You know, going through all the old artworks I have, I really gotta say that nothing quite makes me as sad as how certain stuff completely disrupted online communities. I have gone through my old DevArt account for some of the old Digimon fanwork I commissioned. And a pretty much nobody who was part of that Digimon OC community back in the day has posted after 2020. Pretty much everyone left when Wix (I think?) acquired DevArt, or at the very latest when they did that design change. I mean, of the people who were part of the Digimon OC community nobody even stayed till the place was overrun by AI.
And I talked a couple of weeks ago about how I coincidentally ran into an old friend who I had not seen for years. And that friend I knew from Twitter. And that, too... there was a whole big ass community on twitter that then just... disappeared because of Musk buying the platform and making it into a refuge for the worst people on the internet.
Livejournal also is just... dead. And it is almost kinda ironic that despite everyone prophesizing the end of tumblr for like 10+ years now, this website is just somehow clinging on.
But it is just so fucking frustrating to realize how fucking much of online communities just fully depends on some corporations not just... messing it up. I mean, all those old fan-run forums largely are offline by now as well. (With the exception for With the Will in the Digimon fandom. That site has been hosting Digimon stuff since I first got online, and by the looks of it, chances are, that site will miraculously outlast me.) But at least the fan-run forums died usually more to "natural cuases". Like, people moved on from the fandoms, servers did not get maintained etc. Instead of a big capitalism corp deciding that "no, actually, we just bought this one page but actually we hate everything about it other than the money that theoretically the people using the site right now could give us".
I guess what I am saying is: ah, man, I miss the internet that existed before, like... 2017.
