PWEEP - Ah yeah! :P Nice!

Kory - a 90s baby! Technically I was too I guess but I was 87. ANYWAYS! That's still a long time!

D.J. - Oh no... We shall not speak of the unreads XD if they were real letters I know my mailbox would be bursting at the seams XD

If I still had my email that Yahoo locked me out of, it'd be over 20 years old by now

(stupid Yahoo...their email system has a lot of issues, like the time I made a new account and somehow it was a shared account by someone else. I kept getting emails for accounts I didn't make on other sites like Instagram and I'm pretty sure the other person was probably also going crazy with why their accounts kept getting locked (before I figured out Yahoo had messed up and had let me sign up for an account name that someone else was already using) )

I think my current one's been around for quite a while too, though I can't remember when I'd made it.

Carn: I check the mail once a week and yeah.....sometimes it gets crazy

Antagonist: I've had my yahoo the longest (10+ years?) but use it for nothing anymore XD I had to beg my parents to get it

I can't remember when I'd signed up for my very first email...might've been somewhere between fourth ~ sixth grade. I remember going onto a lot of angelfire websites back in the days of AOL...

...

*feels old *

Ah, yes, I remember those days. I went on YIM most often, back when you could create chatrooms. That's where I first learned what roleplaying was! Lots of fun memories perusing the various worlds people had created.

I think I've only been to a handful of chatrooms...I was mostly interested in hoarding pics of my fav characters for a time back then. Then I found forums and chatted on those.

Originally Posted by Car'a'Carn

Kory - a 90s baby! Technically I was too I guess but I was 87. ANYWAYS! That's still a long time!

Yeah! :D 1995!
I consider myself more of a 2000s kid because I don't remember any of the 90s. XD

I used to use AIM when I was a kid. I talked to my friends on AIM and then there was WeeWorld that I used and that was kind of my first introduction to avatars and dress up games. I really enjoyed playing those games on WeeWorld.
The name was weird and misleading, but the game was really fun and it was great to see my friends' avatars and chat with other kids. xD

I remember finding this forum where you get points for posting, and then you can use the points to buy stuff like a fancy colored glow around your username, I liked that. No customizable avatars though. You just upload your own or pick one from their selection of a 100 x 100 pic to use. Which was probably why there was a LOT of people making 100 x 100 pics and gifs of various things, but nowadays you can barely find any anymore.

I feel like I've seen forums like that before back in the day... :O
I used to use forums where you could upload 100 x 100 avatars. :> I used to have a lot of them myself, so I had a ton of 100 x 100 avatars saved on my computer.
I mostly got into forums when I was around 16-17. After that, I kinda got tired of forums and now I'm starting to feel that way towards even avatar forums. ;-; It just feels so slow compared to chatrooms like discord. And there's not as many people on forums as there are in chatrooms.

I don't remember those too much, but I know I was barely a teen when I first got into roleplaying. Then Invisionfree/Proboards came around, and I spent all my free time exploring different roleplaying sites. I was decent at coding them, too! It's been a decade since I last spent a good chunk of time playing with HTML/CSS, though, and so much has changed since then so I'm not interested in picking it back up as of right now.

I used to have a pretty large collection of 100x100 avatar pics too I even made my own for roleplaying purposes. Like I'd have a character with different expressions and then make posts using those pics to indicate the characters' moods, etc.

I made a few Proboards forums way back when one of the forums I frequented kinda went downhill. Had some friends who would join my site (and I theirs) and we'd just chat. I'd look for nice-looking skins and all to make the site look nice. Now I'm just like...I have no idea where I had all that energy to do all of that.

I don't like chatrooms much because I've had some bad experience with them and I don't really like the 'time pressure' of responding to others, so I still prefer forums. I just don't spent as much time on them as I used to because being an adult with ~responsibilities~ suck.

It's definitely changed like that for me as I've gotten older. I didn't mind using Discord for RP sites I've been on for ages, because I've known those people for years; hell, I'd swapped cell phone numbers with a few of them. So there was a mutual understanding anyway, but if I don't know a person well I'll stick to forums. The only Discord channel I have right now is for Mene, and I only RP here as of the moment. I needed a long mental break from it, since I already write novels in my spare time and it's hard to break the 'roleplaying' mindset from an actual story. Things have to be written differently, y'know?

