Online Homes

[dokyun]

Issue with all your fedi-posting is that you can't improve social media; social media is fundamentally rotten. The fediverse in its most common form is fundamentally rotten, shackled to a timeline-and-replies format. What frontend do you use? I see it's Pleroma, literally inspired by Twitter!

I use the Bloat FE so to me Pleroma is just the backend. And I made it look like 4chan as you can see in the picture mostly just for the lulz and to see if I could make a stylesheet I liked more than the default one, but it turns out I actually did like it (and other people did too, surprisingly) and figured it fit my sensibilities in how I treat fedi more like an imageboard than social media. And that's an interesting thing to ponder right, aren't imageboards social media? I think people in Japan consider 2chan social media, and if the quantifier is being "fundamentally rotten" then I think it's hard to find evidence to the contrary, "/b/ was never good" etc.

Screenshot_20260513_213323.png (398.59 KiB) Viewed 670 times

I believe timelines are decadent, presentist slop. Slow-paced communication like in forums or personal sites is the TRUE way forward!

I don't really know what that's supposed to mean. Like, if I stick this site's RSS feed into my reader then I have a timeline of all the posts. Mailing lists and Usenet are timelines. If you want something more spartan then there's FediBBS which is text only and at least one guy actually uses.

Even if I complained about it before, I feel deeper connections from randoms posting on my guestbook than I ever did shitposting on twitter (2014-2020) and my friend's fedi instance, because I know that people who read my site do it on purpose, not because it popped into their feeds. Effort more meaningful and thoughtful than just pressing follow on a bloated site that barely loads.

That's fine, I just think we have different perspectives. I follow people I like talking to and might consider friends to some degree and I can do it from several different interfaces; the interface isn't the big deal to me but the underlying thing. I also like big, drawn out effort posts. You can't do that on Twitter (or Mastodon.)

Sorry to be a hater. My soul burns with hatred towards anything resembling social media.

You're soaking in it!

[rancher]

The right way to look at fediverse is -- it's an IRC channel (or "discord server" for the zoomers) but inverted.

Choosing who you follow is essentially building your own chatroom of people you want to engage with. Gyudon makes a good point that the view you see of fediverse is shaped by how you interact with it. And unlike corporate social media, the software will not try to force specific views of the service upon you based on spooky metrics.

Hashtags and threads split the difference between a big loud room where everyone is yelling about everything all the time and specific, focused, structured discussions.

I am a very heavy user of syndication (Atom/RSS) and even run several sources of syndicated information . When I want to consume data in a more serious context, feed readers are pretty good at filling that hunger. Fediverse is something in between feed readers and chatrooms. Similar with how imageboards and reddit were before the internet got got.

Sometimes I just want to snap random photos or share random links that I find. My blog is not set up for casual posts like that. But there's no chatrooms on my phone where random life photos or links seem appropriate. Fediverse is a reasonable place to throw random stuff at. Normies solve this instead via "stories" on "social media" but that's another conversation.

I think fediverse can serve nicely as a kind of "third space" online. People used to use webforums the way they now use fediverse but I think this was due to a lack of options instead of webforums being the best place for people to post everything that pops into their heads.

In the "glory days" of webforums where there were dozens or hundreds of posts an hour, most posts were easily forgettable bullshit. I'm glad that people can post low effort stuff to social networks instead now, so forums can instead focus on longer-form discussions, which is what they really do well, and places like fediverse, chatrooms, imageboards, reddit do poorly.

[Maypews]

• Small webforums -- ah, I went through a phase of preferring anonboards, but in practice they are inferior to webforums.

Very much agreed that imageboards sound great in theory but aren't as good in practice. The pure anonymity is often cited as the greatest strength of the format, and admittedly the cultural axiom of judging posts solely based on their textual content rather than who is saying it is a great one. But the problem is that pure anonymity encourages bad faith engagement since you can just troll and bait all the time without real pushback if you're a shit tier poster. Nearly every board on modern 4cuck has like 2-3 board schizos that run roughshod on the place, and the only way they are ever identified is via stylometry. This is by far the biggest problem with IBs because even the best gatekeeping in the world won't save you from another website/board going down causing an influx of stupid trolls or bad posters that ruin any high level of discourse or board culture that may have been fostered (ask me how I know..)

