/mlp/ — Are there any other fandoms that make you feel like FiM's?

>>43202427 (OP)
I never have and never will extensively interact with another fandom. I simply enjoy things on my own time.

No. Fandom no longer works online the way it used to. Even FIM was unique for the period of its time. The only other fandom similar to it that had existed was Homestuck. Both of those communities had earlier origins in the Invader Zim fandom.

The fact of the matter is, if you weren't here for the golden age of fandom - that's it. It's fucking over. You missed out.
The only way to >go back is to revive the old fandom culture. We've made a lot of inroads on that end, but we are constantly under siege by psyops.
>Inb4 fake old fag
Was here for the original watch thread on /co/. /Co/, DeviantArt, forums, Tumblr, EQD and the (original) ponibooru were the initial hot spots for the early fandom. Fimfic started growing in popularity a little after ponibooru was getting close to dying.

Prior to YouTube, we uploaded a lot of fan music (almost all lost now) to tindeck, grooveshark & Tumblr.
I could talk about the old fandom for days. I'm one of the last people who was actually PART of the old fandom, not just a partial fandomer or fandom hopper like alot of fags now. I was there BEFORE everything turned to SHIT.

>>43202572
I feel like there should be articles of people like you to archive so future generations could grasp on what was like on these times...

>>43202572
My seniority as an old fag is also why I am familiar with homestuck. Back in the day those were the two major fandoms. Outside of the fandom niche spaces (ala ponibooru, etc) we shared the same major spaces; Tumblr, /co/, Deviantart, tindeck.

Chances were if you weren't part of some anime fandom, you were gonna be a homestuck or a brony. Chances were, you could even be both. Alot of us were.

Peel into the old art archives between 2010 - 2013, you'll see HS influence in the art style of BNFS for FIM. Same vice versa.

I am one of the last people from that era. I'm sure some of us are still here, but how many I don't even know. I'd say a majority of the people on board now are late joiners to the fandom (around 2015-2016 joiners) and now adult target audience, with some underage b& lurking and or pretending to be adults.

There's a lot of stuff that's changed how fandom works online. I've seen the rise and fall. Outside of HS & MLP, THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A SIMILAR FANDOM TO THOSE TWO.

Hazbin/helluva gets close in some ways, but the fandom displays the same issues as other modern ones. It's just not the same.
TADC, same issue. Gets close...but just not the same.
Fandom simply does not exist the way it used to online. Alot of that has to do with overinflation of Internet usage. Even more of that has to do with the fact U.S governments are desperate to figure out a way to turn the net into an interactive television they can use to psyop you successfully into a spiritually dead husk of a man.

It's all suffering.

>>43202603
Man, there used to be. It's just...all gone now. You might find some old web news articles covering old fandom, but it's almost all lost at this point. Internet archeology is a mess. There's some crucially important history that is now simply lost to time.

If people have questions, I can answer. I wanna share everything I can before it's all gone completely.

>>43202572
I would listen to a 3 hour audio essay if you recorded one.

>>43202622
TADC has a fandom? Is it just a club of autistic children?

>>43202427 (OP)
Yeah, juggalos. It's the same mix of wholesome sincerity and teenagery edge for an audience of mostly nerdy white people with GEDs and maybe a job at Walmart. You probably wouldn't make the connection looking in from outside, but they feel exactly the same on the inside.

>>43202656
Juggalos had a small faction in the community in the early days. Alot of us still treated them like shit because that's what you did...but they made some connections by being "self aware'.
If you look through fimfic, I imagine you can still find one of the first juggalos fanfictions that should have happened either just before or just during the advent of AIE.

Believe it was set during the running of the leaves.

Juggalos are more of a quasi-religious movement than a strict fandom though. They're an odd group.
>>43202652
>I would listen to a 3 hour audio essay if you recorded one.
I can do that. Might take me a long time though.
>TADC has a fandom? Is it just a club of autistic children?
Yes and kind of. There's a huge portion of it that are, far as I can tell, aged out Steven Universe fans (post HS-FIM era). The rest are very autistic young adults & children.

It's a huge global fandom, actually around the size we were. It just doesn't have the same magic though that we did. Not any fault on them...just is how shit works now.

File: myhome.png (721 KB, 640x804)

>>43202622
>I'd say a majority of the people on board now are late joiners to the fandom (around 2015-2016 joiners)

According to most polls around /mlp/, the majority of people are 2012-2013 joiners.
Although those statistics could be a bit tricky depending on what do we define as "joining in the year".
I joined the ride in 2013, but practically at the end of it (around December if my memory serves right, but I'm not entirely sure).
While it could be argued that I joined "at the end of an era", I think I got at the last time someone could understand what it meant to be a brony in the early 2010's and get excited for official pony content, despite some duds along the way.

File: Lauren Warned You.jpg (247 KB, 1280x800)

>>43202622
>Fandom simply does not exist the way it used to online. Alot of that has to do with overinflation of Internet usage.

