Fond memories from old fandom/internet days?

i think most of the forum stuff i did was Well before i realised i was a furry, but was probably a good indicator of myself in the future - the legend of spyro RP threads in 2008 on neoseeker. i can't remember the exact storyline of the RP but can remember my character/username & and also that it was around the time that let it rock by kevin rudolf ft lil wayne came out cus i listened to that on Repeat whilst writing my replies. i also played a lot of wolfquest and i ended up getting it again recently along with wolfquest 2, it's like Pure Nostalgia to me

So might be dating myself a bit here… my family subscribed to AOL 3.0 back in 94-95, and I’ve been online ever since (I was 7!)

I found furry in 99 as a community through a how-to-draw tutorial somewhere online; the tutorial had a cat lady and how to draw her! I’d always loved anthros since I was a kid. There was a link at the bottom of the page for something called Furcadia! And that was my jam for decades. I used to play on either my dad’s Win98 powerful (for the time lol) PC or my mom’s ancient HP Pavilion that ran Win95. They were divorced and Furc helped me escape that fairly traumatic time and find community. I miss the isometric pixel-art art style and .midi tunes.

We used to mainly have yerf!, VCL and Furnation. It was very early 00s vibes and I miss that aesthetic. I’m so grateful this forum is here because I lived on forums like this for so many parts of my younger life!

totally agree, it's also become a problem in the way that it discourages people from properly reading into something, and then interpreting it incorrectly, which may create misunderstandings, arguments, the lot.

also feels a lot more 1 to 1 in a way, idk what it is.

i was online just at the tail end of the older era, i think, so bearing that in mind ... i miss all the damn petsites that used to be around LOL like! ugh! dragonadopters was my first one and so dear to me. i know a lot of the heavy hitters are still around, like chickensmoothie and gpx+ and dragcave, and flight rising has made itself a staple... but i still mourn smaller ones, like unicreatures... i was obsessed with them!

i also, weirdly, miss the old irc chatrooms i used to lurk in. (unsure if irc is the specific way to label them, because i was like 10 and didn't care) obviously, everyone using discord is similar, but... i don't know... the vibes, man! the vibes are different! the anonymity is really appealing, i guess?

omg no wait you know what i miss?! dolling. i was JUST too young to get into dolling, but my sister was really into dolling! (basically, you remember those ms paint bases from deviantart? it's like that- people would make bases of tiny pixel dolls, and then other artists would pixel-art their own clothes onto those bases. sometimes people would make dressup games from them :3) pixel art in general is kind of shafted by the fact that everything needs to be "responsive" (?) now, to accommodate for smartphones, i think? so there's barely anywhere you can post pixel art that won't be blurred to hell and back, unless you have perfect dimensions...

AND I MISS FLASH GAMES TOO WWWAAAAHHHHH IT'S NOT FAAAAIIIRRR
And Also, i miss like... how... hands-on it seemed like the older web used to be? like, kids would end up learning really basic coding (at the VERY LEAST html/css) to customize their sites. you had to learn how to connect to servers on xmpp clients. Or like. whatever. omg. this was ages ago so i don't remember a lot. but now everything is SO clean and handed to you directly that i hear horror stories from the younger generation...about not trusting .exe files, because they're unfamiliar with them. it genuinely sucks. or not knowing how to extract files!
i don't like how afraid people have become to explore the internet and their own computers...if they even have computers!

yap yap back in my day things were better cus ur on that damn phone

in the days of telegram and discord, honestly I miss IRC

reject @everyone, embrace /WALLOPS