Ravelry!
Ravelry is a social media site entirely about knitting and crochet. It’s a place for users to share patterns and creations and talk about projects they’re working on.
It has more than 1 million active monthly users and 10 million total users, making it one of the largest social media websites in the world. One of the two founders owners, who is also the lead developer is trans, and the website culture is absolutely lovely and very queer and trans friendly.
If you're at all interested in yarn crafts I’d very strongly recommend you give it a try.
It has more than 1 million active monthly users and 10 million total users, making it one of the largest social media websites in the world
We are but krill swimming among beautiful whales
Oh yeah. DIdn't they knit Doom once? I also recall them being pretty based on stuff but I can't remember what.
Bonus it was one of the original web sites and has decades of history extending into every facet of modern society. So that's kinda wild. Memes might have gotten invented there. 4chan was and that might be the most important act of modern American history.
Forum Goons are probably some of the most influential non-state actors in the history of the internet. For decades anywhere you went on the internet there was a clique of Goons who got their before you and there was a good chance they were running some kind of cartel or scheme that defined the meta.
I thought this was 4chan before 4chan. Is this horseshoe theory striking again?
SA's news/opinion articles page has been abandoned for years now and I don't know how to feel about that.
the rhizzone give me a "gen x hexbear" vibe
https://rhizzone.net/about/
https://rhizzone.net/forum/topic/14117/
though i wouldn't call them large, they are definitely obscure
Holy shit, this is like a alternative universe version of us, awesome
Apparently they're the ones behind readsettlers.org lmao or at least was
I don't know if these are obscure for online people (I guess most Americans IRL wouldn't know them) but erowid.org (drugs) bluelight.org (drugs) fetlife.com (fetish)
Have you read r/datura yet? Or the erowid reports of datura? It's just as crazy if not crazier
erowid rocks. when i was beginning my phase of experimenting with drugs, i spent a lot of time on there, especially the experience vault. i remember those days and thinking of how incredible it was that the internet had so much knowledge on it.
i read a weird book once, probably b.s., but supposedly a powerful sorcerer from long ago made themselves immortal inside datura, so when you take it, you invite them into you and conflict with them in a bid for their powers, like shapeshifting. if you lose, you became the sorcer's slave / permanent psychosis.
anyway, no thanks either way, lmao. ill stick with cannabis and maybe the occasional cubensis trip in the woods.
Fetlife is a social super-fund site, but that can be both amusing and terrifying in equal measure.
Spacebattles.com
SB is still a black-hole of chuddery (although not as bad as 4Chan) it's telling that one of the biggest events in the site history is when someone was so horrible to a Trans-admin that said admin spun off an entire site and half of the forums up-ended and left. I was a frequent goer to SB ten or so years ago but you can only stomach so much 'enlightened centrism' before you want to throw up.
sufficientvelocity.com
It's been a long, long, loooong time since I've been there, so I have no idea how the sea temperature is there nowadays
One of the forum threads that pops up on the main activity page is "The Summoned Hero Is A Historical Materialist??", so possibly not bad? Idk, I haven't been on forum like SB since I was in middle school and wanted to know obscure Warhammer 40k facts (still love obscure 40k facts but don't wanna get them from chuds).
Doomworld is the largest english speaking community of classic doom fans and it's pretty cool. It's surprisingly active even 30 years after the original doom released
The grand and storied USENET group alt.folklore.computers that is responsible for a lot of "old net" culture still has an active userbasr.
Body bullding. com
https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751
A classic
I dunno if you can call them "large", but SovietSteeds.com is a decently active forum for fans of Russian motorcycles, especially as the name suggests Ural and Dnepr bikes made during the Soviet Union. It's a spinoff of the older website Russian Iron, apparently there was some drama with that site's owner but I've never dug into it. It's an absolutely mandatory repository of information if your an English-speaking owner of one of those bikes, since the Owner's Manuals are notoriously thin on details for a lot of essential maintenance tasks.
I get the feeling that most of the active posters are :grillman: -types from Washington state.
giantitp.com is the homepage for the Order of the Stick which was originally a DnD comedy webcomic whose stakes kept escalating. The forum is a big home for more lighthearted TTRPG discussion among other things.
I actually found one maybe two years ago that was super niche and had a small community that stuck around for over a decade (and some for 15+ years). It was fun to hang out in that space until the guy running the forum did a hard "no politics rule" when things about pride month came up, so I left :pain:
