#imvu users

[myuumei]

angela web decor for anon

[selfinflictedgunshotwound]

these two pictures are what got me into doll collecting as a hobby at the tender age of 12... i'm not that attached to the concept of "grails" bc i consider most everything i want of equal importance, to a degree, but these two are probably my biggest grails

[girlspecimen]

my imvu avatar shes wat u might call "uglycute"

[pettyvu]

b warned and cautious of kovu/davey (used 2 b kovunightshadow now hes daveypinnywolfteller)

click on keep reading to find out whats going on

manufacturers_id=64873937

[aroceu]

some thoughts on leaving a social media website...again

as of 10/16/2024, twitter has announced its intention to implement a new feature into the platform: instead of blocking allowing you to block certain accounts from viewing your profile if it's public, it now just... doesn't do that anymore. it only limits interaction. though this certainly isn't a surprise with musk's twitter rollouts since 2021—when i first saw people start to trickle out—this, in particular, breaks a lot of users boundaries and has prompted many to private their accounts and move to bluesky.

i'm in support of this, btw—the ceo of bsky is strongly opposed to ever running any sort of ads on the site ("won't enshittify the network with ads"), doesn't use any blockchain technology, and has a culture where supplying alt text on images is the norm. your main timeline is in reverse-chronological order (like intended), but there are other separate options to create a custom algorithmic feed for certain types of content, only if you wish to. though bsky is a work in progress, i have high hopes for what it can be in the future: that is, usable, practical, and more reminiscent of what it was like when twitter first started, than how twitter currently is.

but despite my love for bluesky, i won't spend too much time glazing yet another microblogging platform. instead, i'm here to ponder the concept of social media: why we have it, why we use it, and why these moves happen in the first place. people have been trickling in and out of twitter ever since the richest and evilest man in the world took possession of it; especially in a fandom sense, there's been a back and forth between twitter and tumblr due to tumblr's former porn ban, as well. we all have principles and morals that guide the decisions we make, including what websites we decide to use. they speak to a pattern of not only our culture as people at any given time—but how these platforms have the power to implement these changes whenever they want. and we, as individuals, must make decisions both based on those principles, but also our desires to fit in.

i'll start off by saying this—eventually i'm going to start talking about what social media means for creatives. but there is in fact an extremely well-written article about this already that goes into more detail. if you're more interested in that, let me direct you there first: R U AN ARTIST ON SOCIAL MEDIA??? by omoulo

with that out of the way, let's talk about me, shall we?

i got onto the internet through geocities—crazy sentence to say now after all these years. of course, i played neopets and flash games like many other kids, but that was mostly through knowing those websites and urls existed, and preserving them in my mind so i could return to them for some mindless minutes of entertainment later. geocities was my first introduction to the creative, user-designed web, so to speak. instead of being a number to interact with a thing that someone else has made—a flash game, a youtube video, a website where you can collect fictional pets—the idea of geocities to me at the time was this idea of participating on the internet. being a part of it. writing whatever i wanted and posting it. sharing the link with others. having others find it and read it too—a part of me, my method of creative self-expression, whatever i desired to write and post on the less than permanent internet.

my best friend at the time was the one who needled me into creating accounts—first an email address, then an AIM, then a myspace, then an IMVU, so on and so forth. i wasn't going out looking for these, and though i'd heard of them before or seen ads of some of these sites, i wasn't interested in actually being on these platforms and making these accounts until my friend told me that i should. call me a people pleaser or easily influenced or whatever; i was 12. but it was through this link sharing, this naivety and ignorance of the vastness of the internet, that allowed me to be fascinated with the world wide web in the first place.

i usually cite quizilla as my first "fandom" website, because it was—but it wasn't because i found it by accident. it wasn't that i googled it or looked for a personality test and stumbled upon it. no, it's because i was chatting with a friend on AIM, and she had found some crazy chain letter story and shared it to me for how absurd it was, and sent me the link. it was on quizilla.