The anonymity also often leaves you devoid of context that go into posts. For example, if anon B says that he needs alternatives to an ingredient in a dish he's trying to cook, he might receive replies from anon A calling him a retard that should kill himself. So then anon B has to explain that he has an allergy to that food so he therefore cannot use it. That might not seem like a big deal but if you regularly talk about things on an IB, having to explain such contextual details every single time you broach a subject is rather troublesome whereas on a forum all of that often just ends up memorised if you read enough posts since people have names.

The things that are oft-cited as flaws with traditional webforums are not innate to the format in the same way that IB flaws are IMO. Commonly cited issues with forums tend for example to be a perceived cliquiness and overbearing moderators. I actually think that the former is usually just a result of the latter, because power jannies will be sympathetic towards their sycophants and give them unjust privilege over other users.

Meanwhile if your top janny barely moderates at all there aren't really going to be very many chances for him to favour certain users. In essence, I think that having a forum where moderation is viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism is the ideal. Such places possess all of the benefits of IBs without any of the downsides.

[TheEvilShadoo]

I was just browsing through the various topics on here as I try to get to know this place better, and this one really resonated with me. I've never used the term "online home" before, but the idea is something I think about from time to time, and I like how it sounds, so I think I'll start using this too.

Growing up, I thought online spaces like Nintendo NSider, Newgrounds, and some various flash games sites were cool places to hang out, but I only ever lurked and never really got involved with the communities. Back then, I only really cared about using the Internet for playing flash games, watching videos, or reading about gaming news. My most social online experience was probably Club Penguin.

That all changed when I found digibutter.nerr. I absolutely loved the concept of a forum where users had HP bars and earned coins to purchase items to use on each other. The place even had its own MMO/platformer/web-hangout game at one point called The Bitlands. It gamified online socialization in a way I had never seen attempted before. Sadly, by the time I had joined, the site had become something of a shell of its former self with a userbase to reflect that. There's a couple important lessons in webmastry to take away from this place:

1. If you rely solely on a video game reference to advertise your site, when the hype for the game dies out, so will your site's userbase.
2. If you have a website that people love, no matter how hacky your phpBB forum mods are, redesigning the site from scratch (three times!) will not be a popular idea among your users.

Over the years, digibutter's had three major redesigns. I began lurking near the end of the first redesign and began regularly posting early on in the second. When I joined the community, the site was just about its rock bottom, but even still, despite everything it had been through, I grew to love the place for its cozy little community tucked away in some long-forgotten corner of the Internet. In my time there, I came to meet some oldfags who checked in every once in a blue moon, but had ultimately moved to Discord holding the belief that the site no longer had anything left to offer them. I understood the reasoning behind their disappointment, but their pessimism had blinded them from seeing the value in continuing IMO, one of the most unique communities on the web. Here's a picture of what the place used to look like back in the early days (though in night theme and before the actual ads got replaced with "user ads" for items users would sell to each other).
Here's a link to an online archive of the old Bitlands (Betalands) game with all the old user created worlds still intact.

Eventually, I was elected to be digibutter's unofficial president in the absence of its creator. I came to foster a new, tiny community of those of use who hadn't given up on what the site could be, and eventually, we convinced the creator to set up a new forum (Discourse, but we take what we can get here) and re-instilled a passion to make the site into a fun, feature-filled community again... someday.

As an aside, whilst being on digibutter, I also got into Phantasy Star Online 2 for a few years and made some friends whom I enjoyed playing together with, but like with most MMOs, the game went downhill over time, and today, it's just not the same game anymore (literally, they rebranded to PSO2: New Genesis and changed basically everything about the game). Rinse and repeat with Sea of Thieves for the next few years after that. OK, that game didn't fall off nearly as hard, but I mainly just don't care to put the time into it anymore. That + FOMO cosmetics + seasons + battle pass + plus a brand new premium battle pass really just got me to drop the game save for some one-off occasions.

