Fond memories from old fandom/internet days?

i also agree with old deviantart! old newgrounds, too. both had a big hand in my development for better or for worse, lol, but there's so much lost from them now that i miss.

I miss old rp forums so bad </3 My favorite one from back in the day was probably Warrior Cats RPG (which eventually rebranded to FeralFront before closing).
My first real experience with the fandom was on DrawCast though!

My friends and I also regularly joke about how popular plastic canvas was as a fursuit building material back in the day lmao. Baby's first Saw trap

I miss livejournal so much (thank u fursuiting.livejournal.com for teaching me how to make suits back in the day), iscribble, all the niche topic forums (mostly costume making related) i’d hang out on. Lately I’ve been lamenting the sense of discovery I used to feel just exploring the internet lol, you could stumble your way through all kinds of neat stuff. Everything is so fleeting and monetized now, it just feels harrowing to be online and if I didnt rely on social media for work I’d quit entirely.

yea

I was too young to have really spent time on the "old internet," but I spent a lot of time on Flipnote. Was my first online art community and it got me into animating

I think what I miss the most about the Old Internet is how there were so many fansites. Multiple little "shrines" for favorite characters, ships, or shows, curating fanart and fanfiction. Bigger fansites too, where an admin or two would publish news about upcoming books or movies or games in whatever series it was. There was an Eragon one I spent some time on... and Ham-Ham Kingdom for Hamtaro! There was a big Kirby fansite whose oekaki board I would hang out in, but I don't remember what it was called anymore... I was on a Sonic RP forum called Green Visions, and also submitted a lot of fanart to the gallery section of SonicVerse Team, a repository of Sonic fan comics. That's where Jon Gray got his start, he later got to become an artist for the official Archie comics and still does art for the IDW comic AFAIK! I spent a little time in a couple of Fire Emblem forums too back in the GBA/Gamecube era. But yeah, I really miss how each little fandom often had a main fan-site or two where people would congregate in little forums just like this one. They were like islands.

I didn't consider myself a furry back in those days and didn't run around in furry-specific circles, but I was definitely furry adjacent and had a Sonic-sona. Back then the furry fandom had a much larger stigma and most Sonic fans would've pushed back against being part of the furry umbrella, so I didn't consider my Sonic OC to be a fursona, but that might be different in the Sonic fandom these days. I've not actively participated in it in like... 15 years.

I was on the internet WAY too early, like 11 or 12 or so. So like...2005? I was really into the pre-YouTube websites like Albino Blacksheep and especially YTMND. We called memes "fads" back then, and I've probably forgotten more YTMND fads than most people would care to know. I remember I named my Pokemon in Pearl after YTMND fads. I remember the eBaum Wars, too. Really crazy stuff.

Notably I wasn't on SomethingAwful though. The paywall kept my 13 year old ass out, but I did read the old let's plays like Boatmurdered, and the Weekend Web articles. I was really fascinated by those.

The forums I remember the most vividly though were Lands of Evelon and The Cave of Dragonflies. Evelon was IS (now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure it's still around) like a prototypical form of today's ARPGs (like Dungeon Coursers or something), and it revolves around "adoptables", which generally meant something different back then-- you could claim pets in different colors and stuff, and you could copy HTML codes to just put them in your forum signatures or personal sites or whatever, but there was also an Evelon forum where you could participate in roleplays as the pets and each post gave them EXP, you could level them up and do battles when there were certain events going on... there was stuff you could pay real money for too. There was a type of pet that was like a wolf with razor blades coming out of its back, and you could commission the site's owner/artist to make custom ones-- shit, they were probably one of the first "closed species", I guess!-- and then you could roleplay with them and breed them with other owners of these things and the same artist would then custom tailor some offspring based on the two parents. It was really neat!

The Cave of Dragonflies is a Pokemon fansite that had a pretty busy forum back in the day and I spent so much time on there. There were your usual discussion subforums, and ones for fanfiction and fanart. Making edits of the Pokemon sprites back then was really popular. There was a roleplay subforum too, and we had something called "Anime-Style Battling", which was basically a combat roleplaying thing where you and another user would have a Pokemon battle where you choose a sequence of attacks that you wanted to use and a third user would be a referee of sorts and narrate how the turn plays out, and it was supposed to be more dynamic like a battle from a cartoon instead of a basic standing-still taking turns punching eachother kinda thing like the games were. And there was an exp system and stuff, of course. That was really popular.
Some infamous figures in the Pokemon fandom and beyond into niches of the furry fandom have their roots in TCoD, too. I reckon the admin Butterfree locked their accounts years ago. Some crazy stuff went on there in the "mature" subforums that at the time were pretty normalized to us, but looking back, man some of the drama was insane and I dodged so many bullets

I'm being really descriptive here in the hopes that someone else might remember these sites too and we can reconnect lmao

I Remember being enamored with the Roblox forums when i was a kid before they got taken down and spending lots of time in the chat rooms on Kongregate playing flash games before that. not OLD old internet but that bar is kind of low now lol. really miss when it felt like everyone was everywhere on the internet, like you could just reach out and you'd bump into a thriving community built around pretty much anything just because they could.