That's one of the most important things people tend to overlook about why the internet isn't as fun as it used to.
A lot of what made the experience of browsing the web so enjoyable had to do with technological limitations and cultural place it had in society.
We used to treat the internet as just a way to disconnect from reality and pass the time when we were bored, it had a more balanced relationship with other forms of entertainment (videogames, tv shows, movies, outdoors activity, etc.) because of its more limited amount of content, the fact you could only accessed comfortably from a computer, and that people using it understood you did not have to take it seriously.
As the web became less clunky to use and more relevant in our day-to-day lives, the line between "the real self" and "the internet self" began to blur.
You can't just say stupid shit online to have fun and forget about it the next day, you now have to fight for a stupid sociopolitical cause while running the risk of getting doxxed by mentally ill people for daring to oppose their worldviews. You can't simply have a portfolio that you only show to the representative of an employer at an interview, you MUST post it online so that everyone can see how potentially lucrative you are, even if you despite being so public about yourself. Like most things, turning leisures into obligations is a great way to start hating what you love. The worst part is we do not even get paid to deal with all of this crap, we are so terminally online that we do it for free.
But to keep this sort of on topic, Friendship is Magic from 2010 to 2019 (both as a franchise and a fandom) is the most accurate representation of the last decade when it comes to the internet, western animation and even politics somehow.

>>43203054
Yeah, that's about right.
The old internet was better when it was clunky. It felt a lot like dreaming and had a magical kind of quality to it.

Web usership is artificially inflated and maintained by predatory design. But the web we use isn't even the same web as the one before. Logging online was an almost ritual act, you had to turn on the computer deliberately and make the choice to go onto some silly, clunky customized web pages or an image board like ours.

Now you can have a computer with web access on literally 24/7 with most websites being overly sleek so as to maximize your attention.

The truth of the matter is, if web design was still clunky and based around making cool shit and fostering niche info/communities & cultures....there wouldnt be even half as many people online.
>the most accurate representation of the last decade when it comes to the internet, western animation and even politics somehow.
FIM & HS were literally the last things to come out before the world became a political laboratory run by pedophile Gatsby's running Cambridge analytica.

Friendship is magic is literally about virtue ethics. Doing things that are good and trying to be kind because those are the right things to do. It's a more realistic representation of life than life is of itself currently.
>>43202892
>Although those statistics could be a bit tricky depending on what do we define as "joining in the year".
Interesting. There's also a question of how many are telling the truth and aren't bots.
Hate that I even have to think about that sort of thing now.
Otherwise, yeah. Definition becomes tricky. I define early fandom as joining *within* 2010 - 2013 (latest).
>I joined the ride in 2013, but practically at the end of it (around December if my memory serves right, but I'm not entirely sure).
Shit. I'm sorry for you as much as I am glad. You literally joined right at the tail end.
>While it could be argued that I joined "at the end of an era", I think I got at the last time someone could understand what it meant to be a brony in the early 2010's and get excited for official pony content, despite some duds along the way.
I won't argue with that. I'd still award you a fandom veteran badge. December is definitely cutting it close...but I'd say you count. You were around just in time to still catch some of the cool stuff. Fandom blogs, the early music wave, etc. if memory serves that would've been about the same time homestuck & MLP were splitting off from each other as unified fandoms, during the initial redditization.

>>43203054
>Friendship is Magic from 2010 to 2019 (both as a franchise and a fandom) is the most accurate representation of the last decade when it comes to the internet, western animation and even politics somehow.
That's a good observation. I feel like it would be hard to find another thing that is as 2010's to the core as MLP is

File: 2092842.png (520 KB, 1280x720)

>>43202622
While I understand you comparing the Homestuck fandom to the mlp one, and without a doubt it was quite a big thing - I was enjoying Problem Sleuth before Homestuck came to be, and I did enjoy Homestuck as well - I have to say around when I got into FiM, ponies were invading the Dwarf Fortress forum, while Homestuck was not. Fans incorporated ponies into whatever they were into, in whatever space they were in - my impression was that Homestuck had far less crossover into other interests. Eg I think I recall seeing an mlp battletech merc company and even today we're modding games to have pony. Of course I'm looking through a pony-centric lens, if Homestuck fans did the same thing I wouldn't know because I admittedly never kept an eye out for it, so correct me if I'm wrong. I'd actually go with OP and say that Touhou was more significant than Homestuck and I really only scratched the surface with their musical scene.

Ultimately my perspective is a limited thing, in the end I can only say that nothing else captivated my heart the way ponies did in 2012. No other community had the same effect on me. But I'm sure many of those belonging to other fandoms would say the same about theirs.

>>43202572
Give a detailed list of everything we lost.

>>43202675
>Might take me a long time though.
Give a trip for searching your release posts. Or a keyword atleast.

