Man this resonated so hard. I think the author and I are approximately the same age so the narrative progression of their experience of the internet reflects mine so hard. I’d like to hope that the fediverse is in some way an attempt to reach back toward that, but the issue I see is that most of the applications that have been developed are aping the format of for-profit, ad driven, infiniscroll based engagement machines. The islands of self-contained niche interest are now few and far between and near impossible to discover because search is shit.

That said, I think some form of federated curated search is an interesting concept that may actually be scalable enough to be useful yet restricted enough to not be considered commercially viable and this attractive to SEO spam.

Anyway, this is my first comment on Lemmy, thanks for sharing this :)

Cool article actually. Even for non-autistic people, the internet was a better place before all the consolidation onto cancerous social media sites.

Tldr: neurotypicals ruin everything good.

Get away from commercial social media. Chat services were always more helpful, and you don’t have to deal with algorithms dragging you down. I’m on Matrix, IRC, and Discord, and in only communities that are relevant to my interests, academic, or autism centric. I browse Lemmy occasionally, but even it has the same pitfalls.

My neurodivergent self is having a really hard time reading that article.

For us spectrum jockeys—avoidant, overwhelmed, and overstimulated as we are—community can be as slippery as the spectrum itself: something you surf along until you’ve slid straight through whatever you thought the end point was, before arriving back where you’ve always been, alone with your perpetually “other” self.

That’s the second sentence. And that’s all only one sentence. I’ve re-read it multiple times and I’m still scratching my head at most of it.

Anyway, I’m not sure I can relate to the sentiment that the internet was once more welcoming to neurodivergent people. I’ve never felt a sense of community online. It sure was a good tool for discovering new music, however.