Orbital Station

How The Pandemic Changed Me

📖 2 min. read

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world back in 2020, the lives of everyone changed. For me, I was in school and we transitioned from in person school to online classes. During my time online, I started watching Twitch, and created an account over there, I then also created a YouTube channel to interact with livestream chats on YouTube and in turn created a Discord account to interact with the communities behind the channels that I was watching. This then led me to start uploading some Minecraft videos from my XBox (at the time) to my YouTube channel. I also started streaming on Twitch (doing some random shit, not important), back then I had a voice.

I was doing online school, working on coursework and learning from home. A very confusing time, as a young person, it was odd not being able to interact with people face-to-face (sounds odd to think about it, but it’s true).

After getting online, (after a year or so) I eventually found my way into open source and in turn found my way into Linux. Through Linux, I found The Linux Cast where I found a community that was similar to me, Linux enthusiasts and tinkerers. I also discovered the Fediverse which let me to instance hopping for a good 2 years I think. Within my time on the Fediverse (again through TLC), I met Amin, who invited me to his GoToSocial test instance where I met Sotolf and then onto Polymaths. First with the alpha and then with the only a few months old main instance, where I met a whole host more people, RL Dane, Joel, DM, Clayton, and many, many more who I couldn't possibly name everyone here.

So, in my mind, if it weren't for COVID and the whole lockdown I wouldn't have ended up where I am today, which I am very happy about (where I am today, not the whole COVID pandemic thing). Since getting on line, my digital life has settled down, I no longer instance hop on Fedi and have settled to my FediHome of Polymaths and I have slowed down my distro hopping too (I've been on Fedora for the last few years but I do want to switch it up to Arch soon).

That's it for this one, have a good one and I'll see you in the next one.