>>43203951
>Fans incorporated ponies into whatever they were into, in whatever space they were in - my impression was that Homestuck had far less crossover into other interests.
Oh, god, no. If anything homestucks were infinitely worse about this in some ways. homestuck produced CONSTANT crossovers. These were especially big during hiatuses for the comic.
The reason you'd have noticed FIM over HS is that FIM is more "noticeable". Especially if FIM was your primary fandom.

Homestuck producing endless crossovers, AUs, etc got them banned off many platforms, etc. people found it annoying for the same reasons they found ponies annoying. The only difference being homestuck was considered slightly more bearable due to it not being colourful ponies.

The dwarf fortress HS community existed and the most notable form was called "troll fortress". You can still find some old web pages from around 11 years ago for that.
> I'd actually go with OP and say that Touhou was more significant than Homestuck and I really only scratched the surface with their musical scene.
I kinda get the logic. But it really isn't the same. Touhou has its own unique community and it's worth looking at and analyzing. But as a community, they have more in common with older invader zim fans than they do with the MLP & HS communities.

The primary reason touhou isn't the same as the definitive fandoms of early 10s (HS/MLP) really comes down to seniority. Touhou has a very "old internet" aura to it. This lends them similarity (and difference) to the invader zim fandom, which acts as a kind of genetic forefather to the HS & MLP fandoms.

It would be interesting to see however, because of touhous similarity to IZ fandom, what it has influenced on that side of internet culture.
>Ultimately my perspective is a limited thing, in the end I can only say that nothing else captivated my heart the way ponies did in 2012. No other community had the same effect on me. But I'm sure many of those belonging to other fandoms would say the same about theirs.
I mean yeah totally.
That all said, the only fandom that was ever similar to ponies was homestuck. That relationship goes deeper than people remember at this point. Again, lot of old fans from the beginning of the ride were homestucks. Part of that was sharing the same core territories. The other part was similarity in fandom structure.
>>43204307
I feel kinda awkward, but here's a trip for the time being.

File: twitter-gif-2047737002309587131_69ed651a82a3e.gif (2.24 MB, 480x268)

Sonic!

>>43204417
When reading the old archives I noticed /mlp/‘s creativity was absolutely off the brakes back then, literally everyone on the board was creating OC and writefagging, drawfagging, the whole nine yards. No matter how stupid they were conceptually. When exactly do you think the board started losing that creative outburst?
Even now I think the creativity we still have is just momentum from that era.

>>43204302
Fuck it's been like 16 years. I may not be able to give one single list in a sole post.

I can however try to remember and post accordingly.
>Music scene
The music scene was a lot different in the old fandom. Off the top of my head, the most significant loss here was we stopped producing "contemplative" pony music. That's pretty much all gone, with only remnants of the old stuff and some more modern revivals existing.

The most notable of these was SGAP, but sgap was part of a larger movement in fandom which was called the "space pony" community. One zine, now partially lost, was produced for this subset of the fandom.

Space pony community was a subset of the larger movement within fandom producing philosophical songs relating to the fandom & show. Autumn leaves is one such example of an older song, that had later been reworked by TLT.

Alot of that is gone now. We have very, very little left. What little we have left is due to circumstances that I'm sure others have at least partial memory of. The music scene has changed from producing contemplative music to producing primarily "stimulating" music instead.

You can argue vyletpwny is trying to recapture that old vibe, and there's some merit, but it's still very different. A vyletpwny song is notably different from a classic SGAP song, or even older pony songs of this nature.
>Space pony works
Splitting this off as it's special. The community of contemplative fan artists connected to this movement had a variety of ocs that became sub-fandom ocs, most of which have been forgotten and lost.
>Pre EQG humanization
We have a lot of these archived. But they aren't really used anymore. They're kind of scattered to memory.
>Sad-content
We do not make "feels' content anymore. Production of feels content gets a lot of ire in the modern culture.
>Shipping
Fucking mess out there. Don't get me started on this. >Inb4 ship fag - shipping in the fandom used to be a lot different than it is now. If you want to understand this, you need to understand how shipping was utilized in the IZ fandom and how that impacted FIM.

We've kinda brought it back on the board to small extent, which is nice. Wish it would come back fully.

>>43204474
I've only been into ponies since early 2025 so is there any archive resources on brony history

File: 1764935491779039.gif (1.60 MB, 1920x1415)

>>43204466
NTA, but it was a double whammy of the fandom at large hitting its peak and starting to decline combined with social media companies realizing that negativity sells and is more profitable so they started turning people into little balls of rage who hate everything and scream at anything they don't like.
Less positive engagement (from less people being around) and more negative engagement (from all the twittards and such on top of schizos latching on to the negativity and screeching) led to less content because nobody likes getting shat on just because they created and produced content.
Some of the big names left the fandom because they either moved on or something happened in life and they no longer had time, and nobody stepped up to replace them. There were also less newcomers who were just happy to see even bad or mediocre content since they were used to quality stuff. So any new creators just... didn't.