literally the moment i clicked that link changed my life forever. even though i read the crazy story, i also clicked on the username of the person who posted it, out of curiosity. that person had jonas brothers fanfics on their quizilla profile, of all things, which led me into an obsession with the jonas brothers in the 2 years that followed. through that link—that account—that platform—i got a lot more interested in writing, webdesign, and what it meant to be on the internet, not just as a numbered participant, but also as someone with an imagination, who finds fulfillment in creative expression. i wrote the longest thing i'd ever written in that time (30k of a self-insert, but we won't go into that), began to experiment with css and website design, and participated, sharing stuff that i thought was interesting or fun, worth 5 minutes of anyone's time.

the internet wasn't just about being a place where my presence didn't matter anymore—it became a medium of self-expression. more than that, it became a place where i could meet and socialize with people, especially as i developed avpd in my high school years.

the internet wasn't always like this. right now, when we talk about the internet, we don't talk about the random websites we find, the links we stumble upon. (i have an entire website dedicated to those for me, though.) the games we spend hours playing, by ourselves, without interacting with others. random personality tests, or just simply the news. we talk about google, but in the same way we talk about facebook, or even twitter. it's a verb; it's omnipresent; it exists within the context of our internet culture, but becomes meaningless outside of it. it's not to say it doesn't have meaning—but that the language we use represents our relationship with it, this assumed normalcy. this assumed dependence.

i bring up my own history because as young as i feel compared to many of my older internet friends, and how late to the game i always felt—i was there. i was there on the internet before twitter (since 2009), tumblr (since 2010), facebook (i lied about my age), bluesky now, and whatever will come in the future. i was there when people were saying that the internet was still being written; when websites were made with tables (eugh); when email was the primary way to connect with others, because irc was for nerds and nothing else had been invented yet.

i'm a big advocate for not looking at the past with rose colored glasses and getting caught up in nostalgia and greener grass. i believe that technology is not inherently harmful or bad—it creates more options for accessibility, especially for those who are disabled. and even outside of that, it allows us to learn about more people, communicate with others with a few keystrokes, and form relationships that we otherwise would never get to have. i don't want this to seem like i'm saying "man remember how good the internet used to be?" because i'm not—i believe that as things change, there are benefits as much as there are hindrances.

of course, it bears saying that the primary hindrance—of current twitter, of many platforms over the years, and the internet with increasing recency—is corporations. big money interests. capitalism.

it's why we get so tired of ads—it's why ads exist in the first place. it's why these social media platforms that used to feel like they were made by the same people who would use them (livejournal, youtube, twitter) have suddenly become these soulless impersonal websites. it becomes more obvious that they want you to use them more because they sell you on exclusivity and visual minimalism, rather than because that's where your friends are, and you have this unique way to express yourself.

in fact, i'll say this: the first time i learned about facebook when i was too young to use it, i was not impressed. i had a myspace at the time that i had dolled up to make pretty with sparkly gifs and obnoxious colors and weird fonts. when i saw how boring and samey everyone's facebook profile page was, i was like, what's the point? sure i could talk to my classmates and random other people in my life that i didn't really care about, but what about making myself different from others? what about my creative expression? what about having an account that makes me look unique, instead of blending in with everyone else?

and so here i am nearly two decades later pondering about the use of social media, our individuality as well as our collective interests, and how the internet has changed so much, both in itself and how it affects us, in that time.

i'm here because i want to talk to my friends and meet new people with common interests and get excited about them. i don't want to feel left out, but that's a normal experience—outside of fomo, it is in our core to connect with others. it's the whole meaning of everything. it's why i even made an email in the first place, in my basement with my best friend, secretly setting up a yahoo account because she wanted another way to talk to me, and i wanted another way to talk to her. it's why people have been leaving twitter little by little for another site—the same site as many others, because that's where all their friends are. whether it's bsky or mastodon or misskey or just back here on tumblr, we're here not just because of our desire for community, but even as simple as our desire for a bond, a relationship with another human being. to me, that is how "social media" is defined—a medium through which we socialize because of this innate desire.

