Asklemmy

I used to get that feeling now and then, not a need to "investigate" them, but a small sense of lonliness seeing that a place that was bustling with conversation and community isn't anymore.

I think it lessens as you age though.

There are countless situations in life that can cause people to move on from a group, hobby, social circle, forum, etc. I'd argue that most of them are perfectly normal and healthy, like having kids, moving, finding new hobbies, changing jobs, life events changing free time, making new friends, finding a new partner, etc.

Sometimes people find their way back, sometimes they don't.

People don't stay the same forever, so their interests and how they spend their time won't either. I think life would be very boring if that wasn't the case.

I do this with old musicians. I listen to a lot of Indy type stuff and ill see they haven't released in years... It makes me wonder. At the same time the entertainment industry and life is pretty bullshit so good on them if they left it.

Also old YouTuber before things were viral and completely soulless.

I come across ancient threads all the time when looking up tech problems. Sometimes you find still working solutions amidst the broken links and defunct profiles, other times it's DenverCoder9.

I don't. I assume they've gotten older and have less time to fuck around online and prefer it that way.

I bet the Germans or the Japanese have a word for that feeling that can't be translated in any other language.

I sometimes get that feeling when I run across someone's personal blog, and it hasn't seen updates in quite a long while (yeah, like in ten years or so). However, as with most of the other replies here, I tend to just assume they've lost interest and moved on.

I've had some blogs like that myself, and I'm certainly still alive (I hope, lol!) Some of them already gone with the sites themselves like Multiply, if you ever remember that, also, Friendster blogs—all this in the late 2000's and early 2010's. Then there's some Wordpress blogs I used for a while back in 2015~2018. I just got lazy, lost interest, and so left them in the dust.

Thus, yeah, I simply assume they're doing just fine, and have just moved on with their lives.

However, there's a different feeling for when I browse the blog/social media profile of someone I definitely knew has already passed on. It hits different. It's like a frozen snapshot of their life. Their final post just there. A lot of times, the final post doesn't even indicate anything. Their lives just went on as normal until it didn't, and it just hits me differently than someone who I would just assume have just stopped posting.

Oh yeah big time.

I've got ancient blogs and comments left on ebaumsworld from when the internet and I were still children. Every now and again I like to revisit the site and see the ghosts of the era. It's probably been 5 or so years since my last visit. It's a particular feeling for sure.

For me I think part of it is more nostalgia for a certain relationship I had with this person, even if it wasn’t a close one, and my life during the time I knew them.

I think that the internet has given us this almost elongation effect to personal relationships though. Some people are just meant to pass into our lives for a brief time then pass out of them, and that’s okay

I've definitely had that feeling recently while digging up info from old forums. I start to appreciate the regulars who spent years posting useful comments and wondering what happened to them.

::: spoiler The dormant feel, to me, is like a feeling of a task well done, or a well drawn map.

OP sounds like they type of person I struggle the most to understand with creative writing and character development. I've spent a lot of time trying to develop roleplay contexts to understand people that make and seek out connections like this or various other ways.

Just for contrast. I do not generally think of other people like this. I have empathy, and I care, but my primary functional thought is very abstracted. My mind is kinda like a roadmap that is driven based on curiosity and intuitive thinking. One of my major outlier traits is that my sense of justice and moral compass exist in a third person like perspective. That perceptive/judgement aspect is rather brutally applied to myself and everything I encounter, but it is not part of my core sense of self. This is the mechanism that gives me mobility across different concepts and ideas in ways other people seem to struggle with. I'm always questioning the status quo by looking for the lowest level biases to question, and this is what drives me to be so detailed in my interests. I'm extremely curious about everything, but mostly I'm like a cartographer developing a map of all kinds of roads, trails, and interesting features. I really enjoy sharing the experience of navigating that edge of the map with others. I take deep dives into niche communities and tend to make a footprint in them, but I have never experienced another human or community that is on a similar overall map of exploration like myself. I'll comment on and share my past mapped experiences, but I stopped letting others hold me back from my explorations a long time ago. You would likely struggle to connect all of my profiles and interests in digital footprints going back to the late 90's, but I'm still around chugging along. I greatly value the people that want to explore with me, but I don't care to stick around in one interest at the detriment to my other curiosities and my desire for independent introversion.

I struggle most to understand boundaries that other people have. I try not to pry, I speak in general abstracted terms, and put myself in the conversational context to avoid asking people uncomfortable questions that are inline with some simple abstract curiosity but might come off as personal to some people. I having no clue what level of information other people are interested in or at what level they can engage with me. I'm extremely aware that the edges of my map are poorly grounded and subject to revision, like I'm actually quite insecure in myself and knowledge in an absolute sense, but in aggregate I can come across as arrogant or pedantic. Anyone that is close to me knows better, like I want to be told I'm wrong in a way that lets me make corrections on my mental map.

That is like my surface world view, in my idea of a nutshell, and why you might find a person like me that leaves a mark then disappears.

I dont. I get a sense of happiness when I read through old threads and blogs because I'm basically looking through a portal to that year. Its like reading an old book it gives you perspective of how people felt at that moment in history.

I used to, but not anymore.