I'm not an old great or that much of an oldfag (around here at least) but I what content I do create stays in generals since the asshats who hate everything hide general threads or at least don't go there to shit on it.

File: gtfo.gif (997 KB, 500x281)

>>43204481
>implying generals aren't just necrobumped imagedumbs

>>43204474
Had to split this off due to how long it got. This isn't even half of it.
>Crack pone
Gone. We had other weird and unique board ocs in the past as well, also gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
>Participatory culture
Gone. This was how we were able to produce massive amounts of stuff, so god damn fast. It's also where we got crack pone, pickle, Emily, etc. We just had a thread about that. But nobody produced anything with the forgotten board ocs....they made a few posts then - fwip - gone. Again.

We've gotten better about this in some ways by bringing threads like /create/ to life. But creation is extremely sanitized on here now, which limits how much people are able or willing to participate.
>Homestuck crossover
We actually lost this early on, around 2013.
>Ponify everything
We technically still do this but again, the energy isn't the same. It's the same issue as participatory culture death. People on the board are constantly getting psyopped and told to stop ponifying certain things.
>Grimdark
Early grimdark in the fandom came from creators like Crookedtrees, who has an insane impact on the fandom culture.

Grimdark intersected with the contemplative pony music & visual art scene (such as the space pony community). This meant a lot of artists were producing spooky art that was meant to instigate a certain philosophical sense of wonder, sadness & terror. Western art theory calls this "the sublime".

Great example of this was crooked trees, who's impact on the fandom was so profound it resulted in a lot of other artists copying him...which lead to the birth of Tracey cage.

Around later 2014 this became completely shitted up with low-tier horror & torture slop. Lot of the good art produced for this is gone. Don't think anyone even remembers "the six of us" at this point.

This has come back slightly, there's one artist who did a great remake of Lil Miss Rarity (which had a great concept in its original form but terrible execution).

Would be nice to see more artists like this one, especially if they become more rooted in the old culture again.
>Fansites
There's a lot of these that no longer exist. What we have now is far less than what used to be.

>>43204495
What about how fanfiction changed? I like early 2010s Fallout Equestria fanfics, but has any of FIM fanfics in general changed?

There's a different branch of pony fandom now, like the Infection AU Tiktok generation. The target demographic who have been old enough to be in fandom now for a few years.
Their fan works are kind of different in tone, and they're closer in character to a typical modern fandom, while brony fandom was different. Bronies were like the kind of like the type of fandom that usually sprouts around serialized lore heavy media I think.
And a big difference: Technical literacy. Bronies are from the era when people did it themselves instead of waiting for corporations or using other people's stuff. From forum and wiki era, not the algorithm era.

Am I onto something?

>>43204495
There were a lot more fanfiction websites. More boorus.... Shit one of the biggest was ponibooru. So much art from the past is gone forever.

Bronihub/bronibooru was the second oldest before derpy. That went offline not too long ago. They seemed to have archived their art at least, so you can still find neat stuff if you peruse it.

Better do that fast though. Who knows how long that archive will survive.
>Pan-fandom harmony
Gone. We used to be spread out amongst board, eqd, fan sites, Tumblr, etc. all gone. Gone gone gone.
>Askblogs
These intersected with Philosophical (grimdark or not) pony art and typically were a vector for them. These are mostly all gone.

I can drop a mention off the top of my head showcasing what the culture used to be like - ask tired tired pie. A nice "friendly" variant on this, analyzing pinkie pie and inverting her character slightly to produce something interesting from her.

This is a dead blog now as far as I'm aware. As are many, many more.

The more famous example from here would be the old AskPinkamena blog. Also dead. This blog was nested in a larger, community driven story with other "canon" sub-blogs.

Also dead and gone.
>Philosophical/instrospective pony art
Space pony community wasn't the only manifestation of this. It was just the most beautiful to me. The majority of fandom centered around making art that touched at deeper feelings. This was often done in a very subtle and beautiful way. ELAOWF when it posts significantly older pieces showcases this very well.

This does not happen anymore. A good portion of art now is made to appeal to hyper stimulation and is just...it's just not interesting.

Good artists making this stuff stick out like a sore thumb because of that. But they tend to be limited, because fanwork creation is extremely sanitized.
>Dudebro Horse fags
This was originally the popular notion of the brony, especially the horsefucker on /mlp/, before the fandom got redditized.

There was one news article in particular that covered this (gone!) talking to people from the board and admiring the culture we had.

Gone.
>Love & tolerate
Gone. Lol. This was kind of stupid, but it was also nice. We produced a lot of goofy memes with this subject.

Tied into the old dude-broism of the fandom and the way we handled ourselves as being more "virtuous" (not that we ever used that term) than the other fandoms which constantly shat on us.

