I moved away from my hometown nearly 8 years ago. I was really close to a lot of people before that (I’ve known some of them since preschool), but I moved, and grew further apart from them naturally as time went on. This is mainly because they all hung out together in person, and while I attempted to stay in touch with them over the years, I never really found success in doing so.
I did like to lurk on their discord server occasionally, mostly so I could see what some of them were getting up to. I would occasionally react to their messages in their discord server, but that was pretty much it for the last 3 or 4 years. It made me feel a bit of nostalgia and made me happy to see the people they were growing up to be. I don’t have social media other than here and discord (and I’ve frankly been on discord less and less), so it does kind of feel like a bummer that I won’t be able to see their messages anymore.
I don’t really feel any anger over it since we had grown apart, but I do feel some type of sadness that I can’t quite identify. It’s probably because in the 8 years that my now wife and I have lived where we do now, we have struggled to meet new friends. I legitimately have no in person friends other than my wife, which is not a healthy place to be. So, I suppose this feels like officially losing almost all of my in person friends, past or present.
There’s still a couple that I occasionally chat with on Signal, and ironically I’m in my hometown visiting family right now and will see one of them in a few days. I might ask them about it, but again, I’m not expected to be re-added and I honestly probably shouldn’t be. Maybe it’ll push me to want to put the effort in to meet some new friends.
For now, though, I’m just oddly sad. It definitely doesn’t help that I’m here visiting when I was removed, I guess.
I don’t really have in person close friends other than my wife. We have neighbors and I have family in the area. Its just a consequence of moving around and dealing with life. I have a college friend I talk on the phone with once in awhile and I lost touch with another. All of us just have to do what we gotta to find a way to live a life.
Live for today and let the past quietly lay down in it’s grave.
You should send them goodbye message just to recognize the friendship and wish them well.
Hey guys, i noticed i got yeeted from the server and i just want to say it was great to know you guys over the years and i wish you all well (except you, Jerry—get fucked, nerd).
I love you all, good luck out there. o7The end of an era
Agreed.
A really nice way to put it
I dunno, thats kind of a weird move of them.
Like, removing a member of a chat group is a purposeful act you gotta go out of your way to do…
If an old friend of ours was in a group and didnt say much, but still reacted to stuff rarely, I wouldn’t have any reason to remove them tho.
Do you feel like there was any kind of event that happened to trigger it? A remark or something?
In our friend group slack we do a purge every couple years or so to cut down the member size, so they could have been doing something similar. But we also send at least an @everyone notification to give folks a chance to say they want to stay, and it sounds like they didn’t do that here.
Maybe they are just getting tighter with privacy etc. our personal community groups are not a tv show or a library resource.
Maybe…
Usually theres some kind of triggering event for that to happen though, yknow.
It’s tough, bro. You’ve forged your own path though, and you’ve made a life for yourself.
I was quite popular in my youth. Knew loads of people, was rarely on bad terms with anyone, and Saturday nights out on the piss were brilliant - I could mingle between different friendship circles and have a great time.
Things change though, and my life took me in a different direction. I moved six hundred miles away to a different country, but still stayed in touch with folk, even if that contact naturally dwindles away. I used to visit my hometown every few months, walk round, and invariably bump into someone I knew for a gas and chat bollocks like it was 2000 again.
A big big gut punch came about ten years ago when I went back, walked round, went into a few shops, got a coffee, and went back to the car. In that time I had seen nobody I knew. Nobody I recognised. No trace of the social life I had worked hard to build in my youth.
That’s when I knew that it wasn’t “home” anymore.
I’m not mad about it. I look back and remember the amazing times I had, but now I look forward to the amazing future in front of me a family and a lifestyle somewhere else.
It’s a big boot in the feels, but life goes on. Nothing lasts forever. And that’s cool.
(like and subscribe for more random anecdotes from someone you’ll likely never know)
I get this. Also moved away. Good friends support and follow you on your new path. It is harder to keep regular touch but it can still work.
The point of walking around town, that felt personal. I still do it too. Each time I feel further removed and it feels smaller. I wish it wasn’t because I loved it, but it is the case. Realising you outgrew a place without even noticing does hurt, it’s like having a bridge knocked down.
https://youtu.be/0T5A4nVzt3M And aptly I always feel it when this pops in the playlist
Thanks, I think I’ve had a similar experience.
Not everyone is meant to be in your life forever, I don’t really know any of my old friends from grade school anymore except two and I married one of them.
Still sucks though.
I agree, I’ve not talked to many of the friends I used to have in grade school in over a decade. It’s natural. This time just felt different, I guess. Someone had to take action to remove me. Again, I can understand why, and it’s probably just time to close the chapter anyway.
Given your probable age and the way you described the group, it’s possible that some group moderation duties got handed to a spouse or someone else who doesn’t personally know you in the same way that the original group does, and that some parameter for inclusion got changed either by Discord or by some inadvertently tightened group setting, like frequency of use. I don’t know Discord so I can’t say, but that would be my guess.
Which is to say that while you may be right, I wouldn’t take it personally just yet. There’s an email list that’s been going on in our house (email, I know, lol) involving people that went to school together in the 70s, which is to say you never have to close the chapter if you don’t want to. Shit happens with us too, but honestly it has only ever happened by accident.
Wait and see what your friends have to say about it. I genuinely hope you ask, just to give yourself the peace of knowing for sure, and also to give them the chance to right the wrong (if it was accidental).
If you miss them don’t use distance or your wife as an excuse. Make time for them and reignite.
If you don’t then let them be. I will add I personally think it’s harder to make new friends.
That’s kind of funky tbh. I mean, there’s no realistic limit to how many people can be added to server, so why bother removing someone? @_@
Privacy or security, perhaps? I’m honestly not sure.
they never said any reason why? or indicate anything? it could be that they see so far removed from them temporally and spatially, they dont see you as a friend anymore, since dint meet them in person often like they do.
Nope, no word. Although I might find out more in a few days when I meet up with the friend I’m still close with. They’re still in there, most likely, and might know what’s going on with that.
Sorry OP something doesn’t add up.
You want people in a discord server even if they just randomly sometimes lightly react.
Then reading this post you give vague details. I think something is afoot.
Sometimes discord servers grow and evolve abd the old stuff gets cleaned up, people who never use it are removed. I’ve got one server that did this, but they announced it first, and anyone who didn’t say they wanted to stay by x date got removed. I hadn’t used it in a long while and didn’t recognize more than half of the people using it currently, so I let myself get removed, despite being there the day the server got founded.
Other servers though, for 5+ years it’s just me and 4-5 other people, if I got removed silently from one of those, it might be more like what you suspect.
That’s why I suspect this. It was a server of long time friends. There’s personal reasons to remove someone
Dude, I haven’t talked to them in years. How could it be personal after so long? Why are you assuming that this could never happen?
There’s personal reasons, yes, but there’s also reasons that aren’t personal. You are assuming things happened, but I assure you, nothing happened on my end to cause this.
…Your post seems like psychologically unhealthy projection.
I’ve never been kicked out of a discord server?
Your comment seems like a psychologically unhealthy projection. Anything you wanna talk about?
I don’t know what to tell you, I haven’t interacted in the discord in a long, long time, other than reactions here and there.
