The way we were

It’s been a month.
 
Last night I was talking with my daughter about how the blip changes have affected the sense of community. She reminded me about when she inhabited a web community quite like this, based on writing and commenting on fiction. One day, unannounced, about 500 journals were deleted. Entirely. There'd been a complaint about explicit writing in some journals and the organisers panicked. There was an outcry from users and the organisers apologised and reinstated most of the journals. But they couldn’t reinstate the trust and some people jumped ship. My daughter stayed and a few months later, for similar reasons, a whole lot more journals were blocked. Not deleted but made inaccessible. A group of users set up an alternative site and wrote some code to ‘scrape’ their entries from the old site to the new but the community fragmented.
 
I had forgotten all the grief and indignation that invaded our household at the time.
 
Then I read Grace’s post about the time that blip was small enough to know everyone. I wasn’t here then and nor was I on Twitter when, apparently, that too was a small friendly community, also mourned by its users as it grew.
 
It set me thinking about communities and cultures and how they inevitably change, and in one direction only. Similar things happen in the solid world too, it's just that we are a bit less dependent on forces we can't control and we tend to know in advance when the ruptures will happen (such as children moving school).
 
It’s sad, but we all know we won’t be going back to how things were. For anyone coming into blipfoto now, this site is what it is, white with coloured stripes, and we older hands are the clucking people in the corner starting our sentences with, 'In our day...'
 
The organisation that hosted my daughter’s long-ago community was started by an American programmer to keep his friends updated on his activities. It now has about 40 million accounts, of which something under 2 million are active, and is owned by a Russian media company.
 
And my daughter? She now shares a flat with someone she met there.