Prefer that to the modern irony poisoning, desu.
---

There's way more but this is all I can bring up right now. I wanna respond to other posts anyway.

>>43202427 (OP)
Touhou is the japanese version of MLP, it feels similar in certain ways that other fandoms don't really compare, mainly by the fact that it's mostly fandom driven instead of creator driven

>>43202634
Please make a blogpost or some kind of Ponepaste article. I'm an oldfag that jumped on board late 2010 too, but most of my Tumblr/DeviantART and memories are deleted or gone from meds frying my brain.

You are 100% right that things were different. The early 2010s was the ideal form of fandom because we had both independant forums and social media to congregate on. Hell, I used Livejournal for pones for a year before everyone went to Tumblr for that. I'm sad I never got to go to Bronycon.

>>43204495
>Participatory culture
This one's the one that hurts the most, because I thought it would come back with the board starting to make more stuff by themselves after the show's end, but instead everyone who's willing to make anything is isolated on their own circlejerks and won't do anything if it isn't for one of the big events like Mare Fair or /mlp/con

>>43204515
As someone who was into Touhou for a little while before pony, it can't even stand in the SHADOW of pony's worldbuilding.

>>43204542
That's why I've said certain ways, there's still a world of differences between the two

>>43204477
Jesus. There used to be...I'm not sure if there are now. There was one archival website floating around for a bit, but I don't know if it's still there.
Hit up the lost media thread and ask around. Someone may have that sort of thing.
>>43204466
>When reading the old archives I noticed /mlp/‘s creativity was absolutely off the brakes back then, literally everyone on the board was creating OC and writefagging, drawfagging, the whole nine yards. No matter how stupid they were conceptually.
Internet was A LOT different back then. It fostered this kind of creativity and, as mentioned before, FIM was special.

Those two things combined let artists create awesome shit. And because FIM was participatory, it meant we could make even more cool shit because everybody was constantly going "oh FUCK that's cool! Yes! And..." Etc
>When exactly do you think the board started losing that creative outburst?
Same time homestuck did. 2013.

Each year after got a little worse. It was really weird watching this...it didn't happen all at once. Instead people just got angrier and angrier and we made less and less stuff.

2016 was the ultimate "death" of this creative output. Ever since then, we've just been sort of stagnating.

We've gained some of this back. Again, due to efforts like /create/. But the problem traces back to how sanitized we are from the fandom wank that started around 2013 and imploded in 2016. People want everything to be hyper stimulating & easily consumable.

This is an easy problem to fix. We just have to go back to the old participatory culture.
>>43204497
Yes. It's kind of hard to describe.... In a hat, I'd say that a lot of modern writers make their fics like you're kind of stupid. Comes back to the hyper-stimulation thing. Alot of modern writing I notice tends to be trying to jerk off my attention, and spelling things out in the most obvious ways possible. Fic writers are less willing to do weird, interesting or complex topics. Audiences are also less wanting to engage with those things. A significant portion of it now is just straight up porn & unfunny/uninteresting romcoms. Love or hate FOE, I haven't seen anyone try to make something like it again. I can't think of the last time I saw something try to broach anything philosophically interesting. One of my favorite gives way back when was about an aftermath of draconequus genocide...never saw anything like that since.

There's also just a rank quality decrease overall.

>>43204559
>We just have to go back to the old participatory culture.
Never going to happen. What you want back is old internet culture and it's gone thanks to smartphones. It's not going to get any better than this, the old internet is never coming back.

>>43204563
Oh and AI also did a number on creative output, not necessarily because I'm mindbroken about AI, but it makes people less creative because if people want a story they will just ask the chatbot for it, same with art (at least when it's coom, which a lot of the fandom's art output was/is)

File: b91.png (427 KB, 650x1250)

>>43203082
>Friendship is magic is literally about virtue ethics. Doing things that are good and trying to be kind because those are the right things to do.

I'd change the word "is" for "was".
The show used to be about those things but Haber turned it into a show "doing what what the mentally ill writer in turn thinks it's politically correct as a way to inflate their own ego", which does describe what a lot of stories (both real and fictional) became in the 2010's:
Preaching values for selfish desires rather than ethical beliefs.

When I said "from 2010 to 2019", I meant how the show's trajectory over said years accurately reflects similar changes to the ones the 2010's presented during its existence.

>>43204559
>This is an easy problem to fix. We just have to go back to the old participatory culture.
How, though? I know "indie" communities exist and some people (outside of the fandom) have sites on Neocities, but most online communication was broken to happen on social media, Discord, or here. It feels like if you don't already have a clique going it's pointless to try to emerge as a fanworks creator. I used to draw pony art often from 2010-2012 and it's a culture shock trying to come back when DeviantART is overrun with AI bots and people traded longform blogging for shortform content after Tumblr banned porn, which basically destroyed askblogs.

