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A personal goodbye

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Russ Allbery

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Sep 30, 2006, 8:05:42 PM9/30/06
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With this post, I'm formally stepping down as news.announce.newgroups
moderator, and shortly after making it I will be unsubscribing from
news.groups, probably permanently.

I grew up on news.groups.

I arrived there for the first time as a college freshman in 1993, full of
wild political ideas, only barely knowing how to communicate effectively,
not knowing how to argue, not knowing how to see anything from another's
perspective. I promptly dove into the middle of the flamewar around the
soc.culture.tibet proposal, got angry, cared too much, hated the result,
and left. And then came back and stayed.

I hope some of you who are reading this know what it's like to be part of
a discussion community. I hope you've experienced a newsgroup becoming
more than a label, felt a newsgroup become a place, joined a community of
strangers connected by nothing more than words on a screen. Joined by
nothing less than months and years of people's thoughts, desires,
emotions, dreams, and frustrations given life and shape in the interaction
of those words and the fleeting glimmers of the people behind them.
People have formed those communities on Usenet around all types of topics
from the shape of their relationships to collectable card games, around
comic books and Christianity, about science fiction and soap operas. And
many of them have found one particular community that drew them more than
others, that felt like their home, that became more than a topic, that
personified Usenet for them.

news.groups was my community. I'm not sure how that happened, or even how
it was possible. It was a working group, a group with a purpose. A place
people came to, used for often unpleasant and tedious arguments, and then
left again. It was a place that many Usenet readers hated to deal with.
And yet, somehow, it formed a community, a raucous, discordant, often
frustrated, sometimes angry, and always divided community, a community
that sometimes existed only in retrospect, that was so full of day-to-day
frustration that it often felt like more than one could bear. It was a
community full of people with nothing in common except that they cared
about Usenet, cared about how Usenet was built, and one day wandered into
news.groups and never got around to leaving. We had few interests in
common, we disagreed vehemently about the direction of Usenet, and we
carried standing grudges that lasted years. We were news.groupies.

It wasn't quite friendly. I never went to any in-person gathering. Our
social net was faint and twisted compared to many other newsgroups.
You could never quite let down your guard. And yet I met people in
news.groups, through news.groups, with whom I could let down my guard
completely. Some of the most trustworthy, most caring, most clear-sighted
and infuriating and helpful and thought-provoking and honorable people I
have ever met I met in news.groups. I was welcomed and listened to and
trusted by that community, slapped around when I needed it, and pushed
into deciding what kind of person I wanted to be.

Thank you.

Thank you to everyone who was or is part of that community. Thank you to
everyone who came to news.groups to argue for your proposal. Thank you to
every news administrator who cared and made what we were trying to do feel
worthwhile. Thank you to every person who posted to Usenet, who read
Usenet, who worked on the code and the systems and the infrastructure that
made a network exist where news.groups could exist, where that community
could exist, where I could be a part of it.

Thank you for letting me bleed in the group when I cared about something
so much it hurt. Thank you for watching me fumble towards learning what
consensus meant. Thank you for teaching me how to debate, for teaching me
how to stop debating, for teaching me how to let things roll off and for
watching and reacting and arguing when they didn't. Thank you for filling
my world with people who didn't care about what I cared about, who didn't
believe in what I believed in, who didn't think the way that I did, and
yet who were real and present and didn't change or disappear just because
I disagreed with them. Thank you for watching me fail and fail and fail
again at understanding someone whose concerns were outside my world view,
and then making me feel like the occasional small successes actually meant
something. Thank you for teaching me how to de-escalate arguments by
giving me a place to fail more times than I can count. Thank you for
teaching me how to let enemies become friends.

I have tried to pay forward what Usenet did for me, but I will never be
able to repay what news.groups has given me over the past thirteen years.
I would not be the person I am today without that experience. For each of
my failures of understanding, of mediation, of honest apology and mutual
understanding that you have suffered through here, I can point to a
success in the rest of my life that wouldn't have been possible without
you. You gave me a space to discover the person I became. It's a gift
without measure.

Leaving this community has been one of the hardest decisions I have ever
made. This wasn't a job, this wasn't just work, this wasn't just social
obligation. This was, as hard as it was to hold on to the feeling each
day, a home. I'm one of the last still here of my peer group. The
community has changed. The concerns have changed. I see Usenet still as
a Usenet of 1998, the Usenet of a community of people who have since
scattered to the four winds or even, in some cases, passed away. It's
time to let go. And still, when I walk away, there's going to be a
news.groups-sized hole in my heart, and nothing else will ever quite fill
it.

Letting go has hurt, and I've bled that hurt and emotion into news.groups,
and in the process I've made life harder for some others, have made Usenet
less of a community for them. For that I am profoundly sorry. I didn't
do this easily, or well. It's the last bit of growing up on news.groups
that I'll get to do.

I write best when I'm angry, when I'm upset. I'm not sure I can express
gratitude, or warmth, or happy memories with anywhere near the power that
they deserve. I've tried to write about Usenet in anger and in
melancholy, in happiness and sorrow, and I've still never captured what it
means to me. The closest that I've ever come are also two of the darkest,
and yet still the most true.

<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html>
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/community.html>

That same strength of emotion is behind the gratitude, inside the
memories, in this message. I cannot name all the people from news.groups
who have touched me and made my life better. There have been so many that
I've lost count.

I have been honored to be part of this for the past thirteen years. What
we did mattered. The community was real, even if we never talked about
it. The emotions were real, even if we rarely posted them. I will miss
you all greatly.

Eagle bows
Salutes the dance partner
Reluctantly takes flight

-- Russ Allbery
September 30, 2006
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