Active doll community on other platforms?

It's definitely an interesting conundrum. I see the argument made for the sort of "overall dark age of social media" hypothesis, and for forums in particular, man I feel that. When I was younger, in the late 00s/early 10s, I was on multiple different forums. Roleplay forums, fan forums, hobby forums, etc. The forums on sites with them built in (DeviantArt and FFN for me) were hopping at a nice clip. Forums still exist in places, obviously, but from what I hear the perception of them is as a dying breed. Something people wish for the return of, and lament their loss of popularity (even the younger folks I'm around!) but still.

Which, forums can have their challenges. A different hobby forum I was on pretty much blew up in its own face after a platform move a couple years ago. Some of those factors may have been the change in features, especially stuff with blocking and privacy, but also the shakeup seemed to lay bare many, many social problems that drove me and my friends from there off the site, and from what I hear now, is still blowing up. And that's a rather established forum with an entire non-profit? not-for-profit? keeping it running. Let alone a more "grassroots" forum without an organization behind it, just the folks who moderate, like the RP and fan forums I was in so long ago. Thankfully, all those were chill, but what happens when they can't afford to host it, or the admin can't continue being the admin, or the mod team implodes?

Then as folks here pointed out, a lot of bigger social media sites do their own image hosting. Images are beefy compared to text, let alone video or audio, so it's reasonable that a forum like DoA doesn't host its own images. But, again, see the state of dedicated image hosts like Photobucket or Flickr. I've hosted photos on Google Photos, Tumblr, Discord... but all have had the broken images problem here nonetheless, and combine that with needing to take the extra step of getting the photo URL before adding it to the post, it's a bit of a damper on sharing images. It's so fun to see pictures but ehhh it's extra work and for all I know I'm going to turn around and the photo will break, even if I hadn't had any issues with that particular host before.

But modern social media is, well, modern social media. Each site has its challenges and unless you really luck out, they're not exactly great for promoting togetherness. I mostly use Instagram to follow artists and small businesses I hear about elsewhere. Great for keeping an eye on preorders but garbage for connecting with other collectors and just shooting the breeze. I've made fandom connections on Tumblr just by keeping an eye on fandom tags and tossing in my own content until I end up in a Discord server with folks and make friends from there, but that means being in the right place at the right time, as well as only using Tumblr as the starting point.

What these sites do have as an operational advantage over forums, I think, is that just because one community implodes doesn't mean the rest of the site goes down, too. If something nasty happened with all the doll folks I follow on Instagram, I could unfollow them all and focus on yarn stuff instead. Or cute kittens. Or visual artists. It may take some digging for a rando to know I like BJDs, but I'm still on the site. Compare to that other hobby forum I mentioned earlier - that sucker popped like a rotten beached whale and now I and my friends either don't use it or barely use it at all. You have to go on entirely different websites to find me and anything related to that hobby. Websites like those modern social media sites.

I don't have a nice, tidy conclusion to this big long ramble. Which, maybe that's another factor! So much of modern social media is about presenting a complete argument, rather than being part of a conversation. Even as someone who grew up with forums, I'm finding I have to relearn that etiquette. But the real kicker there is, on modern social media, "conversations" can be highly detrimental. Other users are less likely to be potential friends and more likely to be potential threats, and very serious ones at that. Very harmful to trying to build a community anywhere, especially when mentality like that goes beyond the bounds of how your software works.

 

When I started learning about BJDs, back in 2012, there was DoA but there were several other communities (forums) within my own country (the bigger ones moved to FB then disappeared) and there were meetings and such. I used to have friendships with a few people, even from afar, and within small groups we would write letters to each other and make little gifts, for example in secret Santa's in winter. And there were already people making amazing beautifully-edited photos and there were others like me who would share only OK photos and I was happy with that.
I took a four-years-long break of the social component of dolls, but when I came back I couldn't find most of that. Besides DoA, I found mostly groups to buy/sell and then I started an IG account and found a couple of owners I remembered and then added some more that got suggested to me but just because they make beautiful photos and with those I don't feel any connection or need to interact besides giving likes.
In here is the only place I find myself being able to discuss things with people and help others and ask for help. I'm not a very social person and I have never been the type to get really involved with others but even I miss that.

