Online Spaces of Olde
Revisiting the places that shaped me in my early years online
Neopets: The infamous online pet site. It was once a quaint, idyllic place that sincerely was the whole reason I learned HTML. I had seen some of the older kids (teenagers, while I was around nine) on the platform turn their Neopet's personal pages into hubs for their webcomics, art portfolios, and more and I feel like my 3rd eye opened LOL. I realized that individual people could actually control some of the web. I did not stick with Neopets for more than a few years, but the impact was memorable. My brother gave me a binder full of his notes from his HTML class and I had most common codes memorized by age ten.
Tibia: My first MMORPG. I was introduced to this online game by my older brother, who was famous on our server. He and his teenage friends were the Otep Clan, and they sunk hours upon hours (honestly, years) into the game. I spent most of my time running around confused and chatting with random passersby. It was a game that allowed PVP nearly everywhere but I knew if I said I was a sibling of the Oteps, I was spared and even gifted items as penance for approaching me. "Tell your brother I'm cool." I had my first online boyfriend for about a week and he emailed me a picture of himself. I was too nervous to open it and I "broke up" with him. My friend Kelsey, who was just a few years older than me, also met a boy on Tibia.. one who was 18 years old and had asked to come and see her IRL. He was pressuring her to give him their address so he could drive up. She made me swear I wouldn't tell anyone, but I told my brother, who told her brother. They found the guy in the game and told him she was only 13, thinking he hadn't known... She'd already told him that. This prompted our brothers to talk to us about predators online, and Kelsey and I stopped playing Tibia.
Digimon FDD: My obsession with Digimon was flourishing in my middle school years, so I searched for forums discussing Anime. In a Yahoo Groups chatroom I met someone who became a great childhood friend, a girl named Ulrica in Canada. She was also obsessed with Digimon and we bonded easily. We added each other on MSN Messenger and would talk for hours every day for years. I used my HTML skills to build us a fan site for our own Digimon, and as we got older, we adapted it to host a combined fanfiction story we wrote ourselves into. Rica drew our characters and our Digimon, and we met more Digimon fans who had projects like ours. They called themselvses "FDD": The Fictional Digimon & Digidestined Community. Even into our late teens Rica and I kept up with our fanfic site, and we even visited each other "IRL"; I stayed with her in Canada, and she came to the US to stay with my family! It feels a bit crazy that our parents ever agreed to let us do these trips during the "Stranger Danger" days. Eventually we got older, started preparing for college, and grew apart. All the same, these are some of the fondest memories of my life and were a deeply meaningful thing for a young, depressed, socially struggling version of myself. Ulrica, you were an incredible friend & I will always love you, ya vulcan idiot.
A side note: In looking for the original logo to add to this page, I found out that Panda Jen actually ported the original Digimon:FDD site to Neocities! I'm overwhelmed with nostalgia, this is incredible. I need to see if I can find my old Digimon art and make a shrine...
Gaia Online: An online forum that incorporated art and games to bring people of similar interests together. You could earn gold by being a consistent poster, buy clothes from the shops to dress your avatar, and trade art and rare items with those you befriended. It was a pretty icon space in the 2000s and it's still around to this day! This is where I learned about txt roleplaying, new books, anime, and more. It's also where I started to make in-depth characters and commission art of them. I was not above 'bumping' threads to try and get the lottery number for free avi art! Iykyk.
Fanfiction.net: I don't remember where I heard about this place, but I spent hours devouring Harry Potter fanfics. I still distinctly remember the lists of Remus x Sirius fics. Oh, and 'My Immortal' was actually happening in real time back then! It was a different world before the downfall of Rowling, when I had no qualms telling people my favorite books were about her wizarding school. I didn't get into the fanfic of other properties that I can remember, though I wrote my own Beyblade fanfic once and it was.. certainly something. Tell me why me, a white girl from the Midwest, made her OC a Beyblade tournament participant from Egypt? If you weren't there for it, you may never know the Egyptian Gods craze of the 90s and 2000s. People were watching Ancient Aliens like it was a documentary. Truly wild.
Deviantart: This is another space that Rica and I hung out in our teens, and where we met most of our FDD friends! My now-husband and my IRL best friends also had Deviantart profiles because we were becoming "serious artists". I look back at the 'work' that I posted there and cringe, but it was a necessary part of my growth and development as a creative person. The DRAMA that was constantly going around on DA was pretty insane though, and there were a lot of toxic beliefs that I took with me for years. I had to work so hard to rewrite my understanding of being an artist after the emotional damage and self-esteem issues I developed from that site.
Tumblr: After the fall of Geocities, Angelfire, and the many blogging services of the 2000s, Tumblr was the last bastion against the reign of today’s social media. Yes, I know Tumblr is still around, but it is a shadow of its former self since the Yahoo acquisition. Early Tumblr had a fever about it that can't be explained easily. I don't even know how I found out about it, it's like I woke up one day and heard the chanting and walked like a zombie to the sign up page. This was the second place that truly split my head in half and poured freshly squeezed teenage social discourse into me. As a reminder, I grew up in the rural Midwest, and I had never seen anyone discuss topics of race, gender, sexuality, or neurodivergence the way that people were on Tumblr. I legitimately did not understand what trans people were before joining. Honestly, there were a lot of things I knew nothing about and half of what I learned on there was probably bullshit. It doesn't matter, the point is my concept of identity was forever changed by the human cesspool (non-derogatory) that was Tumblr.