I was scrolling through an old hard drive the other day one of my digital archaeology, as I dug through my past selves I found folders from my first-ever email account saved conversations from long dead chat rooms and screenshots from forgotten forums with the alias I used to go by back in the days And there they were My old usernames.
Seeing them was like hearing a song I hadn’t thought about in fifteen years Each one was a timestamp a tiny capsule holding a version of me I had completely forgotten about, There was the cringe overly mysterious one from my angsty teen years the try-hard cool one from college and the bland professional sounding alias I used when I first dipped my toes into the "serious" online world. It hit me then harder than ever before when our usernames are more than just a string of characters we use to log in, They are the foundation of our digital identity They are the first impression we make in a world where handshakes don’t exist in the web 2 environment.
I remember carefully crafting that first online personal username It felt like picking a superhero alias which I wanted it to sound in a certain way to hint at my interests without giving too much away, to be unique enough that no one else had it. That name was my flag planted in the vast uncharted territory of the early internet It was how I introduced myself to strangers how I signed my often terrible opinions and how I built my first online friendships People didn’t know me by my real Monica they knew that name German machine gun.
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