 

Honestly, I think that the BJD hobby is a bit of a victim of the times. The world has seemed scarier in the last few years than it was for a while there, and so people's focus shifts to those things naturally. I don't think it means that the hobby is dying, it's just been put on hold for a while.

And to me, that's not our fault. We didn't cause all the scary things in the world. I also don't think that any platform or community is necessarily "better" than another. They're different, and depending on what you like, you can pick and choose where to share your content.

That said, I like DOA best because it's all about dolls. Bjds are where I go to get away from world events for a precious five minutes, so being bombarded by politics isn't pleasant for me. For some, it's no big deal.

@JJ3_dolls I don't think you're whining. I've seen a pretty drastic change in the hobby just in the six years I've been a part of it, and change can be scary. I wouldn't lose heart, though, because the times will keep shifting and people will be able to return to their bjds again. In the meantime, we can keep the hobby as active as we are able and enjoy our dollies to boot.

 

I would love to find a local community, but I live in the middle of nowhere and it seems unlikely I'll have in-person doll friends. I'm in a discord server for the community and it's very active. We talk about all sorts of things, and many people there are also registered on here. I have a hard time making online friends, but I try really hard. If anyone ever wants to reach out and talk, I'm here to do that. I think a lot of us are, and I think this hobby has always thrived on generosity, kindness, open-mindedness and willingness to share.

Instagram used to be a great way to connect, but when I came back after my hiatus, I've noticed it is no longer that. I think new algorithms make genuine human connection difficult nowadays.

 

@JaxxCapta mentioned forum etiquette and I've been thinking about that a lot in regards of social media and online communities. Somehow, even through the mainstream socials are often tied to our names and faces, the way people act gets absolutely unhinged on easy-to-access platforms. Meanwhile, when a community has a requirement for entry (sign up, send a mail, wait for confirmation, say hello before accessing the rest of the community etc), there is a more considerate vibe allover but we are also in an age where people have gotten used to getting to act online without any accountability for their actions or actual moderation aside from empty reports to a big anonymous entity - so I feel like some of the negative stuff you encounter about DoA on Reddit and confession tumblrs kind of comes from there. But it also scares some people away, and I think the barrier to sign up for a separate entity is also becoming more rare on the internet overall, making people more hesitant about it. Having moderated forums pre-2010 and moderating a forum-style discord now, I would never sign up to take care of a space that doesn't require a little extra action to get into the community, though - people have gotten too rowdy, but only if they feel sort of untouchable and anonymous. Trolls were a problem way back when, but it wasn't as overwhelming as now.

I was writing this on the train and lost my train of thought after I got out... I hope that makes some sort of sense? There's hesitation to sign up for more intimate spaces that require some sort of a confirmation while a lot of content roams free for everyone to see on the Big Social Media. However, the free-for-all makes building communities and potential friendships suffer greatly, I think.

 

Life has changed... Of course the hobby and the people in it have changed, too. That's inevitable. We can either chose to adapt to the situation and roll with it, or we can say to heck with it and move on. Some folks that used to be involved have gone the first route, others have gone the second and the rest of us are still looking around and trying to make up our minds.

Seriously, though, it's not just DoA. Or the doll hobby in general. It's the world.

COVID did a number on in-person gatherings of all sorts. Social media has taken a proverbial hatchet to old-school forums. The global economy (Not to mention environmental concerns over consumption and waste-) has made shopping a lot less enticing than it used to be. Politics has made us all crabby with each other. People are stressed and short-tempered and throw around insults and death threats over.... basically everything. And every bit of that is reflected in our online hobbies and interactions. There's no way it wouldn't be.

