The dormant person feeling is a feeling I find myself having on the Internet often. Casually browsing the Internet, I find myself reading through threads and websites that don't look like they've been updated since 2009, or 2010, or ${currentYear - 10}. Profiles that haven't posted in so long either.
When I see just how long ago their last activity was, it gives me the feeling, which I can only describe as a mix of concern, curiosity, and empathy. In my head, I go "I wonder how they are doing now", and "are they alive and well?". Sometimes I find myself "investigating" them or looking them up to see if they are still alive just so I can satiate this feeling of mine.
Do other people experience the dormant person feeling too? Is it wrong to have such a feeling? But hey, if I feel the dormant person feeling, it does show that I do have empathy for strangers, a good quality, I suppose.
I used to get that feeling now and then, not a need to "investigate" them, but a small sense of lonliness seeing that a place that was bustling with conversation and community isn't anymore.
I think it lessens as you age though.
There are countless situations in life that can cause people to move on from a group, hobby, social circle, forum, etc. I'd argue that most of them are perfectly normal and healthy, like having kids, moving, finding new hobbies, changing jobs, life events changing free time, making new friends, finding a new partner, etc.
Sometimes people find their way back, sometimes they don't.
People don't stay the same forever, so their interests and how they spend their time won't either. I think life would be very boring if that wasn't the case.
I sometimes get that feeling when I run across someone's personal blog, and it hasn't seen updates in quite a long while (yeah, like in ten years or so). However, as with most of the other replies here, I tend to just assume they've lost interest and moved on.
I've had some blogs like that myself, and I'm certainly still alive (I hope, lol!) Some of them already gone with the sites themselves like Multiply, if you ever remember that, also, Friendster blogs—all this in the late 2000's and early 2010's. Then there's some Wordpress blogs I used for a while back in 2015~2018. I just got lazy, lost interest, and so left them in the dust.
Thus, yeah, I simply assume they're doing just fine, and have just moved on with their lives.
However, there's a different feeling for when I browse the blog/social media profile of someone I definitely knew has already passed on. It hits different. It's like a frozen snapshot of their life. Their final post just there. A lot of times, the final post doesn't even indicate anything. Their lives just went on as normal until it didn't, and it just hits me differently than someone who I would just assume have just stopped posting.
A place where most of the people are both friendly and active. No dormant effect there.
I do too. Since we are also talking about musicians, I remember this song very close to me, called Meille Feuille by stepic, which I was kind of engrossed into, during my teen years. There's a lot of dark stuff from my teens, and music kind of eased the painful, stressful youth I had. When I tried looking for the artist, they disappeared after 2017, I believe. And the Twitter bio says - "stepic is dead". That was actually not something I expected to read. And it has affected me in a bad way, I think.
