I feel this a lot. In short: the author (and many formerly-very-internetty people) are withdrawing from large swaths of the internet because those swaths are like being a gazelle out on the savannah: it’s not safe and everyone is gunning for you.

In contrast, “dark forests” are “spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments.”

I was going to say more but I realized after walking away from this for a while that all I was going to do is just say what the author was saying, but less polishedly. So, maybe I’ll just say read that article instead.

Personally, I’m certainly doing this - much less interested in The Internet At Large, much more interested in small dark forests within the internet.