I even themed my personal website around a certain world from Super Paper Mario, the world which digibutter is based on. I don't consider my personal website to be my online home however because I agree with the sentiment that that would be lonely. My website to me is a place where I can express my online presence and claim a piece of cyberspace. I think my analogy for it would be something more like a hostel or a bed and breakfast in the sense that I intend it to be more oriented around visitors than for myself.

When I found this site here, just a few days ago, I was blown away by how this place seemed to be so close to my idea of what an ideal forum website would look like. To top it all off, I only just happened to discover this place by chance from checking out a Steam group. And it's based on SciADV! What's not to love?

So, to make a long story short, I still love digibutter, but the place is a slow burn. Maybe it's somewhere between my online archaeological dig site and my online recreation of Jurassic Park. In any sense, I would love to make this place my new online home.

Hope you enjoyed the ramble!

[Maypews]

I was just browsing through the various topics on here as I try to get to know this place better, and this one really resonated with me. I've never used the term "online home" before, but the idea is something I think about from time to time, and I like how it sounds, so I think I'll start using this too.

Growing up, I thought online spaces like Nintendo NSider, Newgrounds, and some various flash games sites were cool places to hang out, but I only ever lurked and never really got involved with the communities. Back then, I only really cared about using the Internet for playing flash games, watching videos, or reading about gaming news. My most social online experience was probably Club Penguin.

That all changed when I found digibutter.nerr. I absolutely loved the concept of a forum where users had HP bars and earned coins to purchase items to use on each other. The place even had its own MMO/platformer/web-hangout game at one point called The Bitlands. It gamified online socialization in a way I had never seen attempted before. Sadly, by the time I had joined, the site had become something of a shell of its former self with a userbase to reflect that. There's a couple important lessons in webmastry to take away from this place:

1. If you rely solely on a video game reference to advertise your site, when the hype for the game dies out, so will your site's userbase.
2. If you have a website that people love, no matter how hacky your phpBB forum mods are, redesigning the site from scratch (three times!) will not be a popular idea among your users.

Over the years, digibutter's had three major redesigns. I began lurking near the end of the first redesign and began regularly posting early on in the second. When I joined the community, the site was just about its rock bottom, but even still, despite everything it had been through, I grew to love the place for its cozy little community tucked away in some long-forgotten corner of the Internet. In my time there, I came to meet some oldfags who checked in every once in a blue moon, but had ultimately moved to Discord holding the belief that the site no longer had anything left to offer them. I understood the reasoning behind their disappointment, but their pessimism had blinded them from seeing the value in continuing IMO, one of the most unique communities on the web. Here's a picture of what the place used to look like back in the early days (though in night theme and before the actual ads got replaced with "user ads" for items users would sell to each other).
Here's a link to an online archive of the old Bitlands (Betalands) game with all the old user created worlds still intact.

Eventually, I was elected to be digibutter's unofficial president in the absence of its creator. I came to foster a new, tiny community of those of use who hadn't given up on what the site could be, and eventually, we convinced the creator to set up a new forum (Discourse, but we take what we can get here) and re-instilled a passion to make the site into a fun, feature-filled community again... someday.

As an aside, whilst being on digibutter, I also got into Phantasy Star Online 2 for a few years and made some friends whom I enjoyed playing together with, but like with most MMOs, the game went downhill over time, and today, it's just not the same game anymore (literally, they rebranded to PSO2: New Genesis and changed basically everything about the game). Rinse and repeat with Sea of Thieves for the next few years after that. OK, that game didn't fall off nearly as hard, but I mainly just don't care to put the time into it anymore. That + FOMO cosmetics + seasons + battle pass + plus a brand new premium battle pass really just got me to drop the game save for some one-off occasions.