and yet, of course the enshittification and corporatification makes this more difficult for us, in ways more than one. because the fact is that as we (as people) became better at using the internet, finished writing it, and understood it—psychologically and sociologically—so did the corporations. or advertisers, you take your pick. we, the everypeople who use the internet as means to fulfill our social and other self-indulgent desires, are not the only people here. as with many things else in the world, the internet turned from an unpredictable but fun mess of us figuring shit out as we went along, into a product designed to keep us using it and engaging with it more, so some rich people can put even more money into their pockets. it's why twitter is the way it is now; even why tumblr is the way it is. why social media has become about "content creation" and "small businesses." why it feels like, every day, we see more ads and AI generated bullshit, as a little bit of the original soul of the internet gets sucked away day by day.

but even there, i don't want to come across as cynical or world-weary. though i believe this to be true, i don't think it says anything about our lack of agency, or our lack of innate humanity. instead, i believe that this means, at least on the individual level, that we should think more about not only what we're doing on the internet, but why we're doing it. how we're doing it. are we here because we're addicted? or is there something we're getting out of it? sure, many websites now have more addictive UI and algorithms that tell the receptors of our brain to return to them because we were getting so much dopamine from them earlier. but i also wouldn't necessarily argue that the only solution to this is to, then, go offline.

i have many friends who've elected to depart social media but stay online—friends who i met through website building, to be fair, but that's one of my main points. i already wrote a manifesto on my love letter to the personal website; but the tl;dr is this:

the internet is not evil, it is not good, it is just a form. if we desire to express ourselves and socialize with others in this space, it does not have to be just about social media, and creating a new account on a new website every time people move. instead, we have personhood—we have individuality, we have agency. we have the ability to build our own websites, no matter how shitty or times new roman comic sansy or color clashy or sometimes inaccessible they can be. regardless of all these seeming impractical setbacks though, it does not absolve us of that ability to do whatever we want on the internet. and it also bears saying that websites, both the personal and impersonal, can change over time, for better or worse.

i am a huge proponent for people making their own personal websites. it makes me so so happy that neocities is gaining popularity, mostly because i love seeing people try their own hand at making a website for themselves, a new form of self-expression. i won't go into too much detail on this because i've already said everything i want to say about it (see above), but if you take away anything from this post, let it be this: consider making a personal website, a corner of the internet, for yourself, by yourself. not just because you want people to engage with it, or because you want to curate to an algorithm or an artistic/fannish trend. not because you want the things you make to gain traction, to get bigger numbers without considering the people behind those numbers, as soon as possible.

do it because you want to. because you have to. because you think it's cool, and because it's you. people may find it and judge it; but they may like it as well. the more unique and authentic and weird we are with each other, the more we are able to appreciate each other for who we really are. the internet is one of many places we can do this.

i don't really see these forms of self-expression separate from social media, but i do see social media separate from it. to me, social media is a vehicle to strengthen those connections, those relationships, much like DMs and IRCs; but it is not the be-all, end all of the internet. it's only a small part of it. not everything is permanent on the internet; but everything that ever has been online is a microcosm of the human experience, whether it's an old cloudflare site or twitter dot com in 2010.

our experiences on the internet are not about corporate interests. it's about using limewire to download pirate music, sharing random links we find, building a design that may not be practical or universally appealing but still represents a form of individuality. when i think of how the internet has grown, i don't think about what it means for companies or advertisers or what meetings must go on to get people like me to keep using it—i think about remembering the difference between addicting games dot com and addicted games dot com, clicking links on websites to find even more websites, sitting at the family computer and deciding if i wanted to spend hours on neopets or that one willy wonka flash game i grinded like several hours on one night when i was 7. i think about what it's always meant to me, because the internet was not always a centralized place where i was going on the same website every day. the rise of internet centralization to the point that it's become expected, the norm, the primary way any of us to be online, is not inherently a bad thing—but i wouldn't say it's a universal good, either, when the internet is a wide and vast space, and can be so much more than that.

