Early on in my journey of connecting with others online, I believe I had the good fortune of reading this post (partially quoted here):
“So my advice is to be an active member in many diverse communities across many areas of interest, don’t put all your eggs in one basket! I hope this forum adds a lot to your lives, but no single community can be your whole social world, thats not healthy for you or the community.”
“You don’t owe anything to a community; you don’t have to agree with their ideas, you don’t have to always be active, and you don’t have to partake in everything they do - being part of a community should feel casual and noncommittal; it should be fun and have little or no pressure; it should be a place where you can relax and be yourself (within the bounds of what kind of community it is)”
A community I love to hang out in is the Zine Crisis Discord Server! It is, unsurprisingly, a community of zinesters~
There’s also an associated website with the Zine Idea Generator, a zine library, resources, etc. The description gives an overall vibe of what the community is like:
ZC MAG is a mutual assistance organization for and by creators of zines and small art, in conjunction with the Zine Crisis discord server. We believe that zines are for everyone, and are more necessary than ever in a creative landscape dominated by corporate art and art made for algorithms.
I’ve heard mention of snailmail/penpalling in a few of my smallweb spaces; for those of us who enjoy it I recommend Postcrossing and the forums associated with it! :D
I have a particular interest in communities that value anonymity that are not toxic, which is largely image and text boards. I also really like communities that are slower, value quality posting, and/or have a unique gimmick.
I quite enjoy the textboard letterbox. It’s a pretty old and fairly slow textboard. Post quality is decent and it’s archives are fun to read.
Other ones I like that have weird gimmicks: tea - only open two hours per day. Board is wiped every day.
bus stop - All posts are deleted 24 hours, it’s p cozy,
Dolphin.Town - This is where dolphins post online. Their local feed seems to be disabled if you’re not logged in, so this is a link to the admin’s feed.
Analog City - A textboard that’s accessible via SSH. It’s very poorly moderated and at some point edgy kids found it, so browse at your own risk. can be accessed at lowlife@45.79.250.220 . The underlying software is pretty neat. It’s not well secured, so if you’re a hackerman see if you can get a shell.
I was just about to make a similar thread as I’m looking for some more spaces to frequent, so this thread is a nice find!
I’ll also contribute the Cook'd and Bomb'd forum. It’s a forum which started out as a geocities site, and recently celebrated passing the 25 years online mark. It was a space dedicated to Chris Morris comedy sketches & other British satire, but seems to be quite a general forum overall. I only found it semi-recently so I can’t give it a verdict or anything, but something about it feels nice. Maybe it’s the old-British-codger energy I’m picking up from it, I’m not sure. Either way, it was super nice finding it at the top of a totally unrelated google search instead of the usual 50-pages of AI-written guff!
I’ll be scoping out some of the ones linked so far, thanks all!
I find that Tildes.net has a pretty good community with people of all sorts of interests. It’s like reddit with different sub-forums of various different topics, but quieter, saner, and IME the discussions tend to be more valuable and thoughtful.
It’s invite-only which likely helped with shaping Tildes to the way it is today. If you’re reading this and want an invite, feel free to DM me.
I have to say, after exploring many of the links here the past few days, that these are almost all really high quality. I thought that independent forums had been cannibalized by Reddit for the most part, but evidently that is not the case. Generally the foreverliketh.is list and the Cheapskate list are exhaustive. Thank you very much for putting this thread and your list together!
I must say the community on https://micro.blog has been pretty reasonable, kind, and informative thus far. Generally they can get a little hot takey and overly political wrt to certain topics in the news, but if you can tolerate scrolling past, there are some great conversations and writings to enjoy from small ish bloggers. It is paid for, but Manton just introduced a $1/month tier called https://micro.one so that might be worth checking out.
I’m not the poster you replied to buy there’s also sendsomething.net for penpals! There are some social features (sending mail, profile, commenting) but it’s not a robust social platform like Postcrossing.
