Faces from Twitter

Re:publica had become the thing I looked forward to every spring. Once a year, Berlin filled up with people you’d been reading for years, faces you knew only from avatars suddenly real in the same room, drinking beer in the sun. The old bloggers were there, the ones who’d been at it since the early days, and you’d spend hours talking the way you can only do in person.

What struck me every time was how analog it felt for a conference about the internet. No WiFi panic, no constant phone-checking, no one live-tweeting about the livestream. Just people in a room, which should have been obvious, but it wasn’t. Everyone there lived most of their lives in front of a computer, and for one week you were all in the same physical space, which made you real to each other in a way that newsletters or Instagram never could.

There was something grounding about it that I didn’t quite understand until later. Years of writing into the void, watching lives filtered through carefully composed posts, and then suddenly you’re standing next to these people in a hallway, and they’re exactly as awkward and thoughtful as they seemed online, or maybe more so because you could see their face.

The sessions mattered less than the hallway conversations, the beers afterwards, the accident of running into someone you’d been reading for a decade. Every year the same people would show up, a little older, some missing, new faces looking amazed that all these people they’d followed actually existed offline.

I’d go back for a while, but the thing that made it special had already started to fade. Fewer old names. The internet moving on to bigger platforms. The idea of gathering in one place didn’t have the same pull. But for a few years there, it was the one place where you could remember that the internet is still made of people.