>>43204538
It's a typical life cycle of a fandom: early adopters engage in participatory culture consuming and producing content. Then trolls find their way into the fandom and diffuse negativity and discourage engagement with the fandom. As the participants filter out nobody is left to produce content. The ones who do are constantly compared to or comparing themselves to the original artists. As a result nothing is really being nmade anymore. That's why i constantly encourage new artists in BALE

>>43204575
Oh yeah, Discord, that's another nail in the coffin of fan communities. Taking everything that a lurker could look into and eventually become a participant of into some insular community each with their own petty drama. I think Discord alone is responsible for the majority of this message board dying over the past 10 years. 4chan shit moderation didn't help either.

>>43204559
If we wanna make a solid criticism of modern fanart as a whole (visual/audio/etc) I'd give it four negative categories
1. Counterfeit culture (produced by AI. Ai may be technically skilled sometimes, but the better it gets - the worse it is. Similar to how counterfeit currency works)

2. Acts as a means for affirming an identity in a narcissistic way (be that sexual, political or otherwise. This is bipartisan, as well.)

3. Focuses on hyper stimulation (ie - meant to appeal to you in the most grotesquely stimulating and easily consumable way possible.)

4. Does not "Communicate". (Art is supposed to ""communicate" certain "tastes". Old art is very good at this because it's sincere. Often even when it lacked in technical skill.)
>>43204538
I mean that's the thing. We could do this, we could go back to this any time.
The hurdle is that we need to abandon nu fandom and return to old fandom. We lost touch with our history. Losing touch with that, we became ahistorical. Without connection to that history, we can't build a better present, much less a better future.

We need to stop getting involved in circle jerks that are about affirming our identity or someone else's. We need to pull back from the hyper stimulation or AI generation and make stuff that's actually meaningful to us.

And above all else, *we* need to participate. That means we need to make new things, respond to new things, contribute to new things. The old fandom never just let something exist in a vacuum, they interacted with it all the time and built cool stuff from every new fan work that came into being.

We need this to be the dominant mode of the culture. Focus on creation AND participating in creative works. Make sure when participating, you're doing it from somewhere sincere.

We can have this back literally any time. Just stop feeding into the beast and simply participate and encourage others to do the same. Look at what worked in the old fandom and pick it back up.
>>43204517
>Please make a blogpost or some kind of Ponepaste article.
I might. What would you or other anons interested, want that to look like?
>Hell, I used Livejournal for pones for a year before everyone went to Tumblr for that. I'm sad I never got to go to Bronycon.
Livejournal! Holy shit thats a deep cut!!! I haven't thought about that in a long time... You could find some amazing fanworks on live journal.

Shame it's all gone. I feel for you, I never got the chance to go to bronycon either. Sad it's all gone now.

>>43204589
>literal Reddit post acting like a knowledgeable oldfag
Jesus

Internet started dying with social media like Facebook. It was already too late back then, and the societal effect and brainwashing it had on people was fucking scary to watch. People that were talking to you about the importance of personal life literally did a 180 and now advertised displaying it for everyone to see.
Discord finished it off and definitively killed old forums and niche websites.

It's over.

>>43204579
Yeah. I don't mind Discord that much, it's good for private communities and group chats. But making everything private completely kills any community. I used to lurk forums for months before deciding to join, you can't "vet" Discord servers like that. Some of the best friends I made online as a teen was from shitposting about games in 2008, and we made our own spinoff forums. Those friends normie'd out now and stopped talking, but I've never had the same experience using Discord or social media in my 30s.

>>43204589
>I might. What would you or other anons interested, want that to look like?
Honestly, just use it to sperg about whatever you like. I read some fandom history and internet culture-themed Substacks and they often are just OP blogging about their experiences online. But I think a timeline of events or some kind glossary of what's different compared to now, what sites people used then, various fanwork genres or BNFs back then would be useful. (I'm shocked I never heard about space ponies despite being deep into DeviantART/Tumblr pony fandom 15 years ago.)

>Livejournal! Holy shit thats a deep cut!!! I haven't thought about that in a long time... You could find some amazing fanworks on live journal.
Yeah, Livejournal had their own equivalent to Tumblr's porn ban a decade earlier that probably fucked over the internet. I was a late user to Livejournal (only started blogging and adding people in 2010-2011) but everyone moved to the new shiny toy Tumblr then. I think people used it for live-action/animu fandoms than ponies, but ponies were talked about.

>Shame it's all gone. I feel for you, I never got the chance to go to bronycon either. Sad it's all gone now.
I have no idea what the con scene was like in the 2010s but I had a good time attending a local brony con this year. I've seen anons say that Mare Fair was like the old days but IRL, so I'd like to go there in the future despite being poorfag.

