Thnks fr the mmrs

On reconnecting with online friends.

As a baby emo in the late 2000s who spent far too much time online, one of my favourite communities was a LiveJournal-based forum known as Fueled By Ramen, or FBR, Trash. It referred to the record label Fueled By Ramen, which was home to artists like Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, and Paramore. Members largely spent their time shitposting (before the term shitposting really existed) and even trolling members of the bands we secretly loved. In that one tiny corner of the internet, we felt cool, especially when people like Pete Wentz (Fall Out Boy’s bass player and lyricist) acknowledged us, as he did in a 2009 blog post:

“FBR_TRASH

and the like. because i love the haters. there is something in me that gets that. i like it if its witty, if its faster than me. if you burn me. i dish it alot, i deserve to take it some too. (which member do you think i am? i like you. you are the wild west).”

As we got older and this particular subset of pop punk seemed to be in its death throes, the community held on, with members branching out into other fandoms, most notably One Direction; by that point, the bands were secondary to the community that had formed. People maintained these friendships even after the community started winding down in the mid-2010s; meeting up in cities across the United States, where the majority of the membership was based, and, naturally, going to concerts together.

By 2020, when COVID-19 necessitated lockdowns in several countries around the world, the idea of a reunion Zoom was floated, and one took place in early April. Despite the fact that I hadn’t spoken to many of these people in years (and in some cases, depending on whether our time on LiveJournal overlapped or not, at all), it felt like picking right back up where we left off. It was a welcome reprieve from the isolation of lockdown, so much so that eventually a Discord server was made so we could talk more often.

Group chats are so 2019 – Discord servers with your friends are the future. Thanks to this server, there have been group Twilight viewings, far too many late nights spent playing Among Us, and, now that things are opening back up again in the US, picnics, nights out, and reunions in person.

A server allows us to create a channel for any conceivable subject, allowing for several simultaneous conversations at once in a way a group chat doesn’t. There are channels for celebrity gossip (because in some ways, we haven’t changed all that much in the intervening years) and gaming, but also one for sharing photos of our pets, one for oversharing, and one for venting our frustrations at whatever’s been bugging us that day.

I asked Saz, whose post in the LiveJournal community (which is somehow still online) prompted the Zoom reunion, what prompted him to post there after so many years, and his thoughts echoed my own:

“I was still in the throes of grief from the previous year and feeling pretty out of sorts [when I made the post]… I guess in my darkest moments and coming to a certain age that we’re all coming to, I thought about the community because we really kind of carried each other through some hellish times. Like, if you were in fbrt throughout your adolescence you obviously had some dark shit going on as [made] obvious by the sad and angsty music we were drawn to — but I always found it really special that a lot of us still kept in touch and considered each other to be close friends, and I thought to myself, “What if somehow that community could exist in some way again?”

There’s a tweet I love, by @RileyWitiw, that satirises a popular attitude in pop punk circles in the late 2000s, that being the idea that pop punk was in need of defending. It reads:

Me: wanna hear a war story?
Grandkid: seriously, grandpa, defending pop punk doesn’t make you a veteran
Me: I don’t need you or this town

And maybe that’s exactly why this reunion felt so natural. We’d survived a baptism by fire, discovering dark corners of the internet together at a time when it felt even more lawless than it does now (you just never knew when you were going to stumble upon Goatse for the thousandth time), and making it out of the pop punk scene, a scene that was decidedly hostile to teenage girls despite the fact we composed a huge portion of its membership, with our sanity and senses of humour intact. There’s a shared history, as a result; even a shared language, born from references and inside jokes that would take too long to explain to anyone who wasn’t around at the time.

This rediscovered sense of community felt like a blessing during the loneliest days of lockdown, and it still does. There’s something incredibly comforting about a community you can drop in and out of whenever you like as though no time has passed at all. Since I’ve already dated myself by writing this, I guess I can say it feels reminiscent of a different age of the internet, when there were to be smaller and more niche communities (forums, LiveJournal groups, chatrooms) and public social media platforms were less ubiquitous (but still in use - miss u MySpace).

It feels all too necessary to end this with song lyrics, so I will. FBRT, I hope our friendships last longer than Pete and Chris’s did.

Hey, Chris, you were our only friend

And I know this is belated, we love you back