Who are these people who are unfriending me, you might ask? (and even if you don’t, I’m going to answer it anyway) 🙂
Well, there aren’t very many of them, I’m happy to say (though every one bothers me). Most people who drift away from LJ just…drift away, without ever doing anything formal.
When I first started blogging, my “friends” were actually my friends–people who knew me. I said, “Hey! I’ve started a blog! Come read it!” and they did. It was a big deal when the first person I didn’t know in real life friended me–I was thrilled, and a little leery–What do they want? How did they find me?–and it provided an early opportunity to ponder the nature of this ambition of mine, to be a writer, to have readers. Because, well, you’re not going to know all your readers (if you’re any kind of a success at writing at all!).
So that was cool. And I always added everyone back, and that’s how my friends list grew. I love my friends list–to this day, it’s the first place I go on the internet. It’s how I know what’s going on in the world.
Then I became part of the romantic constellation of a reasonably well-known writer, and suddenly LOTS of people added me. Many of them were people the writer had introduced me to, but a whole lot more were strangers to him too–fans. People interested in him and his life, and since I was obviously part of that, they wanted to read me too.
For a while, I still kept adding everyone back, but it quickly became overwhelming, and I got choosier: if I didn’t know who they were in real life, I wouldn’t add them. That felt so, well, unfriendly; but my friends list would have become unmanageable if I didn’t do something.
When I left that writer’s romantic constellation, a handful of people unfriended me. While it did bother me, I also understood it; and frankly preferred it: if someone is only reading me because of my relation to someone else, then they’re not really interested in *me*, are they? So, farewell and godspeed to them, no hard feelings. I would unfriend them back (assuming I’d ever added them to begin with).
It’s particularly hard if they are someone I actually do know, have been friendly with. There’s only been one case where I really wanted to write and ask, “Why?”, but there were compelling reasons not to, so I didn’t. (I’ve since added that person back again, once I determined that there was still a real-life friendly acquaintanceship; they haven’t added me back, but they haven’t been posting either, so perhaps they were just being tidy about a social network they no longer use.)
Anyway. No real conclusions here; just pondering the dynamics, and my own feelings. I still think, as I said yesterday, that part of what makes it so hard is the very language of it: losing a friend. If I lost a “follower,” or a reader, or whatever, it just seems like that wouldn’t sting quite so much. You know?