I even themed my personal website around a certain world from Super Paper Mario, the world which digibutter is based on. I don't consider my personal website to be my online home however because I agree with the sentiment that that would be lonely. My website to me is a place where I can express my online presence and claim a piece of cyberspace. I think my analogy for it would be something more like a hostel or a bed and breakfast in the sense that I intend it to be more oriented around visitors than for myself.

When I found this site here, just a few days ago, I was blown away by how this place seemed to be so close to my idea of what an ideal forum website would look like. To top it all off, I only just happened to discover this place by chance from checking out a Steam group. And it's based on SciADV! What's not to love?

So, to make a long story short, I still love digibutter, but the place is a slow burn. Maybe it's somewhere between my online archaeological dig site and my online recreation of Jurassic Park. In any sense, I would love to make this place my new online home.

Hope you enjoyed the ramble!

A great writeup, and man that vintage UI is so good! I checked Digibutter not longer after you joined since I saw it linked on your website and was immediately offput by the use of... Discourse. I swear, this software consumes every other old forum and I cannot stand it. Feels like the result of trying to Twitterify forums, and so many other sites I occasionally use like PanzerDragoonLegacy and the TimeTravelInstitute have switched to it. Out of all the softwares it's truly the only one that I find genuinely unusable as an end user, but it's at least good to hear that the webmaster is trying to keep it going.

I am also a fan of the Paper Mario games, though really just the early ones. I could imagine a site themed around Paper Mario would have seen better days given the absolute state of the series post SPM. Something I was thinking, perhaps it'd be a good idea to cover all Mario RPGs in general? Not sure how much it'd help but the PM series was originally meant to be a sequel to Mario RPG on the SNES if memory serves, and the M&L series has a fair few fans with I assume a good deal of crossover with PM people.

Regarding how this site looks, I've pulled inspiration from a lot of different places. Originally I actually considered pirating a copy of VBulletin because I really like how Beast's Lair looks (and also some of the unique functionality it has, such as the blogging system, profile walls, and friends system) but I ultimately decided on PhpBB because it was easier to setup and supports mobile devices. Which, like it or not, account for a lot of internet traffic these days.


Nonetheless I did still pull some design ideas from Beast's Lair. The most prominent is probably using 200x200 (bigger) avatar pictures, as I think it's a much more efficent use of the vertical space to the right of the post column and makes the user's avatars more immediately noticeable. I also bought an extension for a more proper profile system so that we could have a group wall and follower system, stripping it of much of it's bloat. Followers are a little ew, but it's the best I could do because no friends system ext exists. Additionally the idea to put 88x31 buttons under your posts is mainly a byproduct of having browsed so many smallweb sites.

I also pulled the site currency-into-waifus system from an anime torrent tracker I use. On that site you can only display them on your profile page, but I think having them next to your posts is cooler personally. They're supposed to show up on your profile page here as well, but unfortunately don't for some reason. The extension for this is very early in development and causes some minor errors (notice how buttons glitch through your notifications tab? That's caused by it I believe unfortunately, not sure if fixable but when new versions of it release I hope it irons out the problems).

Due to the ridiculous mess this site has become with the sheer volume of extensions we have running (literally 30+)it'd be hard for me to ever update the PhpBB version or PHP version. With this software a lot of extensions break over time, so for example the awards system and webring system extensions we have are fairly old and likely wouldn't work if I updated my php version.

The idea of losing functionality pains me, as apart of why I loved the old internet is all the depth sites used to have, when you could get lost surfing the web and coming across an ocean of features with every page you visited. Nowadays even a lot of forums are just the bare essentials, websites should be fun to browse damnit! I went on a bit of a rant there, but you've mentioned the site's look a few times so I thought it'd be fun to go into detail about it for anyone curious.

[TheEvilShadoo]

I was just browsing through the various topics on here as I try to get to know this place better, and this one really resonated with me. I've never used the term "online home" before, but the idea is something I think about from time to time, and I like how it sounds, so I think I'll start using this too.

Growing up, I thought online spaces like Nintendo NSider, Newgrounds, and some various flash games sites were cool places to hang out, but I only ever lurked and never really got involved with the communities. Back then, I only really cared about using the Internet for playing flash games, watching videos, or reading about gaming news. My most social online experience was probably Club Penguin.