>>43204572
Ohhhh, alright I can see your point.
It's funny, that's another way homestuck mirrors my little pony. The same thing happened for them.
>>43204563
>Never going to happen. What you want back is old internet culture and it's gone thanks to smartphones. It's not going to get any better than this, the old internet is never coming back.
I DO want old internet back. The modern net infrastructure is incredibly poisonous to our wellbeing and is part of why this revival isn't happening.

Honestly, though, this could be fixed. Suppose we can't remedy the issue with where we currently are... We can fix that by a combination of
(A) Switching to a different protocol
(B) Advocating a Luddite net movement [connecting & posting ONLY on actual computers. No smart tech.]

Point (a) if the protocol we are currently on is unsalvageable. This may be desirable even if it is salvageable, especially if we can create our own protocol and distribute it like a walled garden globally.

Point (b) should be pushed regardless of how salvageable the protocol is or if we switch. Using a technology we have to deliberately turn on and make a choice to use will increase the quality of posts, reducing people from just spewing garbage stream of consciousness style.

We may not be able to step in the same river twice, but we can at least clean it out. And if we can't clean it out, we can find a new river and take better care of it.

Reading this thread brought back memories I didn't know I still had. I was 11 in 2010, so FiM and brony fandom culture was a cornerstone of my childhood. Still so mad I never got to go to BronyCon, but I wouldn't trade the memories I made on the internet during those times for anything. I pity those who never got to experience it, but the least we can do is to tell stories so that our history lives on, even long after we are gone.

>>43204616
Dude, AI is getting more advanced every day, and all forms of communication are under attack by both it and politicians. I repeat the same mantra I have had for years now: It's only going to get worse.

>>43204589
I feel ya, back in the day I felt like the only person in the fandom that didn't contribute to it in any way, everyone did everything about ponies, not only art, merch, games, trolling, blogging, endless pony references on everything, it always felt like everyone was on it, just for the love of pony and nothing else. I don't know if that's enough of a motivator for people these days, it seems like everyone just uses pony as a platform for something else that actually motivates them (politics, money, identity, etc.), but I think that this fandom can do it again, as long as they do it for the love of pony, and nothing else

>>43204572
>Preaching values for selfish desires rather than ethical beliefs.
God that hits the nail on the head. This seems to be the only thing people are concerned with nowadays. It seems after 2016 (when people became insane because of politics AND smartphones became widespread) the internet pretty much ended. The worst thing is it's bleeding into real life now as well. No idea where this is going to end but it's definitely not going to get better.

>>43204564
Nothing wrong with the tool (AI), but rather the people who use it and what it does to them. I've seen some people pump out amazing high quality stuff, and then asked them "hey since you can do all this stuff, why don't you ever do SFW things?"

And the answer is always "Not worth the effort"
In other words, people just seek instant gratification and fail to see what you can do with it if you bother putting some effort into it.

I'll keep using it to realize my vision despite it sometimes ending up a bit flawed. I had no hope of doing anything like what it lets me before.

>>43204631
True, but this is more a result of how fast paced the internet (and also real life because of it) has become. Why spend 30 minutes writing a post when it will be buried under mountains of one-liner slop anyway? Not to mention it sucks balls to write a message longer than a couple sentences on that cancerous device, it's no wonder people stick to dumb one-liners. Same thing with pictures: why go through the trouble of making a decent SFW drawing (or even gen) when it will be buried under mountains of NSFW AI slop?

Ponies was big, so it attracted a lot of people, some genuinely talented and enthusiastic.
The show is now dead, so most of them just moved on with their lives and did other things. They had skills, they had drive, so they could actually leave and build something elsewhere.

The people staying on this board and still supporting what it's become are the dregs who can't move on. They're mostly apathetic, depressed, and lazy. They can't create anything themselves but will complain endlessly about the state of things. Generals will have retards asking where the next OP is and letting a thread die when making one takes two minutes. They can't even be bothered to do the bare minimum to keep their own spaces alive.

They're so apathetic they can't even give (You)s or a single word of encouragement to people who actually try to contribute. Post something you made? Silence. Try to start a discussion? Ignored. But post bait or drama and suddenly everyone has energy to reply. The few creators left get zero engagement while shitposters get endless attention, and then these same people wonder why nobody makes content anymore.
That, plus the demoralization tactics that have been running wild for years now.

What remains is a self-selecting group of people too beaten down, too lazy, or too addicted to the familiar misery to do anything else.

