When i was around 14 or 15, I helped do the web dev stuff for an online friend of mine who started a Minecraft server hosting company (he was a few years older than me)

It actually got pretty popular and while I just got paid in free server hosting, I was having a great time.

He just disappeared one night though which we noticed when the card he used for the bulk server reseller host failed. All the servers we were hosting for people along with the website got shut down and he was nowhere to be found online. I was talking to him pretty much all day every day so it was really weird

Its been nearly 15 years but I still wonder wtf happened to him

The older I get, the more I think about people I used to know, and wonder whether they're still alive.

They logged off and are all working a farm somewhere just waiting for you to join them

For most online communities, I was the one to just disappear one day. For some reason I tend to just kinda burn out and move on from time to time.

Still using the same username though, and I do sometimes run into people from ages ago in unexpected places.

Oddly enough, one of my lifelong best friends is someone I met on bolt.com in the 90's.

We've hung out in person half a dozen times but facetime and chat all the time.

In my ex friends group I am that person I'm still alive so thank you

I used to moderate a subreddit about talking to Trump Supporters, and my mod team was pretty small but we were close even though not all of us were Trump Supporters. I think about them a lot.

I also had this dynasty team on some mobile space war game, with so many branches and feeder teams and tons of in-game and real life geopolitics. It was wild, and again, I was really close with my fellow team leaders.

And in both cases I’ve never said a word to any of them since leaving basically. No Ill will, just going to a different school now, so to speak.

They could be one of two types of ghosts by now.

I used to work nights until around 2015. Used to game with a lot of eastern europeans. (And American friends in the military deployed across the globe.)

Two guys I knew, one in Svestopol and the other Kiev both signed off in 2014. I am 90% sure the Kiev guy moved to the UK since they were going there for a degree, but the guy in Svestopol just went radio silent.

Still thinking about them every so often…

One of them is a very famous, like gigantic YouTuber so there's that. Also his brother is even bigger.

I miss you joseacher