That all changed when I found digibutter.nerr. I absolutely loved the concept of a forum where users had HP bars and earned coins to purchase items to use on each other. The place even had its own MMO/platformer/web-hangout game at one point called The Bitlands. It gamified online socialization in a way I had never seen attempted before. Sadly, by the time I had joined, the site had become something of a shell of its former self with a userbase to reflect that. There's a couple important lessons in webmastry to take away from this place:

1. If you rely solely on a video game reference to advertise your site, when the hype for the game dies out, so will your site's userbase.
2. If you have a website that people love, no matter how hacky your phpBB forum mods are, redesigning the site from scratch (three times!) will not be a popular idea among your users.

Over the years, digibutter's had three major redesigns. I began lurking near the end of the first redesign and began regularly posting early on in the second. When I joined the community, the site was just about its rock bottom, but even still, despite everything it had been through, I grew to love the place for its cozy little community tucked away in some long-forgotten corner of the Internet. In my time there, I came to meet some oldfags who checked in every once in a blue moon, but had ultimately moved to Discord holding the belief that the site no longer had anything left to offer them. I understood the reasoning behind their disappointment, but their pessimism had blinded them from seeing the value in continuing IMO, one of the most unique communities on the web. Here's a picture of what the place used to look like back in the early days (though in night theme and before the actual ads got replaced with "user ads" for items users would sell to each other).
Here's a link to an online archive of the old Bitlands (Betalands) game with all the old user created worlds still intact.

Eventually, I was elected to be digibutter's unofficial president in the absence of its creator. I came to foster a new, tiny community of those of use who hadn't given up on what the site could be, and eventually, we convinced the creator to set up a new forum (Discourse, but we take what we can get here) and re-instilled a passion to make the site into a fun, feature-filled community again... someday.

As an aside, whilst being on digibutter, I also got into Phantasy Star Online 2 for a few years and made some friends whom I enjoyed playing together with, but like with most MMOs, the game went downhill over time, and today, it's just not the same game anymore (literally, they rebranded to PSO2: New Genesis and changed basically everything about the game). Rinse and repeat with Sea of Thieves for the next few years after that. OK, that game didn't fall off nearly as hard, but I mainly just don't care to put the time into it anymore. That + FOMO cosmetics + seasons + battle pass + plus a brand new premium battle pass really just got me to drop the game save for some one-off occasions.

I even themed my personal website around a certain world from Super Paper Mario, the world which digibutter is based on. I don't consider my personal website to be my online home however because I agree with the sentiment that that would be lonely. My website to me is a place where I can express my online presence and claim a piece of cyberspace. I think my analogy for it would be something more like a hostel or a bed and breakfast in the sense that I intend it to be more oriented around visitors than for myself.

When I found this site here, just a few days ago, I was blown away by how this place seemed to be so close to my idea of what an ideal forum website would look like. To top it all off, I only just happened to discover this place by chance from checking out a Steam group. And it's based on SciADV! What's not to love?

So, to make a long story short, I still love digibutter, but the place is a slow burn. Maybe it's somewhere between my online archaeological dig site and my online recreation of Jurassic Park. In any sense, I would love to make this place my new online home.

Hope you enjoyed the ramble!

A great writeup, and man that vintage UI is so good! I checked Digibutter not longer after you joined since I saw it linked on your website and was immediately offput by the use of... Discourse. I swear, this software consumes every other old forum and I cannot stand it. Feels like the result of trying to Twitterify forums, and so many other sites I occasionally use like PanzerDragoonLegacy and the TimeTravelInstitute have switched to it. Out of all the softwares it's truly the only one that I find genuinely unusable as an end user, but it's at least good to hear that the webmaster is trying to keep it going.

