I enjoyed bus-stop for a season. Think I'll go take a peek now....
This is going to be one of those posts. People have always wondered about the great empire on the opposite side of the world.
I don't want to cross-contaminate different places that I feel are comparable to each other willy nilly, but maybe a little ebb and flow won't hurt. It's as much of a reminder for myself as anything else to visit them more often.
I admit I'm an imageboard native. IYKYK. One of the kinds of boards that you may come across late in your browsing cycle is https://bus-stop.net. I haven't been a regular there, but it's always a place you can stop by.
After the Bus Stop comes the Post Office: https://postbox.garden is a place where you post by sending in postcards that aren't scanned and uploaded until months later.
Finally, that brings me to another place that was rather like the Bus Stop, being a slow-paced real-time board (I dislike the term liveboard). This was https://gossips.cafe, but when I visited yesterday it was different from how I remember it being. They now recommend algae's pond (https://volvox.observer/pond) which reminds me of https://atob.xyz with the color bar IDs.
I used to be part of a small community at http://alistchatforum.info/, it was just another BBS forum full of weird and wonderful people and there were maybe at most 30 of us at one point (median maybe 5 or 6 "active").
In the 10(?) or so years I posted there, I really got to know a lot of the people all living on different parts of this earth, and planned to visit them. We were a family of sorts. The site went down a few times, but it was usually up in a few days.
One day the site went down for good. The group fell apart without a watering hole to stop by. Sure we had email, and LINE, but it really wasn't the same.
10 of my formative years exist on that site, with me developing from an awkward opinionated teen into a more rounded adult. A large chunk of my core internet memory belongs there, and it's simply missing now.