This is an attempt to develop some sort of electronic social interaction that might be pleasant among the lone wolf Xenos. Perhaps a study in futility.
I have just been regaled by the utterly thoughtless postings of several of my talkative extended family members on a “service” called “facebook”. My oldest daughter was an on-and-off member of this chronic exhibitionist collective, which is how I know anything about such things at all. At the ripe age of 44, I was one of those “old farts” that avoided “texting”, much less its more evolved cousins like twitter and a procession of social yammering spots. I just never got very interested except as an extremely ineffective and oft blocked advertising opportunity.
The Xenoi is the plural of Xenos in Greek and I tend to use it as kinda of a tribal reference, though I doubt most Xenos desire affiliation, much less gatherings based on our alien status.
How do we communicate with each other? I remember visiting a chatroom for autistics and things actually flowed pretty well, but you had to devote your attention to it a bit more than I liked.
In the end, I came up with https://xenos.quix.us because it might allow for “parallel play” in sharing thoughts and ideas among explorers. It isn't much like social media at all, more like sub-websites where you can share without the bother of keeping up some sort of banter or spewing a “stream of consciousness”. There aren't attached comments, so one is encouraged to write up their perspectives more fully as a full contributor rather than a just a reply as a commenter (troll?).
The larger problem is that I decided long before this technology existed that it was far smarter and safer to keep your thoughts to yourself, with the exception of these missives. I can't say that I do a marvelous job of this, but I seemingly do far, far better than the typical youngish person. In the distant past, people wanted their lives to be private and even went to far as to say that such a “right to privacy” existed or needed to be codified. In our modern times, it seems no one even bothers to use the word “private”, much less exercise privacy themselves.
I know all the “love and light” gossip about the people around me because it is broadcasted to practically everyone through some social network. The saddest thing of all is that these tidbits are not really gossip at all, these missives are actually posted by the person themselves. Once upon a time, something unsavory such as an out-of-wedlock pregnancy was whispered around for weeks until the person finally admitted that the circumstances were true. These days, the “mommy-to-be” uses something like twitter or facebook (does no one capitalize names anymore?) to inform everyone before the old-fashioned rumor mill even has a chance to warm up. This must make “news agencies” infuriated as there seems to be very little “dirt” to dig about these days as starlets and CEOs just let their totally uncensored private parts “hang out” from moment to moment. So much for “scooping” a story!
I only have a cell phone because my job requires it and I don't pay for a “texting” add-on, no matter how inexpensive it is. I immediately saw that I would have what little concentration I can muster constantly interrupted by little non-sequitur. To think that I would invite further interruptions by signing up for a text message aggregator like twitter and the much more expansive social networks is just no where near my interests. I have nothing to say at a moment's notice that would be proper and I doubt anyone else has useful things to say without some thought that an email would not improve. I purposefully disabled commenting on my blog, which is the closest I will likely get to becoming electronically social - if you really want to say something to me, I prefer either an email or that you keep comments to yourself. Rude, but true.