>>43204592
Yes.wav
Sometimes reddit spacing is good for actually being able to read. Do you honestly want long effort posts with no spacing at all?
>>43204575
>How, though? I know "indie" communities exist and some people (outside of the fandom) have sites on Neocities, but most online communication was broken to happen on social media, Discord, or here. It feels like if you don't already have a clique going it's pointless to try to emerge as a fanworks creator.
It can feel that way, but it really isn't. People want new stuff. It just needs to be made. If what you're making is sincere, it's more likely to get attention than not.
You probably won't become a BNF, but you'll have a good impact on the culture.
The other issue with this though is the people who get your creation need to RESPOND to it. Especially if they actually enjoy it. Whether that's commenting, reposting or building more stuff off of it.
> I used to draw pony art often from 2010-2012 and it's a culture shock trying to come back when DeviantART is overrun with AI bots and people traded longform blogging for shortform content after Tumblr banned porn, which basically destroyed askblogs.
It's really hard now, yeah. Deviantart was never "great", but it's kinda shit now. Tumblr is like an uno reverse of here. The porn bans killed the blogs and Russia bots killed the culture of participation.
It's gotten slightly better... But if you're on there in the modern day, we both know exactly the problems it has still.

You brought up neocities. That's potentially another piece in this puzzle. We may need to go towards the old decentralized form of the web. Thats probably gonna mean making our own little webrings & websites and cross posting on suitable platforms.
We should probably favor also fan run platforms, avoid the short form webspaces (tiktok, etc) and start working on reunifying the fandom with that in mind.

Those things theoretically should bring the fandom closer together and revive alot of the cultural movement broadly. My experiments of this in other niche fandom spaces paid off pretty well.

For our own board, we can start off experimenting here first. Switch from the nuculture back to the old. After some success, build from there to fix the wider fandom issues.
This will draw people in if it's done properly and become self sustaining, with natural cycles of rise-fall.

>>43204616
>(A) Switching to a different protocol
>(B) Advocating a Luddite net movement [connecting & posting ONLY on actual computers. No smart tech.]
What protocol would be use, and how would only using computers help? The same websites and behavior exist even if you opt-out of smartphones. My job requires a phone (I know) so I only use it for paying bills and calling family, but it doesn't change every other person online is a zoomer brainrotted by Tiktok and politics. I used to webmaster my own site, but kind of fell out because the lack of community involved. I think that's why most people don't bother with alternative internet spaces.

>>43204623
>it always felt like everyone was on it, just for the love of pony and nothing else. [...] it seems like everyone just uses pony as a platform for something else that actually motivates them (politics, money, identity, etc.)
That's what I loved about early brony fandom. It was a melting pot where people of different backgrounds opinions could come together just because we like the same cartoon and drawing fanart. I don't think that aspect can happen again due to political tribalism. I get sick of both trannies and chud shit constantly, I miss when few people cared.

>>43204638
I'm not wholly anti-AI but 100% agreed. It's why I gave up on art and writing for a while, it'll just get buried under attention-seeking slop.

File: 1630826688647.png (79 KB, 476x600)

>>43202427 (OP)
Absolutely not. I have been around since before the world wide web, and I have had exposure to many fringe cultures over the years.
>there exist a few fandoms with large numbers of - or a few high quality - fanfictions
>there exist a few fandoms with technological or social counter-culture autism
>there exist a few fandoms with super high quality artists in all genres
>there exist a few fandoms with serious real-world and social energy (conventions, imageboards,open communities, archival efforts)
>there exist a few fandoms with decades-long soul and tenacity
>there does not exist even a single fandom outside of MLP that combines all of the above. Not even close lol.

I guess you should mention the furries who at least tried, but the tiny amount of original cultural artifacts they create is pathetic and miniscule compared to MLP.

>>43204644
The thing is we need to raise our standards now that AI exists, especially for material that is wholly made with AI. I'd say every post to a Booru that is made using AI needs to be hand-approved, just like they used to on the Ur-Boorus like Danbooru. Then reject anything that is not even fixed up with a little inpainting, and anything that does not list the generation data. Just my 2cts.

>Touhou
What's so special about it? Looks like the most generic anime shit. I've seen more original things coming from Japan anyway.

>>43204655
It just has a big fan following and large fan output, but in reality, almost all of those "fans" are secondaries.

>>43204644
Could FOSS be a solution to this? Fediverse, Linux, free as in speech software? There are people working on stuff adjacent to this already, like Gemini (Not the AI) web protocol that existed a few years ago, Matrix, and other stuff.

The problem with modern social media is the underlying incentives that Big Tech and private software media has imo. Open source is community oriented.

>>43204657
Sadly, a lot of open source communities have fallen for the political brainrot as well. And it continues to fester because of cancerous social media platforms.

>>43204650
Furries aren't comparable to MLP because it's a big tent. There's fags who just want to hookup and coom, teenagers into roleplaying wolves, some media fandoms like Zootopia overlapping, but otherwise everything furries make is for them. MLP fandom is impressive because all this stuff exists because of one show, furry is a fandom based on an idea.

>>43204653
I'm personally fine with AI-assisted content (vul's music using 15.ai voices has merit), but AI shit in general needs to have their own community and websites. I'm on some "indie" art websites that blanket ban AI art entirely. I know it'll always exist and I'm fine with containment threads on here, but unless there's an overlap with human-made art, I don't want it on boorus or fansites.