One of the things that I’ve been asked a lot — by people in fandom when I participated in that (them wanting to meet me, them wondering if I would go to conventions), by various people on the Internet that I’d known or that I’ve known for varying periods of time — is… under what circumstances will I meet someone from the Internet in person, if there are any. I’ve also had well-meaning friends that I’ve known for awhile ask me the same question, so it’s not always asked by people that I mind answering it from. But the thing that has gotten me for awhile has always been the assumption that you have to be open to meeting people that you know, or even like, from the Internet “after enough time has passed”, or that there have to be favorable conditions for you to be willing to do this. Back when I participated in fandom activities online, I felt like I alienated more people than I befriended when I made it known that I wasn’t willing to meet up with them in person — bullet dodged there, perhaps literally — and that I had absolutely no intention on attending any conventions or other fan meet-ups even if someone else paid my way to attend, and this had been floated.

I felt like it made me a “bad member of fandom”, or that I “didn’t like (the show, or the thing) enough” if I wasn’t willing to meet people in person who… also liked that thing, or to attend conventions or fan meet-ups to show — other people, as it would turn out — “just how much I liked it”, but then I began to think about it more, and I realized that it didn’t matter at all to me what other people thought of just how much or how little I actually liked… whatever it was we were talking about, and that people ultimately did up end being right in that I did like it “less” than the people who were willing to pay several hundred dollars every so often for convention tickets, meet and greets, photo ops, the whole nine. And as time went on, I thought more about what that meant for the friendships that I had with people online. Under what circumstances would I meet them in person? Would I? Were there circumstances? (As it turns out, I am skittish about that as well.)

I think that for me to feel comfortable meeting people outside of… say, TwitchCon or VidCon — two conventions that I would feel safe attending, because I know how they are run and have seen evidence of how they are run online in both picture and video format — I would have had to know someone for an extremely long time online, so probably going on a consecutive decade. I wouldn’t want to meet up with them at my home address, because my current living situation is not tenable to that, and the people that I know in person are not friendly to the idea of “Internet friends” being brought around. It may be 2022, and we may do more online than we ever have, but some people are still less comfortable with the idea of the Internet tangibly being brought to their doorstep, and I respect that. I’m not going to force that on someone.

But right now, that’s not something that I actually want to think about since I can’t think of anyone off of the top of my head who satisfies that criteria. As much as I love so many of my Internet friends and think so many of them are awesome, I would much rather be conservative here (and during the pandemic, no less).

In case anyone is following what I wrote about in my last post, Tumblr continues to interact with people online under the guise of selling itself as a “fandom-friendly” blogging site (this could be one of the furthest things in the world given that the security of their site is awful, that doxxing happens on their website, that they are aware that the doxxing happens, and they take absolutely no corrective action against it even when it happens to minors). I continue to be glad that Tumblr is one less thing that I have to check or update in the morning, although I think the majority of people that I followed and were friends with on it had probably caught onto the fact that I wasn’t substantially participating on anything that had to do with the site for like… the longest time bar the very, very occasional one-off. I prefer the sites that I use to have more substantial security, for one thing. And it’s becoming a little bit of a joke amongst my friends at this point.

I’m also a lot more comfortable not actively using a site whose data can effortlessly be leaked.

For several days, I have been attempting to let a large blogging website know that I have become aware of exploitation through their site’s back end — namely, that it is possible, and apparently pretty easy for someone with the right amount of knowledge and fortitude to access information that one would at least think they should not be able to access. I have made reports to the blog site in question (okay, it’s Tumblr) about this, going into enough detail about the process as I’ve heard about it to hope that Tumblr would take the security of their site seriously enough to at least get back to me thanking me for letting them know about this and doing something, anything to fix it. As I’m sure a lot of you can probably already tell by the fact that this post is even being written, this is as far from the case as can possibly be. For multiple reasons, I no longer have an account on Tumblr. I did at one point, and I had for a long time, but I decided that for many reasons it was no longer worth the risk or even the time taken each morning to reblog one or two things pertinent to passing interests that I did not and do not talk about with any of the people that I know offline.

Anyway, Tumblr has “responded” to maybe a third of the reports that I have sent them total about more than one situation, sending me copied and pasted responses claiming that they will look into what I have reported to them… but not actually bothering to look into, or do anything about, any of it. At this point we are on day four of this being a known problem, although I’m beginning to wonder how long it’s been a problem for them on the back end of their website’s security (none of this is or will ever be my specialty, though). I think that if Tumblr cares so little about the integrity, safety, and security of their site to begin with that it should no longer be something that I concern myself over or with, and it’s not going to be something that I use in the future or let my children use. I think we would be better off using LiveJournal even though it is currently owned by Russia, because at least it is secure enough for me to feel safe writing about our daily lives in entries made to varying filters pre-programmed into the account that I’ve had there on it for years.