What non-corporate social media do you use these days?

December 5, 2021 12:08 PM

Obviously, there is Mefi, but I am curious what other gems you use to connect to people online, or have connected to people in the past?

I was a former member of Couchsurfing before it went corporate and made beautiful friends there about 15 years ago, and I also have close friends from a photography forum who I have the pleasure of meeting overseas. I've also had lovely conversations with folks on Flickr and here on Mefi.

As an oddball example, the old getafreelancer.com (now the glossy freelancer.com), I made friends with an overseas programmer, long after the project was finished.

I curious to know how others have made friends online using non traditional channels? Stories would be cool too!

posted by aeroboros to Society & Culture (8 answers total)

MLTSHP (formerly mlkshk) is a user-supported and member-run community where folks share pictures/videos of any/everything from memes to pics of their pets to infographics to live music videos to whatever. There are a lot of current/former MeFites there but it's definitely its own entity. There are occasional long discussions and/or flareups, but they're few and far between. Mostly it's an established community of chill people sharing things they like and commenting on their friends' stuff and I've definitely made some great friends there over the past ~decade.
posted by Ufez Jones at 1:46 PM on December 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

There are some good communities on Discord. (I don't know how to explore channels because I made a Discord account just to join the one "server".)
posted by heatherlogan at 1:57 PM on December 5, 2021

The comments on a paid substack I subscribe to are very much like the comments on an active niche blog 15 years ago.
posted by COD at 4:26 PM on December 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

I used to be a very active member of the Brunching Shuttlecocks BBS. It was awesome and I made some really good friends. (Big thank you to Mefi's own Lore Sjöberg!)

Also, it seems crazy, but there was time that Yahoo was not the corporate behemoth it is today, and their Groups held a very important place in my life in the early 2000s.

And I can't forget poor Tribe.net, a wonderful underground social platform that tragically lost almost everything when their main servers were dropped during a data center relocation. They never really recovered the trust of their members, as many people lost years of conversations and photos.
posted by ananci at 6:32 PM on December 5, 2021

Dreamwidth is where I keep in touch with a loose circle of people. Maybe 70% are from a fandom originally, but most posts are personal life stuff and comments, generally locked down. My DW would look like a single post publicly, but has close to two decades of posts running in it for people in my circle. DW feels like being indoors and having personal conversations, while Metafilter feels like talking in a neighbourhood restaurant - you can still be overheard!
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:16 AM on December 6, 2021

I was a Friendfeeder before Facebook zucked it. A fairly tight group of librarians and a few more former Friendfeeders migrated to mokum.place and are still there.

No ads, no tracking. Funded by yearly-or-so whip-rounds to cover hosting and storage.
posted by humbug at 7:18 AM on December 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

I made some great friends and meet ups on a now long defunct pc case modding forum called PimpRig. (Back when "pimp my ride" was all the rage and pc case modding was really big way to impress people at LAN parties...remember those???)
posted by gzimmer at 8:00 AM on December 6, 2021

Other than MeFi, MLKSHK is really the only website where I've met people who I went on to get to know in more of a real-life situation. I am also part of an online trivia league which has friendly chatty forums about nerdy trivia things which is definitely part of my daily internet life. I know there are some project on Wikipedia which have really nice and supportive communities, so like not Wikipedia in general but specific projects like Wikiproject Vermont or Wikiproject LGBT Studies wihch can help make Wikipedia in ngeeral a bit more palatable. The LGBT project, in specific, really patrols pronoun usage on the pages of trans individuals so that people aren't misgendering them. Obviously Wikipedia needs a lot of help but if that sort of thing interests you, it's a neat way to help out.
posted by jessamyn at 7:58 PM on December 7, 2021