Don't be sorry. The hatred of me is well-deserved, not for the reasons believed, but for reasons that I will now reveal publicly.
I am what is known in Latin America as a digital guerrilla. I show up in promising social spaces and attempt to perform a social transformation. Once I have done all I can, I move on and do it again, sometimes online, sometimes offline. I have been popping in and out of existence like this for six (6) years. I do this alone, but I am also not the only one doing this - I learned it partly by studying the methods of others.
This is the first time where it grew into an organizational effort. The Yesterweb was created by Sadness as an aimless hobby server and I joined because I wanted to see if I could help Sadness stop being sad. Sadness did in fact stop being sad. This inspired her to strive for a higher purpose with the Yesterweb, though she had zero experience with ever doing anything like that.
Although I was fairly certain of the limitations of the Yesterweb, you can never truly know what's possible until you try. I also can't impose my beliefs on others, only try to convince them, and sometimes people need to see proof of something before they can be convinced of it. So we worked on the Yesterweb anyway, even if I had (accurately but not precisely) guessed that it would fail in the end. I knew it was doomed from the start but it was worth seeing what we could accomplish along the way.
It was only *after* the Yesterweb was created that we discovered (as in consciously recognized) the social movement which was the precondition for its existence. So in my defense I did not have a premeditated intention of transforming the movement, I just found myself within it because I was also building a personal website at the time.
So we set out with the near-impossible task of trying to transform the pre-existing Web Revival movement into something like a Social Revival. Trying to building new things within old things even if the old weighed heavily on us like a nightmare. Given the unique characteristics of this particular movement - with its romanticization of a better past and technology from an era that was previously only available to the wealthiest 5% of humanity, and its hatred of contemporary "social" media - it should be reasonable to expect that it would be extremely difficult to convince most of the necessity of creating something new, progressive, and social.
If you can imagine this web revival movement on the large-scale, out of every 1001 people interested, 1 will recognize the need for a profound social transformation and act towards it, 100 will be sympathetic and support it at least in thought, and the 900 of the rest will not care (or worse). This is not what is normally expected - in an average social movement, those who are sympathetic are usually in the majority, but this ones' particular hang-up on nostalgia and period-revival shifts the majority of the movement into being unable to see or want anything genuinely progressive. (This is an over-simplification, to keep this post short and readable.)
We were always overwhelmed by the uncaring majority, but we stayed optimistic because of the 10% who did care, so we pushed on anyway. I was teaching Sadness how to organize while we were building the community. This education takes several months or even years for a single individual and requires a lot of study + practice (keep this in mind with our discord server growing by 3 or 4 people daily). Eventually Auzzie joined and was our rare 1 in 1000 who was absolutely committed to our mission, but he also needed to be trained and educated. The server and forum are already practically over and we still have a lot left to study.