I am also a fan of the Paper Mario games, though really just the early ones. I could imagine a site themed around Paper Mario would have seen better days given the absolute state of the series post SPM. Something I was thinking, perhaps it'd be a good idea to cover all Mario RPGs in general? Not sure how much it'd help but the PM series was originally meant to be a sequel to Mario RPG on the SNES if memory serves, and the M&L series has a fair few fans with I assume a good deal of crossover with PM people.

Regarding how this site looks, I've pulled inspiration from a lot of different places. Originally I actually considered pirating a copy of VBulletin because I really like how Beast's Lair looks (and also some of the unique functionality it has, such as the blogging system, profile walls, and friends system) but I ultimately decided on PhpBB because it was easier to setup and supports mobile devices. Which, like it or not, account for a lot of internet traffic these days.


Nonetheless I did still pull some design ideas from Beast's Lair. The most prominent is probably using 200x200 (bigger) avatar pictures, as I think it's a much more efficent use of the vertical space to the right of the post column and makes the user's avatars more immediately noticeable. I also bought an extension for a more proper profile system so that we could have a group wall and follower system, stripping it of much of it's bloat. Followers are a little ew, but it's the best I could do because no friends system ext exists. Additionally the idea to put 88x31 buttons under your posts is mainly a byproduct of having browsed so many smallweb sites.

I also pulled the site currency-into-waifus system from an anime torrent tracker I use. On that site you can only display them on your profile page, but I think having them next to your posts is cooler personally. They're supposed to show up on your profile page here as well, but unfortunately don't for some reason. The extension for this is very early in development and causes some minor errors (notice how buttons glitch through your notifications tab? That's caused by it I believe unfortunately, not sure if fixable but when new versions of it release I hope it irons out the problems).

Due to the ridiculous mess this site has become with the sheer volume of extensions we have running (literally 30+)it'd be hard for me to ever update the PhpBB version or PHP version. With this software a lot of extensions break over time, so for example the awards system and webring system extensions we have are fairly old and likely wouldn't work if I updated my php version.

The idea of losing functionality pains me, as apart of why I loved the old internet is all the depth sites used to have, when you could get lost surfing the web and coming across an ocean of features with every page you visited. Nowadays even a lot of forums are just the bare essentials, websites should be fun to browse damnit! I went on a bit of a rant there, but you've mentioned the site's look a few times so I thought it'd be fun to go into detail about it for anyone curious.

Thank you. I agree, the old UI is such a far cry from what we're left with today. In a sense, I'm not quite as affected by the use of Discourse because it's still a whole lot better than what the previous iteration was (NERR 3.0). To give a little more background on the site's theming history:

1. NERR 1.0: Original phpBB installation (early days, 2007-2008)
2. NERR 1.5: Heavily modded endgame phpBB installation (2008-2009)
3. NERR 2.0: Webmaster-made R*ddit-like (2009-2014)
4. NERR 3.0: Webmaster-made Slack-like (2014-2024)
5. NERR 4.0: Discourse (2024-20XX)

I also host the old digibutter wiki here which is largely unchanged since 2009.

So, in the 3.0 days, our website was kinda just like a chanboard with two real channels /all-posts/, /the-dump/ (anons allowed), and a fake third feed /gaming-news/ which just fed into /all-posts/ anyways. It was pretty bad. So yeah, I'm no fan of Discourse either, but hey, at the very least, we're a forum again... From a software/cyber security POV, I get why the webmaster doesn't like phpBB jank: it becomes unmaintainable (without significant time and effort) and you can never update it (better hope for no security holes). But yeah, I totally get what you mean on it Twitterifying forums.

Cool to hear that you're a fan of Paper Mario too. I love the first three myself, with my favorite being SPM. Agreed, nothing after even comes close, and Sticker Star is an abomination worse than Chibi-Robo! Zip Lash. SPM is usually the love it or hate it game for PM fans. I love it for what it is, but you do have to go into it not looking for a traditional PM game. Yeah, the site did switch gears pretty early on from being SPM/PM -> Mario RPGs -> Nintendo -> Whatever, but probably video games. It had its hay day, but it just doesn't really seem to be something that draws in all too many users these days. I think a lot those who might be interested tend to hang out on R*ddit or Discord instead.