because the one thing that remains throughout the years is our agency and choice. we still have the ability to make the internet what we want it to be, or at least a corner of it, something separate from the corporations, the enshittification, economically researched user interfaces and experiences, the advertisements, the "like and share so the algorithm boosts me more." there's still a point to it all without the money, and without twitter. and it's both our desire for creativity and self-expression, as well as our intrinsic bonds with each other. despite it all, it's about our humanity.

as the internet continues to grow, so do we. nevertheless, the importance of our humanity, and retaining it, will remain. oftentimes it is up to us to remind ourselves of that.

-

links here, for access:

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Says She Won’t ‘Enshittify the Network With Ads’

R U AN ARTIST ON SOCIAL MEDIA??? by omoulo

links @ kingdra.net (my links, like bookmarks)

A manifesto of sorts; or, my love letter to the personal website by me

[simnostalgia]

Not to be biased but why is it when someone is causing trouble in the sims community it's always coming from IMVU and SL creators?? Like, this isn't JUST about the @lindasims2 thing either. It's been like this for YEARS. I try not to talk inside baseball on Simnostalgia really because I have a lot of casual players but like...

Year after year the biggest stupidest drama is always IMVU and Second Lifers coming in with their crumpled meshes, overedited photos, and cringe 'instagram baddie' fashion that ages TERRIBLY and looks like dogshit in game. Flooding the CC market with asset flips and trying to monetize content creation while giving out unsolicited advice. It's garbage and not what our hobbyist community is about.

The problem is that we don't oppress users coming from MMO social games enough.

[cuntperv]

i always read your user as imvu for some reason lmao

GIGGLING LMFAO no cause you’re so right one wrong move and i would’ve been sued 😓 I DIDNT EVEN NOTICE BEFORE LIKE 😞

i wanted it to be ivamp but it didn’t let me like hello wtf 🔥 so i shortened it LOL

[ioi-burnbook]

ReigningDiamond

This user is known only as “Dia” rumored to be Aiden. Rumored to have be in a trio with “Nikki” and “Sasha”. This user is seen to call users strange insults such as “meth cow” and “crack giraffe” odd fascination with drugs and animals in the insults suggest a childish immature nature. Imvu association unknown. This user is hostile and untrustworthy. Tread carefully.

- Ducky

[thenightling]

Dear IMVU,

Please stop giving your Customer Service Scripts to read and use people who actually read the help tickets.

I just spent THREE days trying to explain to one of your customer service reps that my MichaelMorbius account was not hacked. THEY gave away the user name and left me with MichaelMorbius_Old21 even though I had logged into the account less than a year ago.

What I wanted was either the old name restored (which was likely impossible since they had already given away the name, likely from their ridiculous premium name scam) or a name change token. It turned out they did leave me a name change token so I turned Morbius into a backup Dracula account (Drakulya) since I haven't really been a Morbius fan in years anyway. So now I have two Dracula names in my IMVU selection.

But because of an apparent language barrier and the customer service person not actually reading my replies to them, or skimming very badly- they thought I wanted the NEW MichaelMorbius account back after a hacking. No, you Social Network barely-not-a-bot.

I was pissed off because the account name (which did NOT have "guest" on it) was taken while I was in the hospital for two weeks. I had that name for years and had logged into it as recently as October. I'm glad they gave me the name change token but still annoyed they took a name I had paid for a decade ago under the assumption that the account was abandoned even though I had logged into it less than a year ago.

Oh, well. I prefer Dracula anyway.

