#and me and this gay dude i was friendly with would bitch on msn (GOD) about the worst replies

[bloomfish]

Livejournal was cool. It was pretty easy to find and interact with people.

However, there was a great purge a while back. It was a bit like the tumble porn purge - accounts with art were banned for “porn” even if it was basic figure drawing or pictures of gays kissing, meanwhile actual hardcore straight porn was still getting through

So most the people I know just left.

That's the thing, I know it was but for some reason not for me rip 😭 I poked around but was unable to find like... anything substantial on there, let alone the communities that I knew existed lol. I was probably going about it wrong but it just seemed like an empty wasteland to me. Like I set up my little blog, then what was I supposed to do?

Yeah afaik lj and ff.net had kind of a more... moralistic stance on fan content than we're used to now. I remember the ff.net mods would crack down pretty hard on random stuff back in the day and get very personally involved. Also the 'slash' shipping wars were HUGE apparently though I was not involved. This was before sjw tumblr changed the world, and it was more acceptable to just be outright homophobic on the internet lol

Honestly before tumblr I spent most of my time on random forums, at the time the invisionfree-type boards were popular. I remember being on a spuffy one (I want to say it was called Elysian Fields) and various Harry Potter ones. I even made invisionfree boards idk what they were about anymore though. I think I had some that were just me and 3 friends lol it was totally free and pretty easy to get the hang of basic html for them. god this is so long ago I must have been like 13-14