Nice to hear your insights on what went into theming the site. I can imagine it must be a pain managing all of it, but much thanks that you do. I totally agree with your points at the end about sites losing both fun and functionality.

[TheEvilShadoo]

@Maypews asked me about this during the last derby, so here's a little bit more info on what Betalands was. Shortly after digibutter's first makeover, the webmaster wanted to find a way to bring back interest in the site. His idea for doing so was to create a web MMO platformer called Bitlands/Betalands and integrate it with the new website by way of things like chat integration, earning items from posting, and holding tournaments like the annual Sammer Bowl where one would first design a sammer guy (see examples below) and then battle it out with weapons such as the cracker launcher from Smash Brawl.

Anyways, Betalands lasted for some years, but like the name implies, it never left beta. Today, we're left with an archive of some pretty neat user-created levels and designs. I'm very glad this wasn't all lost to time. You can even still make your own creations in the archived version and save/load to/from JSON files. Here's one I made back when the archive was published.

Link to the archived version here -> https://nerr-biz.github.io/betalands

[Yuuni Anno]

Something that I've recently become fond of is the concept of an online home. For me, an online home singifies the site you check on the most. For some that may be their homepage, but I guess to me my homepage carries a sense of loneliness with it. Since you know, it's a personal site, so I'm not really going to be interacting with someone on there unless they just so happen to pop into the chat at the same time as me.

For me an "online home" must be a community, whether it's a forum or a chat room. I've had a few over the years, my earliest was probably some combination of old YouTube and a flash games site I was a regular on where we'd roleplay in the chatbox. Then it became a MMO that I played, in the later parts of the 2010s it was a Discord server, and eventually I ended up becoming something of a regular on a forum for a local sports team that I was a fan of where I felt very at home. But I ended up leaving the latter behind due to complicated reasons, reasons that were no fault of the site itself.

Since leaving that forum behind, I'd been "homeless" for about 3 years. I searched and searched, yet it seemed that it was to no avail. I found some sites that I liked, but felt that I wasn't a 1:1 fit on. Sometimes I'd come across older forums that I'd have probably loved had I joined a decade ago but by the time I found them they had dwindled down to a small base of regulars who didn't post very often.

Even if I did find a site I liked, there was always something seemingly that put me off about the place. It certainly does not help that internet centralisation has greatly shrunk the amount of forums that you can now find. Beforehand you'd have had 5 different forums for one topic that all had their own rules and such, nowadays you're lucky if 1 is still up.

And that, dear reader, is what inspired me to make this very site you're browsing right now. This forum, Deluoode, is my new online home. And I do hope that it may become yours and many other people's as well. But such things take time to develop, and so in the meantime I ask you; what happened to your old online homes? Do you know where the regulars went and keep in touch, what was the site like in it's prime? I'd love to hear all about it.

Back during the post-pandemic years, I hopped from place-to-place so to speak. As someone who never experienced Newgrounds I had to settle for the rapidly declining Roblox, and that led me to a lot of inane places.

For starters, there was this Roblox discord server for a really cool naval game I found at the time. The game itself I found it really fun but it was team-based and given the average cooperative capacity of most (including me) on the platform at the time it was oftentimes a nightmare to play but it had its fun moments.

Anyway, the server itself was a cesspool, stupid shit, stupid people, all genuine saying some of the stupidest fucking shit I have ever heard in my life. I found it fun for a while as its what helped me start on Modelling and Writing, but being both stupid and petty I got roped in with some bad people, though that's not surprising given everyone there was some kind of deficient, morally and mentally.

Snides aside, I managed to get into a semi-one-sided drama with the server's eternal head of staff (the guy was a shithead and so was I) as I shit-talked him for being an ass with the people I befriended on there. Eventually we even tried to make an "expose doc" on the guy with nothing but screenshot of him doing stuff that people already knew he was doing, aka, being a shithead, which most didn't even care about in the first place

After that and a ban from the server I drifted away from the game it was related to, and eventually they made another much more popular game that was a shooter, I tried it and it was pretty fun. Other than that, the bad behavior of the folks there spread far in the circle it encompassed, a lot of people from there starting shit in other servers for a time too.

