this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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For me, it would have to be 2008-2011 era DeviantArt! A lot of my nostalgia is really due to the fact I was a teenager and a part of me misses having no worries outside of videogame bosses and homework lol, but I genuinely feel like it was a great place! I used to spend hours browsing art, talking to people, making friends... Of course it wasn't perfect, there were creeps (one time a grown ass man tried to convince my then 15 year-old friend to partake in a diaper fetish roleplay... Jesus Christ) and the kind of stupid drama you can expect from teenagers. But even with that, I'm glad my teenager internet experience was there instead of Twitter or TikTok haha
More broadly, I miss forums! I remember spending so much time getting good at using GIMP to make graphics for roleplay forums I was on. Which in retrospect were ugly as sin LMAO because I was a teenager slapping every effect I could on crusty jpeg anime screenshots... It was a simpler time (❁´‿`❁)✲ﾟ
Some forums are still around, but they have fewer active users than your average social media community. I'm thinking of the competitive scene of an old game I used to play. Those guys still use the forums to this day.
Definitely!! There's a few I frequent too (funny enough mostly attached to virtual pet sites lol), but it's sad how many communities have moved to Discord. Which don't get me wrong I like Discord, I've been in really fun servers and use it to talk to my friends, but it sucks for archiving purposes and is just not a good replacement for forums imo