if i do a neocities search for journal and sort by last-updated there's a few, but it's scattershot. a quarter century ago what we were doing was new and exciting. we put our journals online. our photos and our poetry. mostly we fed off each other's energy and kept it up for years. everyone linked to a handful of sites. best friends. aspirational people you hoped would notice you. you could map out hundreds of lives that way. it's hard now not to feel a twinge of sadness in the loss of this. some people are still journalling, but not nearly as many. it seems like so many of my old friends aren't writing anything anymore so much as just posting.
i've been not just on the web but elsewhere on the internet and so far the best thing i've found has been a gemlog: an irish t-girl writing down their life, every messy detail, talking about what they've been doing, what they've been hacking at, who they've been fucking; that they're cold but they have blankets, that they've got people and they're happy.
finding what you want specifically can be harder in gemspace - really only one search engine i'm aware of, and it's not great. but finding interesting content in general seems to be easier. there are feeds like antenna. most people keep link directories. here on the small web, i keep hoping i'm just not looking hard enough, that there's a whole community like what we used to have just beyond the boundaries of my search. and i still choose to believe that, even if some part of me suspects i'm wrong. because what's the alternative? a mostly-empty web, all the fascinating people i used to know doling out their days on facebook and reddit and twitter, upvoting dumb shit, posting pictures of their kids, trying to fight the memory that being online used to be exciting and fun, the sensation that none of this feels right as they load up instagram and scroll and scroll and scroll.