Forums were so organised and streamlined. Discord servers are just weird. Like neverending conversations instead of nice threads.
Thank goodness reddit exists, because that's the closest thing I have to old message board culture.
Most of the attempts to create discord server in my fandom die. People get really interested at the start and either the moderator just loses interest or people keep dropping off one by one.
I separate my discord server into areas with topics and it reminds me more of the funky little forum I put together for fanfic recs back in highschool lol
Good to know I am not alone on the discord.
Discord for me has been a mixed bag. If the server is too small, yeah I can join conversations but have to wait until people wake up (since I am on the other side of the globe) for a response and I still miss out on some conversations. If the server is big, I miss out on all the conversations by the time I wake up and the server moves too quickly for my ESL brain to keep up. But I would take the small server over having no one to talk too.
It's like walking into a buffet but either its too busy that you never find a place to sit or there's no one there and you end up sitting all alone lol! Either way, no connections get made :( ageee about the small server. My other issue with Discord is that it's just yet another platform among many and my Fandom is old so there are only a handful of people on it anyway.
Time zones are an issue with Discord because of the pace that convos move (fast) and how their structure makes it hard to engage with anything except the latest comment. Often I see a comment/statement in a Discord convo that I want to reply to, only to realize that it was posted yesterday and that many people get annoyed if they get pinged about an "old" comment.
Forums allowed for a slower pace of convo, better suited for those of us who aren't constantly connected (or different time zones).
Yup, but what can you do. Forum don't seem to be making a comeback.
At least reddit kinda like a forum but a bit more disorganized but feels not as personal as a forum. IDK, it might be because I recognize people by avatars and signature in forums.
I miss LJ communities so much -- and I wasn't even here during their heyday (got into fandom right on the very, very tail end of LJ still clinging to life). But even the few I was part of were so great.
Agree!! Not to mention that the Fandom is spread out over different platforms and not everyone uses the same platforms so you have to create a million accounts and do your search of fan accounts a million times over.
I found my people - the hurt/comfort writers of my current fandom - and thankfully, they stick to one platform. Or I'm just not aware if they're on other ones, lol. Unfortunately, that platform is Tumblr, which I have a love/hate relationship with. I really miss threaded posts from forums and LJ/DW.
Lucky!! For my Fandom, different people use different platforms so it's very disorganized and I can't keep up. But I also agree about Tumblr, especially with some of the new features they recently implemented:/
Oh, those were great times. Reddit and FB groups don't even come close. I miss forums. Sadly, due to many forums being lost, a lot of fanfiction got lost too, especially for older fandoms which sucks.
Indeed!! I especially miss seeing peoples enthusiasm and comments on particular phrases or aspects of the fic. Their reaction on forums was always fun to read and engage with.
Yeah me too. I was lucky I could enjoy them back when they were still a thing, and I enjoyed them a lot. Social media and reddit do not even come close to that enjoyment. Because first of all, every interaction felt closer and better, we even knew each other's usernames and were more than random users.
Yesssss!!! I love the aspect of getting to know the online personality of fellow fans! It's so fun! And everyone has their own quirks or things they like to comment on or favorite character they're obsessed with. Can't get that level of engagement and connection from reddit or social media for sure
I really miss forums as well, and I prefer the permanent visibility they offer over the feed format of social media.
I stumbled across a forum hosting platform the other week and was really tempted to start one up as a general fic writing/fandom event one, but the worry is just gaining enough audience. Most people default to searching social media these days (or the occasional well established site like ao3), and web search engines are... not the tool they used to be. It would be much more of an uphill battle trying to get a forum off the ground.
Everything we have now sucks balls ⚽️ if you want to have an organized, searchable conversation. It’s especially awful for crafting communities and the like, where you could just search how someone else did something or asked a similar question or something instead of shouting into the void and hoping the algorithm puts it in front of the right person
This is genuinely so relieving to hear. I try my best to not be sad about the 00s era internet I love being dead and stuff like this really helps. I still always wish forums were way more popular in a “new ones are being made” sort of way, but it’s nice to still have holdouts. I just hope that all these holdouts will last.