 

Oh yeah, the cost is why I imagine DoA doesn't host images. And this is actually something I think is a very interesting dilemma. Take, for example, My Figure Collection. It's primarily used as a anime figure database. Sure there are forums, sales pages, etc. but it's intended to be used as a database and figure tracker. But it hosts images. It'll give you a warning every single time you go to upload an image, that the site isn't intended for image hosting and to only share photos other users would be interested in, but you can still upload your images, because the site understands that the hobby is heavily image based. The big difference is that MFC has a ton of sponsors, partners, and companies and vendors that pay for a promo spot on the site. Keep in mind, these aren't Amazon ads or McDonalds ads or whatever, MFC only has ads that are specific to the hobby. They rightfully only want companies and vendors that people who go to the site would be interested in. DoA does this too, has ads/sponsor spots for bjd companies or bjd vendors.

BUT. Comparatively, the bjd market is tiny. Sure there are companies that do well, will pay for an ad spot, etc. but the revenue stream is nowhere near the same as it is for anime figures. The vendor, partner and sponsor possibilities are so much more limited. A bjd site, even the big one that most people associate as the go to place for the hobby, can't generate enough money to afford image hosting. But this hobby is just as image based as anime figure collecting. So, what happens when a largely image based hobby's "big" website doesn't host images? People go to places that do, websites that can afford to host images: Instagram, Tumblr, FB, Discord, Reddit, etc. And what was once the primary place to go for a hobby rapidly becomes decentralized and the hobby can feel dead or dying due to that.

There's no easy fix, DoA suddenly having the ability to host images won't solve the decentralization, but what it might do is encourage the users that are still active here to start posting more photos, photostories, and all that stuff that keeps this hobby vibrant and alive, aka looking at bjds. But because bjds, in a Western market, don't make enough money or are unwilling to sink ad money into an English speaking website, at the rate of the site being able to support the costs of image hosting, DoA is unable to take that step into a more user friendly, new collector friendly website.

I just think it's an interesting conundrum, that "the" English language bjd hobby website can't grow/update itself because the ad money available for bjds just isn't enough, because the Western market for bjds isn't there like it is for a similar East Asian based image heavy hobby of anime figure collecting. Keep in mind, they are two different beasts: anime figure collecting has a bigger market because people are coming in from a prebuilt fanbase, there are more new fanbases (animes) being generated all the time and anime figure collecting is viewed as less gendered than doll collecting, i.e. "dolls are for GIRLS" where anime figures are for, idk, fans of anime, which isn't particularly gendered (at least not that I'm aware of). It makes sense that one hobby is more profitable than the other, and thus big websites for it are more accessible to that hobby. There's no solution I'm proposing here, I'm just someone who is getting back into both hobbies after over a decade away from both of them and seeing how active each hobby feels on it's given big website. I can't help but compare the two, even if it is a bit apples to oranges and this reply got a little away from me.

In summation: yep, image hosting is expensive, I think most people are aware of that. I don't expect DoA to suddenly have the ability to do that, precisely because of what hobby DoA is explicitly for. Image hosting is a possible cause for why the hobby feels less active here. It's not a solution and that's not what I intended to say, and I hope that was clear, or at least is clear now. Sorry for the tldr ramble, I just don't want people to misunderstand.

 

There's something I've been wanting to bring up on this topic, but I always worry it's going to upset people whose work I appreciate - know that I do not mean to cast shade, only to open up dialogue!

I love DoA and have for over decade; I find this format the most useful for connecting with community, for sales, and for reference. Tumblr was okay, Instagram was okay once I got used to it (though they've ruined it now with the removal of the recent hashtags), but the Discord is harrowing for me. Discord is just the wrong format for doll stuff. Discussions get swallowed, reference is all over the place, and sales posts are constantly bumped with only a link to the original thread and no other information about what it is they're selling. I wish more of the community would come back here. But:

Word from a lot of folks to whom I have spoken about DoA is that many left because of the stringent restrictions (what is "on topic" and what is not) and elitism that results. Of course we should have some of these restrictions (we are not about playline dolls, for example), but do you think maybe it's time to revise?