Still, it should not have taken THREE days for the customer service person to accept I wasn't trying to get the current "MichaelMorbius" account back from a hacker. No matter how thoroguhly I explained what happened. "The information you gave us doesn't match the records on the account." because you're looking at the wrong account, I'm not trying to get back a hacked account, I'm complaining about IMVU snatching a paid for screen name away from an active account and leaving me with "_Old21" at the end of mine until I changed the name. By the way, IMVU has REALLY gone to Hell. It now has virtually every Internet red flag proudly waving on its main page. Crypto currency AND NFTs. You might as well have "For Old School uses: Click here to get robbed by a Nigerian Prince."

[saijito-sl]

this is currently my browser html theme icon bc it's aesthetic. it's actually from imvu, not sl. I tried to recreate skye from hm cute.

outfit credits under the cut.

layerable | fur coat by SHOP iTrap

*MW*MALE Derivable shirt by Dreamy

lovely lilac slacks by Roy

[z] White Leopard shoes by Zazx

Baguette chain by unavailable user

o: belt M FemBoy 2 by Screwball

*B* 3d any pants chain by Bizzy

D| Gemstone |3 by Drozzo

macarina silver hair by unavailable user

 IMVU+ M eye aqu 0 by IMVU official

[ M ] the cutie head by necrotek (sorry it uses special text)

Ikemen. 01 by yeorin

[biwrites]

How's This For An Embarrassing Sexuality Realization Story

Or- "How an IMVU SRP Made Me Realize I was Bisexual"

(tw for some of my extremely irresponsible online behavior when I was a minor. brief mentions of sex and sex toys)

Flashback: it's sometime in the early 2010’s, I’m the token straight friend in my extremely queer middle school friend group. Gender feelings are bouncing around in my head like the DVD logo and just haven’t hit any corners yet. I’ve acknowledged them and promptly ignored them, which will continue until around the age of 17. My best friend has entered yet another extremely expensive video game hyperfixation, and expected the rest of the group to follow suit. First it was the Sims, then gacha rhythm games, and finally IMVU. They had, by this point, sunk hundreds (yes hundreds) of dollars into character cosmetics thanks to their parents, while the rest of the group looked on in awe. Of course, I did what any middle schooler in a deeply unhealthy homoerotic friendship would do and downloaded the stupid game. 

Now if you weren’t a weird little tween at around the same time that I was, you might be wondering what IMVU even is. It’s a social simulator, very similar to what VR chat would become in the future. You would make an avatar, decorate a house, join a room someone has decorated to look like a park or a nightclub, and chat with other users like you were in whatever setting the room portrayed. 

I was very interested in the avatars at the time, since the feminine ones were heavily stylized and very attractive to the emo middle schooler on the other side of the screen…no need to unpack that. It felt scandalous, dressing the virtual manifestation of myself in fishnets and crop tops. Giving them long dyed hair, black lipstick, and dark eyeshadow. I was prepared to slam my laptop closed at the first sign of my bedroom door opening, and I didn’t know why.

Me and my friend played around for a bit, but eventually they got bored, and I decided to go online on my own. Like many young people with unfettered access to the 2010’s internet, I’d found my way into generally more spicy corners of the internet. Because I specifically was, and am, a giant nerd, that meant I naturally found my way into RP communities. So here I am, staying home from church on a Sunday evening due to a freak muscle spasm, anxiously typing “S.R.P” into the IMVU search bar. After a few failed attempts, I struck up conversation with a girl sporting a preppy female avatar. At this point, I was tired, I was bored, and I was determined to make this work somehow; so when she asked if I wanted to move to dm’s, the implications of imagining sex with a woman was the furthest concern from my mind. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that this was probably a random guy getting his rocks off anyways, that because it was online, it didn’t mean anything about me. 

Boys, I had a revelation. 

What came of this was two girls who knew jack shit about sex trying to figure out how to write a sex scene, it wasn’t hot, we were middle schoolers in places we shouldn’t have been. I didn’t know what a dildo even was. I had to ask for a definition. 

