> I don't agree. If you choose the right club you don't have to conform and you can just be yourself
There is absolutely no such club for many people who are even slightly out of the normal expected range of behavior
Really? Back in my day, there were all sorts of nerd groups, which were often plagued with horrible social dysfunction.[0] People just muddled through.
[0] https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/
That's not too geek-specific. I've seen that at almost all kinds of volunteer-driven organisations. Like a local radio station, student fraternity, backpacker houses. Disorganisation, feuding, usually because several people put more effort than the rest but feel like they also are more important than the rest. Coupled with usually not very strictly defined roles and responsibilities this is a recipe for discord and fighting.
I've seen it at typical geek places too like makerspaces but it's certainly not limited to the geek communities.
At the groups I'm part of the vast majority is neurodivergent but things go really smoothly. We rarely have incidents.
They're not neurodivergent-focused groups but there's just a (much) larger percentage of us attracted to events that stray a bit further from the mainstream.
In my experience people do not just muddle through anymore. I don't want to speculate about why that might be, but I have seen so many weird behaviour explosions at these sorts of events myself that leads to people being ostracized
I could speculate, it was partially because of that blog post. The more social nerds are encouraged to cast out the antisocial stinky ones. Instead of a whisper campaign, there's a social media ejection.
(Nerds in particular have been lured into fake socializing with fake friends on a discord or something. I've seen this where someone disappears and it's like "i dunno, maybe he got busy with life". None of their 'friends' really care if he's dead or not, because if he really did get "get busy", that is an indictment on them.)