I can definitely relate you in the ways you described in the post.
>>952029 (OP)>Despite there being literally billions of people online, I keep encountering people I've interacted with before in entirely different communities that should have no overlap.It's strange.
Incredibly strange feeling.
I've had friends who I haven't talken to in literal months be in the same online communities as me. Especially on the sharty too.
Strange feeling whenever you talk to someone who you used to play games with 7 years ago, and they have a similar style of humor as you and also ended up on this site somehow.
>Yesterday, I left a comment on an article somewhere. A few hours later, I got a reply from someone I used to frequently troll on a completely different site in 2022.There's online communities who I remember trolling anonymously who still have no clue it was me behind them.
It's weird to see if someone like that, someone who knows you, but also someone who clearly doesn't, will ever actually realize who you are.
I've always found it to be quite an odd feeling. For me, the thrill of subtly making innuendos to previous activities, but in a way that wouldn't seem completely obvious, as a test to see what you can get away with has always been my preferred way of doing it.
It's always humorous to see people completely oblivious whenever you're giving out hints like that.
>It felt so surreal seeing him interact with my "main" identity without knowing that he's replying to the same person who used to torment him years ago.This sort of disconnect between our real world and our online persona's always makes me re-think my life.
I spend a lot of my days online, and to think that I have an entire personality, an entire list of aliases online before that people still think about is absurd, despite me being a literal stranger.
It's always weird to think, whenever I'm outside or doing something else, to think about my online personality compared to my IRL one.
There's definitely some sort of disconnect between the two and seeing them both overlap is something that completely takes me out of everything, it makes me feel disgusted and sick. Having people in your real life find out about your Internet activities, and find out how completely different you are always puts a bad taste in my mouth. I know some people can never see me the same after learning what I've done online, and vice versa. I've known people who I can't look at the same because I know what they do when they think they're anonymous, and they're oblivious.
>It was really frustrating having to hold my tongue and sit out that conversation since I had a ton to say on the topic. But I couldn't risk linking those identities since I made a really bad OPSEC mistake on the identity I used to create that piracy tool.There's been quite a few instances where I can say I relate to you on this.
There's been quite a few times where I've interacted with people online and I've accidentally done an OPSEC fuck-up, but they're completely oblivious to it.
Or they decide to investigate who this is, but don't think it's me because of how different I was.
Having to hold your tongue under your breath on topics like these is what really puts me on edge, I've had to act completely oblivious to certain subjects because I've had involvements in them prior and I don't want a certain person recognizing whoever I am because they participated in that same niche micro-community years ago.
>Having really good OPSEC and dozens of separated identities is lonely honestly.It is.
It really is.
Having most of your modern friends be privacy schizos who you meet off imageboards and forums is a completely foreign concept to me.
In my years of having Internet friends, I've always met them either through games or social platforms, a place where many do not care much about their personal OPSEC.
Having to interact with people who refuse to share a modicum of information about themselves because of what they're afraid of is incredibly distant to me.
I've known people online who have told me literally everything about themselves within a few days of getting to know them, but having most of your friends originate from strange Internet corners where you don't even know where they're from or how old they are feels foreign to me.
But at the same time, I understand why they are like that. I used to never care about my OPSEC but after being used to this format of these sites, it's quite understandable why people are like this. I've definitely become the same myself, deleting all my socials or anything that could connect back to me in an attempt to conceal my identity to people I just met.
>Nobody ever knows the real youIt's definitely one of those things you have to balance.
Knowing when it's fine to powerlevel and when it's best to hide it is an incredibly valuable skill.
I can tell my friends about certain anecdotes that happened to me in online spaces years ago, but I can't go into much depth without compromising myself.
But still, everyone who is my friend nowadays doesn't know the real me. But I don't think anyone in person knows that either, nobody online nor in-person will ever know the real me unless my aliases collide, which has unfortunately happened quite a few times.
>And you can't let anyone in without risking everythingThere's a specific friend who I know and have talked to over the course of half a decade almost every single day now who knows almost every single tiny bit of information about me.
I revealed all of it to him years ago without a second thought because he was my best friend and I trusted him.
I still trust him, I still trust him with literal years worth of this information, I still trust him with knowing my full name and my address and every single thing about me despite me never getting to see him in-person.
But it makes me incredibly tense, knowing there's an Internet stranger who knows so much about me, despite me knowing the exact same about him.
He could just decide to ruin my life forever if he wanted to because he has the ability to, but I have the same ability as well. What's stopping me? But what's stopping him? Aside from me or him losing the only connection either of us have had for literal years and the guilt of doing so.
The fact that I put all my trust into a stranger years ago and have to live with that makes me never want to do it again, but knowing how one of my worst traits is being an oversharer, I'll probably make the same mistake as I did years ago.
Even weirder that I know this random guy who lives thousands of miles away from me better than some of my own family members or people I know in-person, and how he knows me better than those people as well.
>I wonder how much more common these small world moments would be if the internet had no anonymity whatsoever and everyone used the same names everywhere.The Internet would be dead as we know it.
Being able to say whatever you want without any repercussions is something that society's have been built on, and it's all perfectly coalesced into the Internet; a true space where you can say what you want anonymously.
If we never had that ability, then the Internet would be a soulless husk. No-one would want to create or say anything with their real names attached to it.
I'm just glad this is one of the only safe spaces where I can still have that ability.
