts, that referenced youtube videos, that referenced Dreamviews posts, for example, and the attributions and information had become unfortunately misconstrued or even lost in translation. There seemed to be no demand for meta posts, which I learned after I published something about said misinformation to crickets. I had spent days writing it, but it held no value to the community which I genuinely did not expect. I had seen many comments about how "x is a myth", "y isn't true" during my time there, so my assumption that more people would appreciate the post seemed solid.
Currently I wonder if it was simply too long, and therefore indigestible for casual scrolling. The idea makes me sad.
Next I considered humouring discord servers again. I had joined a few in the past, but I seldom participated (or stayed) because they were too fast or too cliquish, or the overall vibe was too vociferous for me. I wondered if I had simply been joining the wrong servers. I hopped into a lucid dreaming discord server to say hello and share advice. Unlike other servers I had joined, nobody said hello to me, nor the other newcomers who showed up shortly afterwards, despite bots mentioning newcomers in the conversations. There was a lot of passive small talk, nothing I was really interested in talking about. I inched into the chat when someone mentioned SAT. People recognized me. Everyone who commented assumed I was a man. People started typing, then I received three(?) questions within a minute or two of each other. Seconds later, all the questions had already vanished past the top of my screen. I was in the process of answering the first question when the others showed up.
I saw more and more comments getting posted and I felt addled. Kind of overwhelmed. It was like a switch activated in my brain and went, "no, stop typing, just get out now". It's like every part of me wanted out of there ASAP. So I just commented that the chat was moving a bit too fast for me, and I left. Not the best exit, but I couldn't do it.
It was an extremely active server. It was the highest number of people I've seen active in a lucid dreaming community in years. However, it hurt in a profound way other servers didn't, because as someone who grew up on forums and on Dreamviews, I was naturally predisposed to compare it to Dreamviews. The activity on discord is very different from forum activity. Discord just operates differently, and I wish I'd remembered better from earlier efforts. There is no time to catch one's breath. There is FOMO, because you can go an hour and miss two hundred comments, not knowing if there was valuable content in there, and if you don't check relatively fast, the comments will all get pushed up into the nethersphere and become less and less accessible and because of that, catching up becomes an urgent, Sisyphean task. You can't reply to someone in a channel without the implicit suggestion that you're available, immediately, to talk to everyone else too. There's no way to review older advice/comments easily, because scrolling up, up, up is more labour intensive than clicking a few buttons back in a forum thread. There is far more digging through comments on discord, because people often post very short comments like "cool" or "gn". Interaction-wise it might be fine for some, but functionality-wise it's a nightmare.
Moreover, I'm frustrated that Discord seems to be such a hotspot for the community. There are upsides to Discord, but it's not good as an information repository. It's not good for many kinds of interaction. It's stressful. It's too fast-paced. It's hard to help people if you just get dogpiled immediately. I'm frustrated in myself because I can't keep up. I hate how I feel precluded from participating in a community that literally recognizes me, and wants to talk to me, but simply isn't located on a platform that makes it easy for me to respond effectively.
This is a very significant realization for me, because I spent years wanting to re-integrate in the LDing community, finally took the chance this week, and it hasn't gone well. I don't think there's a place for me, or people like me anymore. I'm deeply upset and I'm not sure where I'll go from here.
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