I thought about it for the rest of the night. 

At first I considered it might just be the embarrassment that I had such a monumental writing fuckup (I mean GOD who doesn’t know what a dildo is.), but I wasn’t shameful, I wasn’t kicking myself. I just kept turning it over and over in my head. When the revelation came, it wasn’t monumental, my heart didn’t plummet to the bottom of my stomach, I didn’t fear for my eternal soul (the religious trauma would poke its head up years later), I didn’t cry, I didn’t cheer. I simply sat back in my chair, shut my laptop screen, and thought,

“Huh…do I like girls?”

I knew the word bisexual, my friends were all queer, I wrote fanfiction as a hobby and had a very active Wattpad account thank you very much. This wasn’t a new concept, but it was never a possibility for me. Somehow, I never considered that I could even feel that way about a woman, but the desire fit like a glove when I gave it a name. 

Honestly, part of me wishes I could tell you I was so conflicted there in the moment, that I sobbed, that I clawed through all of my internalized homophobia and biphobia early, that I fought as a child to accept myself as an adult, give you some emotional catharsis, but I didn’t. Truthfully, late at night, lit in a warm glow by the little pink lamp on my desk, I came out to myself silently. 

“I guess I’m bisexual.” 

I still remember the exact thought. 

I would proceed to deal with years of internalized and external biphobia, years of unpacking my compulsory heterosexuality, years of wrestling with religious trauma in the light of my self discovery…

But

At that moment, in the quiet of the night, I was happy, I was unconflicted, I was bisexual, and for a brief, beautiful moment, that felt like home.

[elfmoon3]

At it again with tf2 and imvu

I made the imvu character, it's my avatar.

The renders of the freaks were made by this guy

Give him some support for his work.

The background is a picture from the TF2 Wikipedia.

Bare in mind that I don't have either Gmod or SFM, so I use the editor on my phone to make this.

Also Ninjineer isn't present cuz I can't find a render for him, so let's pretend that he's taking the photo.

[aforgottenballad]

I realized the reason that I never called user icons "avatars" was because I associated "avatar" specifically with like. Dress-up doll customizeable user representations. Like on Gaiaonline and IMVU and Maplestory and all of that. But other people have also used "avatar" to mean the same thing as "profile pic" or "user icon", so. I wonder where that distinction comes from and how common it is?

[pettyvu]

thats creepy af

[ladiorl]

Back in time...

マクドナルド、シャイアン。 「私は検疫中にIMVUに参加し、2000年代のフィーバードリームがまだ生きていることを発見しました。」 入力、入力、2020 年 5 月 25 日、https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/imvu-is-the-dream-of-the-early-2000s-coronavirus-new-users-covid19/amp.

麦克唐纳，夏延。 “我在隔离期间加入了 IMVU，发现 2000 年代的狂热梦想仍然存在。” 输入，输入，2020 年 5 月 25 日，https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/imvu-is-the-dream-of-the-early-2000s-coronavirus-new-users-covid19/amp。

맥도날드, 샤이엔. “격리 중 IMVU에 입사했고 2000년대 열풍의 꿈이 아직 살아있음을 발견했습니다.” 입력, 입력, 2020년 5월 25일, https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/imvu-is-the-dream-of-the-early-2000s-coronavirus-new-users-covid19/amp.

MacDonald, Cheyenne. “I Joined IMVU during Quarantine and Found the Fever Dream of the 2000s Still Alive.” Input, Input, 25 May 2020, https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/imvu-is-the-dream-of-the-early-2000s-coronavirus-new-users-covid19/amp.

[idiotsofimvu2]

I can confirm Darkfwuzzle is an oc thieve and when confronted they will get you booted/banned from the room or run away and act like it never happened. im not posting with my real name because I don't want to be targeted by that user and I've seen them do that. its an awful kind of behavior! i hope imvu catches them and bans them!

oh