LET'S ALL QUIT THE INTERNET!

i grew up on the internet. it raised me more than my parents did. i can't really blame them; my mom and dad worked full time, my granddad worked from home so i never wanted to bother him, and my grandmother couldn't give a shit about what i did in my free time unless it annoyed her. classes still taught children about internet safety when i was growing up.
i could navigate a computer when i was still in single digits, and i was always on it. i'd watch youtube videos for background noise while i drew or played with clay. i played on pet sites and kid-oriented MMOs, and i roleplayed on forums with strangers. i made up stories for every minecraft world i created. by the time i was entering middle school, i barely had friends offline. the curse of being autistic with no support due to being undiagnosed.
by ten or eleven, i got on deviantart because all of my friends were on it. i knew i was underage, so i lied and said i really was thirteen. a lot of kids did, and still do now. i spent a lot of time on there just browsing stamps and page decorations, but i never learned how to make profile codes. i loved them, but couldn't understand them. coding didn't come to me naturally, and i had already decided that if i couldn't pick up a skill immediately, i would never be good at it.
it was fun! the internet was a fun place! deviantart was a friendly place for artists, twitter was for the normies, tumblr was for the insane people, youtube had anything you could ever want to watch, and tiktok and discord didn't fucking exist. there were bad things, and people argued a lot, but i could ignore those spaces and just have fun with my friends!
i turned thirteen in 2016. finally, i could actually use social media apps without having to lie! by this time i already had deviantart, and skype, and discord (a new and exciting alternative to skype!), and reddit, but from now on i didn't have to pretend. i was always told not to give out my age online, but i didn't really care. no one had ever been nasty to me about it, so i didn't hide the fact that i was a child.
i found out quickly that people really don't care about your age on discord. i was allowed to do anything, and it was so fun! i made sexual jokes to people my age and people much older than me, and they joked back. i called strangers 'mom' and 'dad'. i did highly NSFW roleplays under the supervision of adults, and with adults sometimes too. it was fun. i was having fun. i told my school friends about it and no one thought it was weird. one of my friends read yaoi in class, i had my phone taken away several times because i played mystic messenger during school hours... it's funny what makes me feel nostalgic.
i'm one of the lucky ones. i was never directly groomed, i never sent anyone sexual photos, i never met with anyone in real life. i was smart enough not to do any of that, and mature enough to talk about sex with adults, right? it doesn't really matter. the internet raised me and it hurt me, just like my parents. i grew up with it like it was a sibling.
slowly, all of the forums i used went quiet. people moved on. they moved to discord. personal websites stopped being shared as their creators moved on and stopped updating. the games i used to play on disney and nick and cartoon network were erased. tumblr banned porn, which is what it was known for. deviantart changed layouts, reddit changed layouts, everything was different.
by now you're probably thinking, well, what's the point of any of this? my answer: who gives a fuck? this is my website.
it feels like every community space on the internet has disappeared, because it's been sanitized for advertisers. corporations don't want you to have friends and community. you can barely say fuck or shit, and anything sexual can't be any left of vanilla - if porn is allowed at all. i hate social media. i hate nearly every alternative to popular social media. i use tumblr, sure, but that's more of a hostage situation. twitter is run by a nazi fuck and full of nazi fucks and people who will accuse you of sex crimes over pixels. reddit is full of annoying people who will jump on any bandwagon if it means they get to mock someone. i had to uninstall tiktok years ago because everything about it pissed me off.
the internet today isn't safe for children. it never really was, but it's targeting them now. spaces are sanitized to "protect" children, children who can't even use the sites being "cleaned". but this page doesn't have to be sanitized, i can post whatever the fuck i want. fuck them kids! this is a space free from punishment of thoughtcrime, puritan nonsense, and childproofing.
i was a child on the internet. i learned internet safety. i ignored it. i remember being on deviantart when i wasn't thirteen, looking at the cool profile codes, and thinking i want to make one of those. i just had no idea how. now i can look back and think if i had just sat down and read some HTML tutorials, i would have made something back then. i would have made something on toyhouse when i was seventeen if i knew any HTML. now, i have this. a space where i can just be fucking weird, one that i made by myself and for myself.
i made this site in 2023 on a whim; my friends had sites, why not make one myself? just like deviantart back in the day. this is a site for that weird little preteen sitting by himself wishing he could make a custom profile for himself. look where we are now!