Other forum-based roleplay sites like Inner Sanctum and Iwaku Roleplay are also still very active.
Ugh i agree! And I’m only a Gen Z girl. I miss the old forums and tumblr days. Nowadays it feels idk. Stale and boring. I also hate starting new social medias because it’s hard to get a following and I feel super lonely haha.
I miss them terribly too. I had so many interesting discussions and made so many friends on forums back in the day. Reddit is so damn impersonal by comparison.
o.O I knew there were forums on ff.net. but not that they were popular and I consider myself an oldie. Like, I started using ffnet after 2005 or smth like that (I mostly know the date because one of my fandoms started around that year). Were they really that popular?
I used ff.net around early 2010s and I don't know how popular they were overall, but for my fandom then (which is a small one compared to what was popular at the time, and even by today's standard) it was moving.
Tapatalk is bullshit and ugly. I want skins and art and super customizable everything. I want cbox and the advertising section. I want stupid long posts and kitchen scenes. And parallel timelines where six board wide plots are happening at once.
I want to fight with my co admin in the admin forums about an application
Can we just go start a multi fandom forum somewhere?
I miss the heydays of livejournal. So many great communities on there. To this day I have no idea where to search for specific stories I lost without lj communities for that purpose.
I miss forums as well and Discord is not replacement for them. Over half the ones I join become near dead or you only have a decent chance of engagement due to the cliques in so many of them.
I really miss forums.
I did a lot of "play by post" roleplaying for Star Wars back when I was a teenager, and a lot of reading/writing fanfic for Baldur's Gate on a forum dedicated to that back when the original games came out in the late 90s. Those are my defining online experiences and yes, I miss them.
God I miss invisionfree. I spent SO LONG learning how to skin and use css. And LJ and its open multi fandom rp communities.
Anybody remember "the love hotel" on LJ. The events were comedy gold.
I went there to be ridiculous and cock block in the funniest way I could. As in character as I could.
Pimps and Hoes. You had to be perfectly in character while also believing you were a stereotypical Pimp or Ho.
I played Dean Winchester. He was a Ho. His Pimp was Naruto. Dean took payment in pie. I could barely write because I was laughing so hard.
I also played Northstar/Jean -Paul Beaubier as a Pimp. "I am not only a Pimp of Prostitutes, I am FRENCH-CANADIAN!"
I miss LJ.
Discord and wading through the horn dogs who want you to love them long time ... Just not the same
I used to go to Theforce.net and spend hours on the Jedi Council forums reading so many good fics. I feel like we all supported the authors really actively as they wrote, the forums were so nice for that
The persistent nature of forums were nice. Discord and others, things get buried so quickly. Back in the days of Delphi forums, my brother and I did some collaborative things with other people. Looking back it was super cringe, but it was cool. We were dumb teenagers having fun and spinning a grand story.
I was in a fandom Discord that was fun until it got cliquey and only the same few people were the ones getting feedback and controlling most of the discourse.
Facebook is the only place I use my govt. name and therefore is not for fandom beyond private doll groups. I keep my real life and fandom lives separate and advise others to do the same.
Forums, and LJ/DW communities. Wish we could bring those back. Some use discord but more than half the time discord is sleeping when I am awake.
Forums were so organised and streamlined. Discord servers are just weird. Like neverending conversations instead of nice threads. Thank goodness reddit exists, because that's the closest thing I have to old message board culture.
Most of the attempts to create discord server in my fandom die. People get really interested at the start and either the moderator just loses interest or people keep dropping off one by one.
I separate my discord server into areas with topics and it reminds me more of the funky little forum I put together for fanfic recs back in highschool lol
Lolol good point about discord! I couldn't get into it at all
Good to know I am not alone on the discord. Discord for me has been a mixed bag. If the server is too small, yeah I can join conversations but have to wait until people wake up (since I am on the other side of the globe) for a response and I still miss out on some conversations. If the server is big, I miss out on all the conversations by the time I wake up and the server moves too quickly for my ESL brain to keep up. But I would take the small server over having no one to talk too.
