Comment by Georgelemental

21 hours ago

I've always used a pseudonym. I have never felt free to speak my mind on the internet under my own name, the cancel mobs scared me away long before the state did

Even with a pseudonym, I worry that spy agencies with AI will have enough information to discover with high confidence who I really am, and that things I said online thinking I was anonymous will come back to bite me in the real world. As somebody who has family overseas and sometimes travels overseas for work, I don't want to end up on a list that will make my travels terrible.

Very much this. I also chose a different pseudonym from place to place. However, a bigger chill to my online speech is fatigue and ack of joy in participating online. I think the last place I felt community online was on Usenet.