Totally understandable from both of you!
I think Discord grew on me slowly. At first, I wasn't into the fast paced nature of Discord and the idea of giant chatrooms was overwhelming to me. But now that I've had kinda a sour experience on a different avatar forum, and then that spread to other forums I used... I find that Discord is a little easier to get to know people faster.
I still prefer forums for RP, but I recently started an RP on Discord, so I'll see how that goes. Right now, tho, my primary way to communicate is through Discord.

I used Discord for a while, but because of the chatroom-y nature, I ended up not using it much and after a while I don't use it at all anymore. Dealing with Line is already stressful enough for me, I don't want to add more stress with my brain yelling at me to constantly check new messages with two chatroom apps.

Discord chatrooms are also kind of a hit-and-miss; I joined a group for an author on AO3 because I'd enjoyed the story they wrote, but it was toxic as hell. Almost turned me off from the fandom entirely. I've already had rabid fans almost completely turn me off from a character entirely in the past just from reading their vitriol-filled fics (before I realized what was happening; I do not miss fandom drama at all).

Why can't people just be nice?

Yeah. That's understandable. Discord can be pretty toxic sometimes. I find that a lot of the fandom servers I'm in are primarily filled with kids and a lot of them literally think that once you're over 18, you have no business being on the internet. So they are particularly mean to people who are like 20+. It's extremely frustrating because I don't believe ALL of my interests are "kids" interests. Like Omori, to me, that game was made for ADULTS but for some reason a lot of "edgy" teens took over the fandom. (Most of them haven't even actually played the game) So it's mostly just a bunch of kids "relating" to the characters and telling 20+ people that they don't belong in the fandom... :/

So now I only stick to 18+ or 21+ servers. Those are hard to talk in too because most of them already have their cliques formed, so if you join and try to jump into a conversation, they pretty much ignore you...

But at the same time, I have the same problem in a lot of avatar forums... People pretty much have their own little cliques and it feels like I'm intruding on them when I try to jump into a conversation, so I tend to just... not. xD

i feel that, Kory. i feel like Discord is all 16 year olds into stuff from the 1980s, and the bitter sketchy 30 year olds who hang out with them. all the 20-29 year olds have been scared away to tiny forums like Mene that we grew up using, because all the new social medias are just flooded with teenagers causing drama for no good reason.

i had started feeling like all of my interests were infantile too, but once i crawled back into my deep, dark forums i started realizing that media is just media, and all sorts of people are into the stuff i started considering "kid stuff", it just depends on who i'm talking to what the demographics look like. so... yeah i really don't use Discord anymore. i used to be so into it too, i was a mod in multiple chats, the owner of a few servers, and i had to have been in at least 50 servers at one time. now i'm really just in one active chat with my friends from a particularly obscure pixel site, and they're all 23+ so it's chill vibes. other than that, i really just use it for image hosting and the rare PM.

i totally feel you on the cliques too, it's hard jumping into a community that feels like it's already formed, especially when there's an age gap. i also feel like people really ignore other people on Discord and just post over them? on Mene, i feel like someone would at least acknowledge what i said before moving the conversation along, but on Discord people won't even drop an emote half the time

Oh, yeah, I feel the same as well. I'm particularly shy in person, and don't warm up to people quickly. On the internet, I'm basically the same way. It took several years for me to find a 'best friend'; someone I can talk to about anything and never feel pressured to hide anything. I thought I had one, in my early twenties, but she really screwed me over because I became friends with someone she hated. I wasn't around at the time of their falling out, so I wasn't going to take sides over something I knew nothing about other than what I've been told. In the end, they both turned out to be toxic people and I don't talk to either of them anymore - I'm happier without them in my life.

I do admit, though, I've been bad at 'keeping up' with conversations - I tend to forget some threads I've talked in, and by the time I return, another topic has started. I will try to jump in with my thoughts, but if I don't have anything in common or cannot empathize, I'll just pass and wait until it seems appropriate to return

You both are welcome to hang in Luck of the Draw, though! That's the link in my signature. ghost already knows about it, so I don't know why you haven't popped in yet, sucka It's basically a hangout with the chance to win gold/prizes - no lie!