It's been, as I mentioned, over a decade since I've been in this hobby, and I have watched it change immensely in that time. I remember when I could recognize any sculpt I saw, because the amount of companies was so limited. I remember artist dolls like Lillycat being such a huge outlier in a world of larger companies, and now small artists make up most of my feed. With the advent of 3D modeling and printing becoming so accessible, any artist can model and print dolls in resin, and there is a whole market now for modeling commissions if you have a concept but not the skill to bring it to life. I see more dolls than ever now that are computer modeled and printed in resin - many of them are molded from the prints and then cast, but then how do we differentiate the cast ones from the printed ones of the exact same sculpt? Why should the folks with the printed ones feel like they can't share their dolls with the rest of us, when their number is growing so monumentally among hobbyists? I appreciate the heck out of the people who run this forum, but I feel the need to call this out, because it seems really evident that DoA is lagging behind, and it makes me sad.

I just feel like times are changing (have been changing), and maybe we should change with them, so we can be more inviting to our growing community. Our rules may be partially responsible for splintering the community, and we can change that.

 

First, sorry for the late reply, this sent med down a bit of a rabbit hole.

Secondly, I'm really not the right person to have this conversaton with. English is not my first language, I don't have much of an education and just about everything I know of both business, programming and computer safety is self taught. So take this for what is is.

A few years back I had a similar conversaton with someone else and I started to research. At that time there were plenty of articles from a large number of sources, both business and security oriented, that talked about how the numbers didn't add up and that Discord clearly had a large revernue that didn't come from users.
I don't use Discord, but my understanding is that there are payed services and sales of digital goods that is supposed to be the way the company makes money. But neither of those seemed to be very profitable at the time considering how many people were using the site without ever paying for anything.

The way I understood it, it works something like this:
Discord collects user data and shares it with their "partners".
The ToS doesn't specify what these "partners" may do with that data, only what Discord may do directly.
Among these partners are companies developing smart systems such as search engins and recommend features. These are systems that only work if they can be trained on large amounts of data and this makes said data very valuable.
These trained programs (and potentially even the raw data) can now be sold on, by the partners.
The money form these sales will then trickle back up the chain.
Discord gather the data and benefit financially from handing it over to someone else. It may not fit the legal defenition of a sale, but the damage is still done.

So, here is the interesting thing. Now, that I search, all I come up with is countless shallow fluff-pices about how Discord is totally safe any not selling anyones data, honest. Many copy-pasted and about as convincing as chinese everything is fine-propaganda.
An article I had bookmarked the last time I looked into this is taken down and I can't find it again, even the way back machine draws a blank.
I've found one or two business articles discussing how much Discords makes a year and where the revenue is coming from, but they had fine print disclaimers saying that Discord did not disclose any of this information so all the numbers were estimates and they did not quote any sources.
I've spent hours on this and it's honestly quite surreal. This is not what I expected.
Make of it what you will.

If any of you have better luck, please share it with @Novalyna

Spoiler: About data gathering, off topic to the thread, but relevant to the Discord discussion.

So, why is data gathering a problem?
Most of you are probably painfully aware of this, but just for completions sake.
Self-evolving AI can get incredibly good at a task as long as that task is fairly limited and clearly defined.
Among other uses, this is often used to predict behaviour and manipulate behaviour. It is used in things like recommended for you-functions and marketing.
The problem is that the AI only cares about numbers, and have no grasp of social impact of the bigger picture.
It get's good at recommending things that will make you click on them, not neccesarily things that you will enjoy or benefit from.
This means that it's very easy to be trapped in ecco chambers, ot be led way too far down paths you never intended. It also means that anything trending can be quickly blown out of proportion while a lot of good quality content may never be seen, and it's nearly impossible for the individual user to have any control.
Most of the examples of things going really wrong in the real world is from facebook, but this is probably more due to the fact that they have been around for so long and have had enough scandals an lawsuits to make it into the mainstreem media, making it very hard to ignore, rather than any serious difference if how things are run. After all, none of the other massive social sited had looked and worked the way they do today without facebook first clearing the way.

