Many of us seem fine here... What changed?

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With so many threads and subjects, there's far more opportunities to say something relevant. In real life, too often you have to bother with small talk. The pacing of forum conversations is far slower, and has no non-verbal cues to decipher, allowing you to take all the time you need to write a response with little stress. It's easy to butt into a discussion on a forum, as it's expected and typical, but hard in real life.

Yeah, right, this small talk is such an annoyance. Today I learned that I don't know how to make small talk. A friend of mine told me that she never saw me engaging in small talk and that she actually was surprised that I sometimes turned casual sentences meant by others to be small talk into full-fledged discussions on the said topic. I wasn't even aware that small talk was used by people in order to fill in the blank space in a social interaction. I asked my friend how she learned to make small talk. She said that she learned it in an implicit way, while observing others, and that she never thought about it up until now. So I get that this kind of stuff comes naturally to NTs? While I need to think about it, understand the concept and perhaps try to practice it as some foreign skill? I never thought that my brian was so different...

Most of us already do that anyway.

What would be a good idea is if there were a law commanding NTs to only communicate with autistic people online or in writing.

That would rid me of a great deal of anxiety!

I think that the major obstacle I have in talking to people face-to-face is that I don't know whether they are interested/they care, or they are just being polite and tolerating while I'm boring them. Online communication makes it easier for me to talk, because:
- with IM, people have the option to close the conversation at any moment or not show up again, so if they keep bearing with me over time I can assume with more certainty that they are not just being polite
- with non-instant online communication, I basically have the right to say what I want and everyone else that of skipping my lines, so I feel even more "free" to talk.

Moreover, I often need some time to say things the way I want them to be (my speech jams up sometimes - I am not always aware of that, though), and emoticons/layouting are easier than people's faces to read.

well, for me, the fact that the members here are geographically separated and aliasd are the reasons why i can open up here, noone knows who i am, where i live, what i look like...
also, it is a group of like-minded people (literally), so they understand what i am trying to say, i dont have to explain what a sensory overload is every single time (for example)

lastly, as said a few times before, becouse i'm typing, i have all the time i need to formulate my thoughts the way i ment to say them, and i can go back and edit if i so wish, try that in real life...

Why text-based socialisation is easier than facetoface socialisation for me:

- I process text better than speech.

- This website contains people of similar neurology to me.

- Body language is cut out and people are forced to use their words to say what they mean.

- No non-verbals means less to process.

- I'm in my bedroom so not having to deal with being distracted by everything else in the environment or with sensory overload.

- I can read and respond as and when I please, unlike in-person contact which requires immediate responses that I don't have the processing/responding speed for.

My aphasia.

You cannot see it here. It is hidden from view by my delete key and the edit button.

Neener. Neener.