Yes, one of the great things about the "don't use your proper name on the internet" was the ability to let go of the past if needed. Much much harder now.
Getting ot now, but actually you'd be surprised (at least I was) how fast you drop off the internet as websites and services die. I've gotten more careful about using my full name maybe 4-5 years ago (the 10 before that I didn't care, and I never used my real name the 10 before that) and nowadays I'm all but invisible online, save a few work presentations with my name on it left and right. I know the mantra is 'the internet never forgets', and probably if you're high profile it doesn't, but for your average joe, even thousands of comments and tweets and posts die off after only a few years.
Every once I a while I end up trying to recover my own posts and accounts from the Wild West days >10 years ago. It's shockingly hard - anything less established than Hotmail has a pretty good chance of simply being gone or unrecoverable.
Which is a pain when I'm looking for it, but vaguely reassuring otherwise; unless the government or the site-owners themselves are after you, much of that stuff isn't coming back.
How is it that hard? I still don't use my proper name. The only exception is Facebook, but I don't do much on there besides maintain an account to prevent someone else from making a fake one to impersonate me, to be able to access the profiles of a few select family members and friends, and to sell stuff on the local yard-sale groups. For all my other internet activities, including this site, Reddit, etc., I use pseudonyms.
I'm still friends with a handful of IRC folks. Some were older, some were younger. I think I was 12-14 during my heyday, but I was around for a few years prior.
A bunch of us eventually got tired of EFNet politics and started a tiny server network of our own that's run for almost .. 16 years now? Running /lusers shows 22 users on the network across 3 servers, with 5 total channels. Overkill, but it's "home" to us.