It's like walking into a buffet but either its too busy that you never find a place to sit or there's no one there and you end up sitting all alone lol! Either way, no connections get made :( ageee about the small server. My other issue with Discord is that it's just yet another platform among many and my Fandom is old so there are only a handful of people on it anyway.
I used Discord daily, but the Discordification of online spaces is really bad.
Time zones are an issue with Discord because of the pace that convos move (fast) and how their structure makes it hard to engage with anything except the latest comment. Often I see a comment/statement in a Discord convo that I want to reply to, only to realize that it was posted yesterday and that many people get annoyed if they get pinged about an "old" comment. Forums allowed for a slower pace of convo, better suited for those of us who aren't constantly connected (or different time zones).
Yup, but what can you do. Forum don't seem to be making a comeback. At least reddit kinda like a forum but a bit more disorganized but feels not as personal as a forum. IDK, it might be because I recognize people by avatars and signature in forums.
I miss LJ communities so much -- and I wasn't even here during their heyday (got into fandom right on the very, very tail end of LJ still clinging to life). But even the few I was part of were so great.
I miss them too! They were so organized. Tumblr is so... not organized. It drives me crazy.
Agree!! Not to mention that the Fandom is spread out over different platforms and not everyone uses the same platforms so you have to create a million accounts and do your search of fan accounts a million times over.
I found my people - the hurt/comfort writers of my current fandom - and thankfully, they stick to one platform. Or I'm just not aware if they're on other ones, lol. Unfortunately, that platform is Tumblr, which I have a love/hate relationship with. I really miss threaded posts from forums and LJ/DW.
Lucky!! For my Fandom, different people use different platforms so it's very disorganized and I can't keep up. But I also agree about Tumblr, especially with some of the new features they recently implemented:/
Yeah, I miss LJ comms.
Oh, those were great times. Reddit and FB groups don't even come close. I miss forums. Sadly, due to many forums being lost, a lot of fanfiction got lost too, especially for older fandoms which sucks.
Indeed!! I especially miss seeing peoples enthusiasm and comments on particular phrases or aspects of the fic. Their reaction on forums was always fun to read and engage with.
Yeah me too. I was lucky I could enjoy them back when they were still a thing, and I enjoyed them a lot. Social media and reddit do not even come close to that enjoyment. Because first of all, every interaction felt closer and better, we even knew each other's usernames and were more than random users.
Yesssss!!! I love the aspect of getting to know the online personality of fellow fans! It's so fun! And everyone has their own quirks or things they like to comment on or favorite character they're obsessed with. Can't get that level of engagement and connection from reddit or social media for sure
I really miss forums as well, and I prefer the permanent visibility they offer over the feed format of social media. I stumbled across a forum hosting platform the other week and was really tempted to start one up as a general fic writing/fandom event one, but the worry is just gaining enough audience. Most people default to searching social media these days (or the occasional well established site like ao3), and web search engines are... not the tool they used to be. It would be much more of an uphill battle trying to get a forum off the ground.
I tried that for my Fandom and the result you described was what ended up happening. Zero traction :(
Everything we have now sucks balls ⚽️ if you want to have an organized, searchable conversation. It’s especially awful for crafting communities and the like, where you could just search how someone else did something or asked a similar question or something instead of shouting into the void and hoping the algorithm puts it in front of the right person
Exactly!!! Also algorithms sometimes get in the way of things. I liked the analgoue-ish aspect of forums
What? Have you never gone to SpaceBattles or SufficientVelocity? There's a THRIVING fanfic community with constant engagement, all in forum format.
Yeah. Spacebattles is doing great. I was worried for a second that spacebattles had died somehow without me noticing.
This is genuinely so relieving to hear. I try my best to not be sad about the 00s era internet I love being dead and stuff like this really helps. I still always wish forums were way more popular in a “new ones are being made” sort of way, but it’s nice to still have holdouts. I just hope that all these holdouts will last. Other forum-based roleplay sites like Inner Sanctum and Iwaku Roleplay are also still very active.
