@starkatt
Slashdot.

@starkatt Originally, a buried freeform roleplaying forum within a fake corporate website centered around the Douglas Adams computer game, Starship Titanic.

Later, the forums on Douglas Adams' personal website.

Later still, forums attached to the webcomic Dragon Tales, mostly the RP/story boards.

Then I found MUCKs. :+)

@starkatt To the extent I did, it was ISCABBS. But I didn't have internet at home until my senior year of high school, and even after that, my biggest community influences and safe exploration spaces were meat-based.

I started a blog when I was 20 and that had a big influence on my intellectual growth, I have lasting friendships, dropping out of grad school would have been a worse experience without it, etc., but it wasn't the same scale of life-altering.

@starkatt Huh. Local BBSes at 2400 baud, Fidonet (and Furnet atop it) at 14.4k tossing QWK zips into the zoid, and then my first 'real' shell account was on a dialup non-broadband commercial provider back when those was a thing, when you still fingered peoples' .plans to see what they were up to - or just TF'd into FM to drop friends a pagemail, if I didn't mav whoever was soloing the botspot from the GC.

Mmph.

I long for The Grid. Things were simpler on two wheels. u.u

@starkatt My first online community was the Dominic Deegan forums, but I think the place that helped me grow up more was Livejournal. (Oddly enough: also the place I coined the name Packbat for!) That and the wider world of blogs was a place of brilliant writers and marginalized folk being open about themselves and political analyses from outside corporate media ... it meant a lot.

@starkatt Using Yahoo categories to look for porn stories, and alt.whatevers on usenet when it was bundled with my first cable ISP looking for more.. Livejournal in highschool and then webcomic community RP forums, which led to AIM and IRC. I was pretty sheltered online until following some friends from one IRC server to another introduced me to Furry. And that's pretty much where I stayed.

@starkatt okay so I’m old BUT there was a local usernet with multiple channels, UMnet. I was vaguely on MUSHes before getting on FurryMUCK and TLKMUCK.

@starkatt I didn't first get online until I signed on to a local BBS at twenty-ish as Rasha. a few years later I moved to Seattle, learned about alt.fan.dragons, and... fwoosh. :D

otoh I still don't think I've really "grown up"...

@starkatt oh jeez apparently i have Feelings about this

in 20-25 years of being Online, slack and mastodon may have been the first places where i've actually felt like I was part of the community

@starkatt oh gosh, the daemon page, werelist, weresource, IRC

@starkatt usenet: soc.bi, alt.polyamory. IRC, EFnet specifically.

These are the places where I met Aynjel & Ian, where I met the people who eventually introduced me to my nesting partner, and who introduced me to feminism. Eventually usenet became uninhabitable and we all left for livejournal but some time along the way they got me civilized & housebroken, thankfully.

I still see some of those folks at WisCon (& occasionally on Facebook).

@starkatt
In my first life, on a MUD. In my second, I started in White Wolf's online RP web chatrooms, and then moved to Yiffnet IRC which then became Furnet IRC.

@starkatt I grew up in an AIM chat room of people pulled from alt.fan.dragons.

Lots of time on Livejournal (RIP).

Long time on IRC and MUCKs.

Joined the tail end of Puzzlebox.