Huh, I haven't run into the 'no business being in ______ after the age of ___!' type myself before. Or I have, but they're generally buried by others under a pile of derision. I guess it might be because I'm not often in groups where the ages are younger than 20? Sucks that Discord seems to have more of those types of people.

I'm starting to wonder if that toxic group I had joined was mostly of teenagers who think they're edgelords or something. In more than one instance, they were initially ambivalent/moderately positive about a character, but then once some of the detailed of the backstory of the character was revealed, they immediately turned on him and was like, "I always knew he was a piece of shit! Bet his *slur here* fans would still be crying about how he's just misunderstood hahahaha" and everyone would join in chorusing about how they 'always knew that character was garbage' etc etc. When they themselves were previously part of that character's 'fan' group not a week ago. It was insanely hypocritical and frankly an amazing display of stupidity.

I'm on Reddit these days and since the site has so many people, pretty much nobody cares about who someone else is (as in they don't bother remembering/checking others' usernames or anything) unless someone happened to have made a post or comment that rose to infamy/become super popular. The anonymity is nice, and makes for a good environment to simply lurk, but there's pretty much no chance of forming any type of relationship with anyone else. People leave comments/send a DM or two and that's it. You're back to strangers, and nobody will remember who you were.

Originally Posted by PWEEP

I do admit, though, I've been bad at 'keeping up' with conversations - I tend to forget some threads I've talked in, and by the time I return, another topic has started. I will try to jump in with my thoughts, but if I don't have anything in common or cannot empathize, I'll just pass and wait until it seems appropriate to return

I am definitely "guilty" of doing that too! If it happens that a thread is moving super quickly, and I have time, then maybe I can keep up better with the conversation as it refreshes. But sometimes I get busy or distracted by real life and then I come back and the thread has already moved to the next page oops!

This is why my attempts at joining group RPs always fall apart. I'm in too different a timezone from most of them so when I'm posting, I could wait hours with no response, but when I'm sleeping and wake up the next day, every body will have already moved on to other things long ago.

Whenever I joined a group roleplay, I made sure it was turn based - I feel it's much more relaxing that way, and allows everyone to participate. Most I found, and all I hosted, gave a certain time limit. If you don't post in two days (or whatever was decided upon), you get skipped. I don't like rapid fire constant posting. I don't have the attention span for it, and I get burned out too quickly. Then again, I limited myself to small groups, 5 people or characters maximum.

i like that! my favorite TTRPG DM had us start by designing the world ourselves, so they would go and ask one group member a question like "what time period is this world?" and they would answer, and the DM would tell a little bit of the story, then when the DM ran into another big plot descriptor, they would ask a different person something like "and where is our story set?" and they'd answer. it was a really neat way to DM and made me feel a lot more invested in the story, and we got to come up with NPCs and did a lot of worldbuilding together, and it really felt custom-made to our characters that way because we were the ones who designed both. i wish that RP had continued!! but the DM got sick, so i never got to play with them again.

Personally, I like Discord a lot! I like how fast paced it is, but I find that I mostly stick to DMs and one server these days because most of the fandom servers are filled with kids who literally think that internet was a created just for them...

I happened to be browsing TikTok one day and some elderly woman was talking to a bunch of kids on her live and everyone was like, "Tiktok was made for kids! Get this old lady off the app!" And some random kid said something in the chat like, "Guys, I'm in her basement!" and these really stupid ass, gullible kids were like, "OMG GUYS HE'S IN HER BASEMENT!!! SHE'S EVIL!" And it was so painful to watch. Dx

I haven't RP'd in a long time... Dx I have an RP going on Discord rn, but I haven't really had a chance to sit down and read through the replies and actually respond.

I just forget to post. Life is so busy that at the end of the day I sit down to do something I want for myself and end up passing out, barely even starting it I would love to RP but I'm so infrequently posting I'd feel bad starting something

That is totally understandable!
I'm kinda in that situation right now. x__x;; Basically, I have an RP going, but I'm kinda so busy that it's hard for me to get into the right mindset to be able to actually reply to a post without starting and just falling asleep. XD