Hornwitser
2022-03-01 19:14:20 UTC
I feel that the traditional internet forums are dying. Maybe it's a
dying medium because something else have replaced the needs and
curiosities of people in the same way emails and text messages have
completed taken over writing letters to each other. Maybe the mega
social medias like Twitter, reddit and Facebook are draining people's
interests for dragon forums, or keeping them in their walled gardens. I
don't know.
What I do know is that there are probably many new places that have
popped up since last time I tried to catalogue all dragon forums[1], and
probably many places that I simply don't know about. When I tried to
catalogue all dragon related sites I reached about 400 before I gave up,
and I estimated at that time that there would be around 800 such sites
on the internet so there's definitively a lot out there.
But it's so hard to find these resources. Things like Dragons from the
Analog and Digital World[2] are what I would call gems of the dragon
fandom. But if you were to search for dragon film and game reviews I
don't think you'd be able to find that site through a search engine no
matter how hard you tried.
So that's why I've been increasingly thinking of making a website to
host a directory of dragon sites of sorts. To make it more easy to
navigate the sites of the fandom, and find new places in an increasingly
harder to navigate web. From what I understand there used to be such a
site called Dragons Must Be Here by someone named Adam. That site is
sadly no longer online and has been replaced by some sort of shill blog
that makes no sense to me. But I love the idea it represented.
Do you know of any ideas, sites, forums, or resources that are of
interest for such a directory? I want to brainstorm ideas here.
One of the ideas I keep coming back to is hosting an archive of dragon
related sites that are no longer actively maintained by their authors.
Yes, I know Internet Archive exists, but it's slow, un-searchable and
often incomplete.
Another idea I keep having is noting down and preserving the history of
the fandom. Like how people pretending to be dragons weren't really a
thing on alt.fan.dragons before Blackburn.
[1]: https://dragnix.net/Msg_Board/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2052
[2]: https://dragnix.net/Digital_and_Analog_Dragons/
dying medium because something else have replaced the needs and
curiosities of people in the same way emails and text messages have
completed taken over writing letters to each other. Maybe the mega
social medias like Twitter, reddit and Facebook are draining people's
interests for dragon forums, or keeping them in their walled gardens. I
don't know.
What I do know is that there are probably many new places that have
popped up since last time I tried to catalogue all dragon forums[1], and
probably many places that I simply don't know about. When I tried to
catalogue all dragon related sites I reached about 400 before I gave up,
and I estimated at that time that there would be around 800 such sites
on the internet so there's definitively a lot out there.
But it's so hard to find these resources. Things like Dragons from the
Analog and Digital World[2] are what I would call gems of the dragon
fandom. But if you were to search for dragon film and game reviews I
don't think you'd be able to find that site through a search engine no
matter how hard you tried.
So that's why I've been increasingly thinking of making a website to
host a directory of dragon sites of sorts. To make it more easy to
navigate the sites of the fandom, and find new places in an increasingly
harder to navigate web. From what I understand there used to be such a
site called Dragons Must Be Here by someone named Adam. That site is
sadly no longer online and has been replaced by some sort of shill blog
that makes no sense to me. But I love the idea it represented.
Do you know of any ideas, sites, forums, or resources that are of
interest for such a directory? I want to brainstorm ideas here.
One of the ideas I keep coming back to is hosting an archive of dragon
related sites that are no longer actively maintained by their authors.
Yes, I know Internet Archive exists, but it's slow, un-searchable and
often incomplete.
Another idea I keep having is noting down and preserving the history of
the fandom. Like how people pretending to be dragons weren't really a
thing on alt.fan.dragons before Blackburn.
[1]: https://dragnix.net/Msg_Board/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2052
[2]: https://dragnix.net/Digital_and_Analog_Dragons/