I’ve known about VampireFreaks.com since I lived in Toronto and hung out at the Bovine Sex Club (not what you think…rock’n'roll bar) and lived just off of Queen Street West, so I loved it when Ted presented it as a strong ‘niche’ community example at FOWA06, I was totally delighted. I never quite ‘fit in’ at VF (as I’m not a goth), but many of the people I knew ‘gathered’ there to announce underground parties and special events. I always loved the strength of the culture there. The site always reminded me of hanging out at the Bovine or down the street at The Vatikan.
The shocking thing about VF, though, is that it has nearly 1 million registered users and every day, about 25-50,000 of them just hang out there. It’s also been around since 1999, started by a 20 year old college student, basically, for him and his friends. It’s a super impressive site, too, where he’s created alot of personalization for his members and really highlights the social aspect: Cults, Events, People and personal thoughts reign over his ‘money making’ activities. It’s a really cool place, which is why it has steadily grown over the years.
I know there are oodles of amazing virtual communities like this all over the web that aren’t ‘MySpace’ or the like. Often, we are asked by people, “Yeah, we hear the standard stories about the famous communities all of the time, what are some examples of strong niche communities?”
So, whilst we continue to look around, I’d love to put this question out to you. What great communities have you come across/been part of that should be highlighted? We’d love to hear your stories (and even invite members/founders to the community roundtable coming up to share their stories).
It’s called the web. No secret handshakes, No boring Meetings, No clubhouse, no abbrogation of copyrights, no home owners associations.
I’ve been an on-again, off-again member of alt.sports.hockey.nhl.vanc-canucks for nearly a decade. It’s one of the older communities I participate. It’s small, but continues to live on despite Usenet being from another Internet era.
I unfortunately became aware of VampireFreaks because of Kimveer Gill and the Dawson College shooting. He was a member of that community, which did nothing for its reputation.
I live in Japan, so Asoboo is my favorite by default. Nice members, good event listings and works on my phone.
#joiito!
Do a search for Starseige Tribes and you will find an insanely dedicated community to what was once the video game of its time. I say do a search because there are a number of strong communities left over from it (essentially waiting the ‘calling’ from the new game, should there ever be one). The most noted is TribalWar.
Genmay, Somethingaweful, and AirsoftCore are a few others. Role Play forums are generally pretty active and sustaining as well.
It makes me to see that at FOWA (and in general) people are giving forums the credit they deserve as community dwellings.
sorry, double post. +happy in front of “me”
WordPress (development) community: blog posts, mailing lists, support forums, IRC, bug reports, and bug hunts!
I love that we come together to accomplish something. Ain’t open source grand.
My favorite community is definitely Something Awful (forums.somethingawful.com). The forums have been around since 1999 and they’ve been a consistent source of excellent content ever since. It has grown continuously as well. Probably half the humor memes you see on the Internet start there.
I always think of them whenever Michael Arrington or Scoble gets to rambling about stuff that involves “social” or “collaboration” or other bullshit. SA fuse vBulletin, which is a piece of crap and hasn’t developed much, technologically, in years; the SA staff has had to make major modifications to it to handle the growth the forums have experienced. It doesn’t matter that the software behind it is junk, because the content is excellent.
Quick stats on SA:
- Usually around 4,000 users online at once
- 94,000 users total
- About 51 million total posts
- About 2 million threads
I am
slightlyquite biased, but my favorite online community is Customize.org. The site has been around since 1998, and in that time we’ve had over 100,000 members submit tens of thousands of works (wallpapers, skins, themes, icons…). Its been amazing to see some users go from “noobs” to world class artists. There are still a lot of the original members around, and many friendships on the site have extended to real life.em411.com – electronic music making.
bigbluelounge.com – pro audio and music
I follow them less these days due to being busy with plasq.com – but they were great then, and still seem lively.
I will add the music voice by mentioning KVR Audio. Not perfect and prone to childish fights from time to time, it’s still a thriving community and several years old now. I used to hang out there quite a bit in my pre-blogging/pre-heavy travel days.