Hi Crowd!
Over the weekend I saw that Nick Gray launched slashfriends in an attempt to get people to add a /friends page to their websites. The basic idea is that this is like an old school blogroll or webring, which fellow olds may remember was how we used to find interesting people on the internet before search and algohell took over. Essentially someone trusted links a few people they also trust/enjoy reading. Slashfriends (aka /f) reads the page and adds the links to the database. At worst, you can visit someones site and see a few recommendations from them, at best you can go to /f and click “take me to a random page” and get teleported to the personal website of someone you might not know, but someone you know might know. It’s pretty fun. In Nick’s initial announcement he said ideally link to people’s personal sites, but as a fallback social media or whatever could work too.
For my implementation I didn’t think a list of social media or substack accounts was really interesting, so I imposed the very strict qualification that I’m only linking to people I actually know in person who write regular blog posts on their own websites. Dear reader, that was hard. Used to be I could think of hundreds of people doing that, now I struggled to get 5. Some people I thought I could include, upon investigation, realized they’d last posted 2-3 years ago. Or in some cases their personal website was now just a redirect to some newsletter platform or a storefront. This was a bummer and another reminder of the web we almost had and lost somewhere along the way.
This also got me thinking about the conversation we used to have way back in the early friendster days about the distinction between a friend, someone you know, and someone you just follow online. And perhaps more importantly, the mutuality of that. On that short list of just 5 people who are thrown under the banner of “friends” the reality is it ranges from genuine friends who I’ve been through so much with and would trust with my life to people I’ve known for decades and always enjoy seeing if I run into them but probably haven’t actually talked to in years to one person who I met once one time, and they were friendly and gracious but I’ve never interacted with outside of that even though I always enjoy their writing. Are these all friends? Would they all consider me a friend? So there’s this distinction here at least between a friend and someone you know. It’s complicated.
I think this idea of what and who friends are is something that’s been on my mind a lot recently because when I think of “my friends” they are almost exclusively people who live far away from me and many of whom I haven’t seen in years. Because I make wonderful life decisions my travel is almost exclusively work related so unless there’s a fairly obvious business justification for spending time/money on going somewhere, I don’t go, which kind of adds to that feeling of distance and isolation.
I think I started thinking about this a lot when I started running earlier this year, which is still an insane thing for me to type, because when I’d run I’d listen to music which would make me think of the bands I was friends with or worked with and who I think of them as friends but I wonder if that’s how they think of me? I can think of more than one time when I’ve been excited to reconnect with a “friend” I hadn’t seen in a very long time and been faced with the terrifying realization that they were struggling to remember who I was. That’s a fun one. I’ve been told this ties into some ADHD stuff where my association to people locks at our last interaction, but for other people it degrades over time. So in practice if I hung out with someone for a few hours in 1996 and bump into them in 2026 I think of them as that person I had a great time hanging out with last time I saw them while they might think of me as some rando they haven’t thought about in 30 years.
Anyway at some point I decided to try listening to music podcasts because I thought that would be less likely to take a random detour into introspective meltdown at the 3km mark. I ended up listening to Riff Worship which I think I stumbled on because they were talking about Deadguy’s Fixation on a Co-Worker and I also saw they had an episode about His Hero Is Gone’s Monuments to Thieves. Both incredible records. But the hosts are a bit younger so this is a harsh reminder that these records are ~30 years old now, and a bit disturbing to listen to people tell stories about discovering such iconic hardcore albums by clicking through YouTube recommendations (linked above for your enjoyment) rather that flipping through bins at a record store, but we’ve already addressed the old thing.
This is only relevant at all because in these episodes talking about these bands they are telling stories they read online somewhere involving other people and bands and labels and given that this was the all encompassing thing in my life at the time these records came out I know the labels and people and bands and even some of the venues. I remember some of them like yesterday (see prior thing about memories locked at last interaction). And of course that brings us right back to thinking about these people that I think I know and I think I’m friends with… but wondering if I’m not as reliable a narrator as I’d like to think I am.
Anyway, the /f thing is yet another motivation to try put something here more often. Thanks for sticking around.
-s