Well said! When I got my first permanent internet connection in the 2000s, it opened up a whole new world for nerdy me.
In the meantime web3.0 has arrived and everything seems enshittified. And is continuing this way. But the nerdy people will still find their own save harbours as it always was, like you said!
We create our own spaces like Gemini/Gopher or the pubnixes. And we'll continue to find each other!
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There have always been those of us who lurk directly underneath the mainstream. Many of us were intoxicated by "nerd culture" breaking into the mainstream and were in fact ourselves pulled into that massive current during that time. Lately I've been realizing it wasn't, say, Star Trek or whatever that we really liked - it was the counterculture, more than anything.