DE Usernames, the story so far. in Life

In the off chance that people are looking at the newer entries that are popping up and seeing a common theme of DE in the user name you can thank two people for that. Myself for finding this site (I promise we’re not spam artist… but that’s exactly what a spam artist would say!) and Andrea (DE_jusjusndredre) for putting in the work to create a facebook group that would start at a mere 15 or so people that she had made friends with and over night has grown to around 60 people through the die-hard community that was part of a site called Digital Expressions.

Now I’m not going to repeat my last entry but this is really just a sum-up of the story so far.

Last night I got a text from a good online friend, Andrea, saying that our journal site of nearly 2 decades is closing down. In efforts to perserve the community she created a group and went on a spree of adding anyone she could think of and in turn, they added anyone they could think of.

The result was an unexpected outpouring of love and memories for the old stomping grounds where many of us bore our early teenage years mistakes for the world to witness but in a great wide world, DE was our bubble where we felt safe and at home. It was a place where we could share, guide, and learn from others. It was more than just a site, it was home, for a lot of broken pieces of people who just wanted to find some semblance of being whole again.

Over the years a lot of us found that as we grew and drifted apart, admitantly not using the site as much causing the traffic to turn to a trickle and the owner, and I think sole developer, to choose his priorites and cut his losses.

But there’s something to be said about the feeling that bubbles up when something like this happens. It’s like seeing your favourite family restauruant from when you were a kid shut down. There was an immediate response from the community to want to do something. Fundraising was discussed but being a smaller community it’s difficult to ask everyone for $100 to turn the site into a .com from a .nu and on top of that, having a Programmer for a wife, there’s the cost of maintaining it. Something that would take a great amount of teamwork for our community to do and when we’re all focusing on our lives that we had planned for, it seems a bit out of reach without one to take up the mantle.

And that’s where you come in PB. I guess with your recent influx of spammers, the DE Prefix caught someone’s attention, Josh’s, apparently.

Josh, who is an admin here, owner here? has reached out to the owner of our site in an effort to perserve and build our community back up.

It’s staggering, mind blowing even, to think that not even 24hrs ago we were thinking “Welp, this is it” because as great as this site is, it’s not “Home” and while even if we got 99% of the community to follow, there’s still those who may not find out in time and be lost.

So even if it’s just for the last glimmer of hope in saving our heartwarming community, I feel pretty damn good knowing that I had a part in it, and discovered a lot of writers that I never knew about on the original site.

Now to take the words out of my mouth and put them down here. If the community is really as important as we say, we better keep writing! No matter what.