Then there is the issue of biased AI.
I'm sure you've all heard of facial recognition software trained mainly on white people and what strange consequences that has on anything from misidentifying criminals to biased image generation and filters.
The same thing is happening on a much more subtle level when it comes to things like political views, long term planning and risk awareness.
Because of the problems asociated with the big platforms it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone; that the people who tend to use them compared to people who tend to stay away also tend toward different views and behaviours in other parts of their lives. So when much of the training data is gathered on social platforms, this means that this data is allready politically and behaviorally (is that a word?) biased.
Since these progams are used outside of the enviroment of the platform where the training data originated, this has an impact on everybody.

And the "Right to be forgotten" doesn't apply. Once the data has been used to train a program, removing the data from the pool of training data is not going to have an impact on the progam allready trained. These things are closed books to us. Not even the programmer can really go in and see what data caused what changes or exactly on what grounds conclusions are drawn.

 

This happened on the other hobby forum I'm active on (it's possible we're thinking of the same forum) and I was thinking about that as I was reading through this thread, and how thankful I am that DoA is mostly unchanged from when I first joined. I feel like it's one of those situations where you don't know how good you've got it until it's taken from you (except, I do know how good we've got it, because compared to that other forum DoA is HEAVENLY to use). Personally I love DoA exactly the way it is and wouldn't want it to change.

 

First of all, thank you for taking so much of your time to write this out for me and research it to the best of your ability.
Just as you said, a lot of data is internal, and we can only make assumptions one way or another.

But I still think there's a little bit of a fundamental misunderstanding. How were they making a profit? The short answer is, they probably weren't.

Spoiler: the long answer

For similar tech startups, it's common that they are funded upfront and periodically throughout the development, and run in the red for some years. Up until just a few years ago, investors were throwing a few milli at tech projects that were just a dream cobbled together with duct tape and popsicle sticks.
Discord's founder already had some proved experience and relationships with their early investors, so even with a half-baked monetization plan, it's no wonder they were able to raise hundreds of millions. That amount of money can keep the lights on for a long time, even if it's resource intensive.
The fact that they started in 2014, rolled out paid features in 2017, and almost no one used paid features for some years after might seem sketchy, but only if you assume they must be in profit to stay in business. It's kind of wild, but tech investors are basically gambling on these projects with big money

If you were to visit the discord server of online entertainment, especially a game but also other types of creative media or software projects, you can see that the nitro features are pretty popular. It took me by surprise too when it took off. I will always be F2P on discord, I personally don't see the value but a lot of people are using them regardless. With ~560 million MAU, the 3-10 dollar/mo nitro for a fraction of those users does seem to produce an awful lot of revenue.
If you are a business with an official discord server, chances are you'll want to boost your server to the max, $70/mo is like a penny out of your budget, and makes your server seem "official." If you consider that almost every modern game, both published and still in development, has a discord server, it's not chump change either. That still doesn't include any of the hugely active social servers which also receive boosts from their members.
They apparently have a button that devs can use to sell their game, giving discord a 10% commission, but I've not seen it in use in any servers I visited, so, no idea how widely used that is. I would think they'd rather direct the users where to buy it, than pay 10% for a button???? But who knows.
They don't seem to be in profit yet based on the data I'm seeing, but, if they can show the data to investors saying, "look, more users are buying nitro, boosting servers, buying cosmetics, and buying games through our stupid little 10% button than they were before, we are seeing X% growth every month!" I think they can probably convince some investors to keep doubling down til they do make it there.

My assumption, based on the fact that they don't sell ads, is that the mysterious partners are their investing partners, and partnered marketing agencies or platforms. But this can't be avoided. For example, if you're doing SEO, you'll have to use user data to form any meaningful strategy. If you outsource any of that work, they also need that data. But where FB uses it to sell to their ad partners, discord has always alleged to use it to sell discord - first to get people in as F2Pers, then to convert them to paying users.
Investors are looking for certain growth data as a part of their funding criteria. "Dude just trust me, we are doing great" probably won't net you a dime... certainly not the multi million dollar re-up you need.

