For me, posting on the internet isn't that much easier than in real life.

It's odd to say but I find posting on the internet every bit as difficult as talking to people in real life, maybe more so in some ways as there's no real space for the default pleasantry list; 'how's the weather? Oh wow that sounds great, tell me more?' kind of thing. Instead I find it really hard to fathom what the focus of interactions should be. If you talk about the topic once then that's fine but then how do you take that any further? Should you take that further? How often do you reply? Should you reply to everyone who replied to you? How do you know which bits to reply to or not? When it's just one person your conversing with then it's not too bad, you can basically reply to everything and the time you sink into it isn't to bad. As soon as you get 2 or 3 people replying then those possible responses grow exponentially and it becomes really difficult to manage, and then other people reply to something you were going to reply to so do you reply to the original person or to the person who replied to them? It's all totally exhausting.

The problem this causes though is it means that i never really interact with anyone and sometimes I would really like to, especially on stuff that i do have an interest it. I want other peoples recommendations for books on Autism for example, or how they've found their diagnosis but I don't want to feel like I'm using people but also don't know if I can manage the multiple conversations. What makes it a little odder is I used to manage a little bit more. Admittedly not as much as I maybe think but some none the less. I know around 1999-2000 I manage to do a bit of posting in various usenet news groups. I think to be fair most of it was individual topics I started rather than interacting with people. I remember once though from a computer game forum, I think, having an argument over whether marketing had any influence on people's behaviour. I mean of course it does or else it wouldn't exist but the other person (cloud cop or something like that they were called) just wouldn't see that and kept causing spats. The thing is I just can't cope with arguments in any form so  i didn't know how to deal with it. So I just stopped posting. Twenty years later I'm at the same point, I would like to discuss some things but I already feel swamped.

I posted on the national autistic societies boards about what everyones' process was in coming to terms with their diagnosis. People were very kind but now I have a load of replies and I feel honour bound to look through them all and reply. This then means I've got to keep a load of conversations in my head and start checking back regularly not to be rude. If I don't check back then I've not really made any connections. It's really difficult! I'll try replying now just to see what happens I think.