Aim, msn, Xbox live chat, qq. Xanga. Asian fanatics, soompi, digg. Once Facebook came along that was the thing.

IRC ICQ MSN Bluelight Other localised special interest forums MySpace Bebo? Facebook Reddit Lemmy Mastodon

BBS with FidoNet. Then Usenet and gopher before the web was invented. After that it was IRC, then forums.

When I was in school back in the early days, I tried typing a random “wherearemypants.com” and it led to this forum run by some random guy in Texas for him and his friends. I made an account and just insinuated myself into this group of adults, and honestly, it was the golden age of social media for me. Absolutely nothing was monetized, just people sharing links and chatting about stuff.

Eventually he shut it down and I ended up on myspace>facebook>reddit>lemmy.

I started with TALK on BITNET. Top that!

I was a big Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan in the 1990s, so I really started with h2g2. For those who don’t remember, it was an early attempt to make a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, but unlike Wikipedia, a given page could only be edited by its original creator or admins. I learned quite a bit of HTML from there.

Every page on h2g2 had an attached comment section, and because anybody could make a page, most of us used it primarily as a message board. There was a lot of roleplaying.

From there I branched out into forums. The big one I posted on was TotalGames.net, the joint forum for a bunch of video game magazines, because I read Cube in secondary school and they regularly posted stuff from it to get more people to join. One of the regular members, Android18a, set up her own website at SilentDream.co.uk and had an attached forum which had six, maybe seven posters. That was a nice, intimate community, and we broke the rules of the forum software by regularly posting porn.

I signed up to a few other forums but never stayed long. In college, I joined TVTropes and actively contributed for a bit over 20 years; I just stopped this week because the new owners seem intent on turning it into another Wikia. TVTropes’ forum software is quite good, really solid, and the community is probably the most thoughtful, rational group I’ve ever encountered online (except for that one moderator. If you’re a regular on the TVTropes forum, you know the one).

I was almost one of the first people in Ireland to join Facebook. During college, I did a work placement where I shared a house with two American girls (also a Polish boy, a Romanian girl, and an Irish girl who moved out because she didn’t get along with anybody). The Yanks told me about this great website called Facebook, which I had also seen mentioned on College Humor a lot. It seemed great, but I kept saying “Oh, I’ll join tomorrow” until everybody else was on it, at which point I decided not to join it because it was too popular (yeah). That turned out to be the right decision.

I made a Twitter account after college because I was a fan of Channel Awesome and they all seemed to be on it, and so was apparently every other famous person. I could keep up with Twitter somewhat for a few years because I was unemployed and had little else to do, but actually keeping up with that site is a full-time job. I tried getting back into it on and off, and eventually deleted my account just before COVID when I figured out I have clinical depression and just reading Twitter aggravates it.

I started using Reddit at some point and I liked it, but stepped back when I realised it was addictive and toxic. I look in once in a while, and every time I do, it seems to be getting worse.

Then when Elon Musk took over Twitter, I started hearing about this thing called Mastodon. I made myself an account which I use daily, but I learned the lesson from Twitter not to bother trying to keep on top of everything. Mastodon led me to Lemmy, which led me to kbin, which is now mbin, which is where this account lives.

I also have a Discord account, but Discord confuses and overwhelms me.

ICQ †
StudiVZ †
Facebook †
4chan †
WhatsApp †
Reddit †
Feddit
I’m an elder millennial German

/.
Reddit
Lemmy

IRC

ICQ

MSN messenger

there was a site where you could post 2 choice questions that people could answer and comment on, I forget the name but I used that a lot

Facebook

Digg

Reddit

Lemmy… I had a Lemm.ee account and that died. Had a lemmynsfw account and that died. Apparently lemmy.ml has a bad reputation. Instances defederate from each other. I just want to see memes without the drama. Don’t know where to post to get more than a handful of people to see my post. I’m rapidly losing interest in the fediverse.

Back to books, podcasts and RSS… Social media has nothing worthwhile for me.

AIM —> Reddit —> lemmy

local dial-up BBSs sharing gif and wav clips and chatting about anything that you felt like at the moment

AOL chatrooms

free hosted forums on Anglefire and Geocities

Larger forums(SA, Fark, etc)

FB/instagram

Lemmy/Piefed

I think that would be my path as it relates to communities where I actually ended up having a social community involved. I would say that it also is a direct increase in toxicity as it works downward. I find Lemmy/Piefed just as toxic as any other platform but the lack of a forced algorithm lets me basically mute all of the negative content sources and it’s niche enough that you can actually mute the negative influence, which makes for a pleasant experience.

CompuServe Chat USENET Facebook Reddit Lemmy

Facebook was a horrible mistake. I jumped off when I realized I didn’t want to associate with the people there.

yahoo chat
myspace
elfpack
4chan
facebook
Spiceworks
9gag
reddit
Lemmy

Usenet Irc (many years offline) 9gag Imgur Lemmy

Usenet (and still there), mailing lists (hooray for any that use schleuder), a bit of IRC (though I was never one for quick fire & forget statements, today I’m good with Signal/Molly/Gurk and XMPP; Matrix never appealed to me), lot’s of Forums (mostly related to my favourite games at the times), some twitter (though I was never really comfortable with the hustle to gain more visibility through large follower numbers), switched over to identi.ca (and eventually many different ActivityPub servers, currently one Akkoma and one Lemmy; not interested in PixelFed, though it helps I dislike the dev’s attitude; PeerTube could be interesting as a consumer, but the UX still feels atrocious; I tend to leave my name/handle behind when switching, I’ll inform some people important to me, but I am quite happy not having to maintain friendships and a reputation, gotta do that in meatspace, and I find it taxing even there). Lurked 4chan a couple years, but was never comfortable engaging, too much “fake” being a horrible person. Was relatively active on reddit, but ever since the redesign I felt it was too cumbersome to use (yes, old., I know, but who wants to rely on a legacy version being available?), plus their corporate decisions were pissing me off more and more (Yeah, I’m a pretty stout software freedom person, down to using libreboot & canoeboot, though I no longer wish to associate myself with the FSF, given their tone-deaf handling of the whole RMS situation), so, yeah, eventually lemmy. I’m more quiet than I used to be, getting older, I suppose, but I was also never that into anything “social” in the first place (I’m an Aspie, who’d have thunk?), so I mostly lurk and only post when I feel I can actually contribute something meaningful.