it feels kinda dead here recently

[wrong_thyme]

for a forum in this day and age i think this place is doing pretty alright

as was already said, this is like. the only place to consistently get vocasynth news in one place (i've seen xitter accounts doing that too, but... it's xitter *shudder*)

i actually use reddit but i don't really hang around r/vocaloid much bc,,,, how do i put this without sounding like an elitist prick,, it feels like it's filled less with vocaloid fans and more just miku fans, y'know

 

[sunnyp4rk]

i actually use reddit but i don't really hang around r/vocaloid much bc,,,, how do i put this without sounding like an elitist prick,, it feels like it's filled less with vocaloid fans and more just miku fans, y'know

ok so i stuck around r/vocaloid for a while to help people with the software, and genuinely, its just miku and triple baka fans. people aren't even just surface level there, they stick with the same barely above surface stuff. Not even elitist to say that tbh.

not that its wrong to be a miku fan, just that the people there only know her and teto and MAYBE another character at the least.

 

[IO+]

Honestly, this place feels pretty neutral. Not just about Miku or any characters and it’s got pretty much everything: news, discussions, collabs, guides, discord, memes… even a corner to rant in. You don’t really see forums like this anywhere else, trust me.

The best part is it’s peaceful, and i will treasure it.

 

[Blue Of Mind]

as was already said, this is like. the only place to consistently get vocasynth news in one place (i've seen xitter accounts doing that too, but... it's xitter *shudder*)

i actually use reddit but i don't really hang around r/vocaloid much bc,,,, how do i put this without sounding like an elitist prick,, it feels like it's filled less with vocaloid fans and more just miku fans, y'know

ok so i stuck around r/vocaloid for a while to help people with the software, and genuinely, its just miku and triple baka fans. people aren't even just surface level there, they stick with the same barely above surface stuff. Not even elitist to say that tbh.

not that its wrong to be a miku fan, just that the people there only know her and teto and MAYBE another character at the least.

Even back in the golden era of V2, there were a lot of people who were really only Miku fans who liked super-popular songs like World Is Mine and didn't know anything else about Vocaloid as a software, a fandom and a budding music culture. If you were lucky, they probably also knew of a token Cryptonloid, another Vocaloid from a different company, an UTAU or a fan character (and for the latter two, they would assume they were official Vocaloids). Those fans were why I appreciated VocaloidOtaku back in the day, despite its retrospective reputation - at least I could have conversations with more hardcore fans about things I put the effort into researching.*

*Saying even that, I know Vocaloid is still a very difficult fandom to get into to this day. It's not a traditional fandom medium like a TV show, movie or game, and you need to do more than cursory research on Google to truly understand vocal synth technology. And if you do get interested in the tech and musical production side of things, you need to save up a lot of money just to purchase a vocal synth. So I get it - even I had to wade my way through misinfo and complete falsehoods on what Vocaloid was and still is back then. (Why did I think Kaito and Meiko were both canonically 21-years old back in 2009? Lol.) But even with places like this forum, fan wikis and even YouTube videos explaining what exactly Vocaloid is, there's still a lot of people who can't comprehend what Vocaloid actually is beyond Miku being a cute virtual idol from Japan.

 

[lIlI]

these XenForo forum software must be expensive to keep. isn't it a monthly rate? I remember I drempt of using something like this for my site and then looked at the price and suddenly making my own forum backend seemed much more appealing.

It's roughly $35 a month currently, plus a yearly fee for the domain. I know how much the forums are appreciated, so I hope to keep it running for as long as possible. Regardless of activity, I believe forums are important for information preservation, as they provide uniquely categorised snapshots of different points in community history, on top of all the valuable resources members have contributed!

Even if activity were to drop to zero, it would be my intention to have all the information archived and available.

 

[Solinus]

Personally, I've only started using forums within the past year as I've been wanting to move away from social media. The first one that really spurred my interest in forums is Frutiger Aero Archive Forum - Home Page and that one was established this year! A lot of people rn are sick and tired of the modern state of social media currently, and I hope that forums become revived sooner or later. Another new forum is MelonLand Forum - Home! for indie web discussions that was established in 2022 or so.

 

[Blue Of Mind]

I was chatting to a friend on Discord this morning about how much we missed forums compared to social media, and it made me feel really nostalgic for both FanFiction.Net and DeviantART's forums. (Yes, those sites had separate forum pages! They were kinda hidden in tabs on the top of their webpages, but they were there!) It's made me realise that the way I like to discuss things fits in way more with forum culture than social media, where comments can easily get lost if a post is popular, and strangers with an axe to grind can quickly gang up on you and call you offensive names. (Not that forums lack that problem, obviously, but at least moderation can be stricter on a forum compared to social media).

It would be nice if forums experienced more of a revival as a reaction against the omniprescence of intrusive social media. (There's a revival of MySpace out there, so why not forums?)

 

[sunnyp4rk]

Kind of what lIlI said earlier in the thread, it's easier to archive things with a forum. When the account is deleted, the messages aren't necessarily gone. Easier to preserve news or resources.

 

[Bookworm2]

I also like how it's less active sometimes. Some days I don't want a constant flood of content, I need some time to think out responses to questions/comments made. As well, I don't type too quickly, so this is a blessing in that I can take as long as I need to type without worrying about the topic I was trying to respond to getting lost in replies and then changing before I can post mine. I guess another benefit of forums is that the focus is less on "OH MY GOD, over-the-top reaction, everything NEEDS to be LIFE-CHANGING", but more on logic and focused thinking because of the more delayed-reaction way of posting things.

 

[Beananium]

I also like how it's less active sometimes. Some days I don't want a constant flood of content, I need some time to think out responses to questions/comments made. As well, I don't type too quickly, so this is a blessing in that I can take as long as I need to type without worrying about the topic I was trying to respond to getting lost in replies and then changing before I can post mine.

I completely agree ^^ I've been in Discord servers where i have a lot to say on a topic and want to put it in an elegant response, but the topic progresses to something different before I could send my response or view on the first topic, making it feel awkward. I've even had situations where I've told people I was getting my thoughts in order on a topic and to give me a few, but then someone starts asking about something tangentially related and the topic shifts to something completely different. It's really frustrating.

Despite being very vocal and talkative on interesting topics, I also have extremely poor spelling and often make a nonsensical message if i don't re-read it a few times for anything longer than a simple sentence. I especially want to check a message about an important or serious topic multiple times. And even though I'm a decently quick and accurate typer on a computer's keyboard, I'm really bad at typing on my phone. I often press the wrong keys and don't have any sort of auto-correct on. It takes me a WHILE to type out a large message or even any message with substantial information in it.

Discord also has a very low character limit on individual messages, and (even if I wanted to or had money to pay for it) Nitro doesn't increase it to a high enough amount.

Fourms are so good for my style of messages because of that. The fourm being very quiet also makes it easy to get updated on everything that happened.