Sourdough NAILED my feelings about troublesome threads in his second post.

I believe friendships can be and have been made in other forums, message boards and newsgroups on the web, but there may not be the sense of community I feel about Mudcat. I know some don't agree that Mudcat is a community, but perhaps they've just never experienced it. Clinton, folks on WhatsitNet may routinely invite WhatsitNet posters to their house for a weekend of fun, I don't know. I'll bet they don't sit around and sing folk songs.

Perhaps some don't want to experience the community aspect. If those completely anonymous folks are concerned about people learning their e-mail address, they certainly wouldn't want anyone to know what they looked like. They wouldn't want to talk, in person, about the things people talk about when they get together. It's their choice, though. They don't want the friendships or the face-to-face contact. They may deny the sense of community exists, but that doesn't make it any less real to those of us who feel it. They may decry it as "inner circle" and "clique," but those are attempts to make people feel guilty for their friendships, and I'm not about to feel guilty. Any walls that exist have been built by those standing outside them.

My feeling is that many of us want to be inside the circle, or at least close enough to jump in when we choose, then jump back out again. Others just hang out in the shadows on the periphery. In a perfect world, neither the folks furthest inside the circle nor those furthest outside would try to pressure the others to move.

It seems to me that Mudcat first began as a polite but somewhat impersonal place to discuss music. Then the BS started, Max did nothing to stop it, and people started talking about their hopes and feelings instead of just facts and opinions about facts. People made emotional connections to other people, and in-the-flesh gatherings were organized. Now, many of us who have friendships here based on the music, the meetings, and other personal communication, come here to talk to one another. It used to be the friendships were secondary to the music discussion. Now it seems the music is secondary to the friendships. I'm not making a value judgement here, but I realize that some folks have disliked some or all of the changes, and some folks just don't like the way Mudcat is today, be they veterans or newcomers. No one person, or even a small group of people, can change things, though. At least not the way they want to change them.

I wonder what's ahead. Whatever it is, the friendships I've made here will last, and the music will go on.