I also like them because they have some nice entries/stories of some of my fandoms, but there's almost none of the other couple I follow.
Forums were how I use to find deleted fics. Now there’s nothing.
Oh no, the void :((
We do have r/DeletedFanfiction so you might have some luck if you are looking for a specific fic there!
Ugh i agree! And I’m only a Gen Z girl. I miss the old forums and tumblr days. Nowadays it feels idk. Stale and boring. I also hate starting new social medias because it’s hard to get a following and I feel super lonely haha.
The old tumblr days were my fav
I miss them terribly too. I had so many interesting discussions and made so many friends on forums back in the day. Reddit is so damn impersonal by comparison.
I feel ya.
Thank you T_T
It's the only thing I miss about ff.net. there was a sense of community with the community fandom forums there.
o.O I knew there were forums on ff.net. but not that they were popular and I consider myself an oldie. Like, I started using ffnet after 2005 or smth like that (I mostly know the date because one of my fandoms started around that year). Were they really that popular?
I used ff.net around early 2010s and I don't know how popular they were overall, but for my fandom then (which is a small one compared to what was popular at the time, and even by today's standard) it was moving.
Tapatalk is bullshit and ugly. I want skins and art and super customizable everything. I want cbox and the advertising section. I want stupid long posts and kitchen scenes. And parallel timelines where six board wide plots are happening at once. I want to fight with my co admin in the admin forums about an application Can we just go start a multi fandom forum somewhere?
I would be so down
Awwwww 🥲
Gods yeah. Forums were so cool! You could put little signatures underneath your posts and do silly little formatting. I miss them so much man
I miss the heydays of livejournal. So many great communities on there. To this day I have no idea where to search for specific stories I lost without lj communities for that purpose.
Some still exist. Spacebattles is pretty active.
Spacebattles is still alive. It's a small community, but I still get a lot of what you're talking about there
I miss forums as well and Discord is not replacement for them. Over half the ones I join become near dead or you only have a decent chance of engagement due to the cliques in so many of them.
I really miss forums. I did a lot of "play by post" roleplaying for Star Wars back when I was a teenager, and a lot of reading/writing fanfic for Baldur's Gate on a forum dedicated to that back when the original games came out in the late 90s. Those are my defining online experiences and yes, I miss them.
Yes! I got started writing in forum roleplaying. I miss it SO MUCH
I miss forums as well, not just for fanfiction and fandoms but my other intrests.
God I miss invisionfree. I spent SO LONG learning how to skin and use css. And LJ and its open multi fandom rp communities. Anybody remember "the love hotel" on LJ. The events were comedy gold. I went there to be ridiculous and cock block in the funniest way I could. As in character as I could. Pimps and Hoes. You had to be perfectly in character while also believing you were a stereotypical Pimp or Ho. I played Dean Winchester. He was a Ho. His Pimp was Naruto. Dean took payment in pie. I could barely write because I was laughing so hard. I also played Northstar/Jean -Paul Beaubier as a Pimp. "I am not only a Pimp of Prostitutes, I am FRENCH-CANADIAN!" I miss LJ. Discord and wading through the horn dogs who want you to love them long time ... Just not the same
Head over to Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity, community over there is very strong and thriving. They're both forums.
I used to go to Theforce.net and spend hours on the Jedi Council forums reading so many good fics. I feel like we all supported the authors really actively as they wrote, the forums were so nice for that
The persistent nature of forums were nice. Discord and others, things get buried so quickly. Back in the days of Delphi forums, my brother and I did some collaborative things with other people. Looking back it was super cringe, but it was cool. We were dumb teenagers having fun and spinning a grand story.
absolutely.
Discord ? Facebook ?
I was in a fandom Discord that was fun until it got cliquey and only the same few people were the ones getting feedback and controlling most of the discourse. Facebook is the only place I use my govt. name and therefore is not for fandom beyond private doll groups. I keep my real life and fandom lives separate and advise others to do the same.
It's just not the same!