As far as I know their rep is still pretty bad, and not much seems to have changed from my time there. Honestly, being there was a huge embarassment for me, but being a shithead there helped me not be one going forward, which, I'm pretty happy about.

After this I drifted to another Roblox game server for this one solo devs games, it was pretty big but I managed to stake a claim there for a bit, made a few friends but I eventually lost interest in both games it was about and drifted away from it. Before I did though I managed to get several models in, 3 total, technically 4 if you count a rebuild project of a spinoff of one of the games.

It's somewhere in-between this time I got involved with a Signalis discord server that I joined after I got one of the endings in the game. I actually had a lot of fun there, especially making OCs and stuff, its where I got my proper start with writing, eventually though, I left after getting oneshot by self loathing, as well I just drifted away from the community that came about there.

As of recent I heard it got into hot water when it banned an artist after they found out they did NSFW work (that afaik they didn't advertise in the server or anything). That's the extent of what I know though, so I can't speak much on it.

Then one day I found out this one server I lurked in was having a like, contest to get your faction into a worldbuilding setting one of the games devs started. I joined in, and almost made it too, sometime after that a bunch of people who participated in that contest just... popped up and decided they wanted to write more anyways leading to a "fanon" popping up for a setting that didn't even have any "canon" to speak of yet.

I joined in because I also wanted to write more for the guys I made, and eventually the place just grew and grew until it had a full blown tight knit community. There's a lot of squabbling but in the end the thing is still going pretty steady, hell the owners ran a 2nd contest and I managed to make it in and have my guys become an official faction that I have to write for.

It was the main community I ran with until recently, when I finished the Steins;Gate and Steins;Gate 0 animes.

I actually knew about Deluoode before then as I found it on Agorra Road when I was interesting in a game someone made from there, Disillusion and its follow up, Disillusion ST. I tried to participate in Agorra but I was anxious and intimidated given how generally unfamiliar I am with Forums and BBS and the Old Net(tm) as a whole.

That aside, after I finished the animes for S;G and S;G 0, I wanted to find somewhere I could talk about them, and then I remembered Deluoode existed, and here we are.

Safe to say this is my digital "home" now so to speak, and I'm happy to have moved in. I still run with that worldbuilding project of course, though, I've had a diminished presence there cause I've found all the talk there to just be draining. I feel a lot more comfy posting and talking on here than at that discord server, than discord in general.

[witch]

Being only 19 I missed the time in which forums and imageboards reigned over the internet, I made my first discord account in 2017 when I was 10-11 so the majority of my time spent online has been through centralized platforms like discord and youtube. I eventually moved away from such platforms and regressed to dying imageboards and forums because I would be continuously banned and excluded everywhere else and found the userbases of dying websites to be more tolerant of my habits and ways of thinking. I also just prefer the higher quality conversations rather than the constant hit of dopamine you get from the meaningless babble posted on mainstream social media.

[Steve]

I guess I could consider oldschool runescape my online home lmao. The majority of my efriends are other high level osrs players who I interact with mostly on discord and twitter. I actually hate discord but unfortunately it's really the only thing people use to VC anymore, and also the way the servers work its pretty much all people use to socialize as well. I've spent so many thousands of hours over the years with osrs people in disc that I guess it has to be considered my online home.

I'm rly fking old, I basically grew up on 4chan in 2008+ and have been pretty terminally online ever since except during undergrad when I was at my most social. I think during undergrad (2014 graduation for some time reference) I mained reddit actually but quickly burnt out of that one. I really miss old 4chan, but moreso old internet in general before everyone took it over and turned it into irl 2. I'd still fw /a/ if anybody on there had good taste l0l0l.

I guess I could consider this forum an online home, I've had this shit open perma since I joined and I really like the community here. And the fact that the theme is visual novels because I have close to 0 people I can talk about them with. Tadaima!!