We call this a "community" but the turnover of people as noted many times has been quite unacceptably high.
I'd like to single out "Caelus" in particular, a member that many will have come across on this forum. I got to know him quite well for a while on a discord server that served for a while for people who get "Bullied" on this forum immediatey that they join until they learn to self moderate their "unacceptable" thoughts.
He wrote an awful lot there about his life and challenges, very articulately and as angrily as one might expect an intelligent, hard working, young autisic man to be in this particularly annoying world as it is right now. I even got to speak with him on one occasion using the discord video conferencing feature, (that never worked well for me) He talked a great deal about his Job ad teh challenges and iniquities he faced daily at work, and to be honest I really looked forwards to his walls of text.
NOW, I am supposed to have in excess of 50 Friends on this forum, and I've been a very prolific poster at some points, as I am sure many will agree.
After the "changeover" I was real slow to connect again to this forum for various reasons, and when I did, I found I had 3 people reach out to me in my PM's box, and one of them wonder where I had gone to on the open forum. To be honest, even cynical me fidns that to be statistically interesting and food for thought. There's a lot of people who report on this forum to be "alone in the world". Caelus would ever be one of those of course, but how many people have asked him how is he doing? I can't help wondering
There are evidently some people who regularly network and are friends in "real life" and who support each other in little sub-communties on this forum, (hence the need for the discord server which I used to attend, apparently for people who got "mobbed" by one such clique) but I suspect that there are a VAST majority of people here who really don't really feel like they "belong" at all.
I'd LIKE to think that Caelus does have a real friend in this community who does know how he is doing ATM, but it has been 3 Months since I last got a P.M. off him, and I think he was railing against his second consecutive sentence of "moderation" so he might have decided to throw in the towel. I didn't really see him get much support from the forum and he patently did not find this to be a "community" as such, where his uniqueness was accepted as a fellow autist MIGHT initially expect until they get the full N.A.S. forum experience.
May I observe as a faily long term "survivor" on this forum, that the name "Community" is perhaps a gross midescription of whateevr this thing we have actually is.
Perhaps it is more of an online "Collective" really, with all the nuances that word holds these days...
