Okay so I want to talk about something that I think about more than I probably should, which is the specific experience of the online community that actually stayed together after the platform died.
This is going to be a little rambly. Fair warning.
The thing nobody tells you
There's a version of this story that's very tidy and has a clear lesson at the end. That's not the version I have. My version is messier and the lesson is more like a feeling than a sentence.
I've been thinking about this since I read something on calitoy that kind of cracked something open for me. Not in a dramatic way. More like: oh, that's what I've been trying to say.
The short version is that the things that teach you the most are rarely the things you signed up to learn. You sign up for one thing and you get a completely different education.
What actually happened
I'm not going to get too specific because some of this involves other people and I don't have their permission to tell their part of the story. But the broad strokes: I made a choice that looked wrong from the outside and turned out to be right in ways I couldn't have predicted.
The part that surprised me was how long it took to understand what I'd learned. You don't always know what an experience taught you while you're in it. Sometimes you need a year of distance before the lesson becomes legible.
There's a piece on jeremy dean music that gets at this from a different angle — the gap between experience and understanding. Worth reading if you're in that space.
What I'd actually tell someone
Not "follow your gut" because that's useless advice. More like: pay attention to what you're learning, not just what you're doing. The doing is the surface. The learning is what you're actually there for.
Also: the things that feel like detours usually aren't. They're just the route you didn't plan for.
More of this kind of thing at the calitoy community and tarosyn dev.