/qa/ - Question & Answer

Despite there being literally billions of people online, I keep encountering people I've interacted with before in entirely different communities that should have no overlap.
This has happened to me twice in the past 3 days alone.

Yesterday, I left a comment on an article somewhere. A few hours later, I got a reply from someone I used to frequently troll on a completely different site in 2022.
It felt so surreal seeing him interact with my "main" identity without knowing that he's replying to the same person who used to torment him years ago.

The day before that, I was lurking in a chatroom. The topic ended up on pirating a certain game and one of my "friends" there starting shilling a piracy tool I made in 2021. Nobody knows I made that.
It was really frustrating having to hold my tongue and sit out that conversation since I had a ton to say on the topic. But I couldn't risk linking those identities since I made a really bad OPSEC mistake on the identity I used to create that piracy tool.

Having really good OPSEC and dozens of separated identities is lonely honestly.
Nobody ever knows the real you, just one of your many aliases. And you can't let anyone in without risking everything.

I wonder how much more common these small world moments would be if the internet had no anonymity whatsoever and everyone used the same names everywhere.