That doesn't mean that the investors or business partners who can access the data, can then use it for whatever purposes they desire. But, laws get broken all the time. So, I'm definitely not discounting the possibility, corruption happens so much. But just like you, I struggled to find anything Of all the entities who you'd think would have the money and power to scrub the internet of their dark secrets, and yet can't, how come discord gets this special powers? Over 1000 employees, and not one whistleblower? Surely someone would be disgruntled enough. But, you could very well be correct, and maybe we will see such a thing in the future, it just hasn't surfaced yet.

I guess the problem that I have is not that you or other people don't want to use it. No one should feel pressured to use any platform, for any reason, 'nuff said! Nor do I feel anyone should say, "yeah discord is fine" if you have an icky feeling, you're perfectly entitled to say so and discourage others.
But when I look at it in its context, I personally don't see the same red flags. Without some damning information, why is my gut feeling less valid than your gut feeling, and makes me and other discord users some irresponsible beast-feeders, just for recommending it? Just because we can't prove a negative, that doesn't mean we don't do our due diligence and make responsible choices, even if our choices differ from yours.

AAAAAALL of this said, is discord the best place for a doll community?
Most servers don't take advantage of its most useful features, they are a little bit hidden. So I don't think discord is really the place for dolls or other collector communities, yet. But I do think there's some good potential for growth there, particularly among the younger gen who don't know how to navigate websites very well. Some of my nieces and nephews don't know how to use a pc or really even a web browser. If they became doll collectors, I highly doubt they will even know what the hell is a web forum beyond some weird old people thing that aunty uses.
The forum format is very comfy and nostalgic for me, but if there was a really good discord community for this, I'd probably jump ship. When fully implemented, it's a lot easier than having to remember three usernames and passwords just to post a single low quality image (one for DOA, one for flickr, one for my email because I will forget the user/pass of one or the other ) But I don't have the best social skills to foster a community, I'm sure you can tell immediately from my very annoying posts, but this is the only way I know how to be

 

Apparently Tumblr wants to add marketplace function for accounts? Might be a potential replacement for IG to sell things outside DoA / FB.

 

I actually agree with a lot of what has already been said here.
I'm very sorry that my English is so bad. I would love to comment more creatively, but the language barrier prevents me from doing so.
Recently I had similarly difficult thoughts about the BJD community in my country. Before I got into this hobby, there was a blog in Czech and a forum attached to it. Then the forum died (by moving to Fb), which dealt a mortal blow to friendly communication. The blog died later (through no fault of the creators, to whom I still owe great tutorials and outreach).
Since realizing that the community had fragmented and necrosis had partially set in, I've been doing a lot to make it better, but Fb...
When I have the energy, I try to comment on people's pictures, post my own, share tutorials and stories with the community, occasionally throw in a question to provoke people to interact, but most importantly, I organize themed meetups from time to time where there is a lot of photography and a lot of talking. I always get a great feeling from it when connections are made.

 

@Arengil - Your English is impeccable!

And to keep on topic, since I've read this thread, I've tried to be more active in the Gallery and comment more there and in other threads. I like the format here and that it is easy to use and look at. The few times I've gone to any links for a discord site...I just don't like how it looks...and I don't get the format.

 

DoA is still my rock after all these years.

 

Lots of interesting comments here and I do agree with many points that have been already mentioned here.

As many have already commented, I think one of the biggest reasons is that the hobby is now more divided to several different social media platforms, that allow easy photo sharing and fast paced conversation. Social media has taken over the smaller websites and blogs. Also most social media platforms and Discord groups are more convinient to use on a smart phone than e.g. a forum or blog. Also for new commers social media groups provide easy platforms to access the hobby, and sadly less new people come to forums. Covid was probably the reason why my local communities are now meeting less on IRL.

Personally I am still most active on DoA. I am an introvert, even online, and I tend to overthink everything more than I should, so when the conversation gets very fast paced I rather not say anything. I like slow conversation, I don't mind the "inactive" feeling, maybe more that I find it hard to connect with people. This year I want to be more active in the community, as in commenting and sharing content, getting into more conversations. I find it is easier on forums, like DoA or an old doll forum in my country, which is now closing. Also it's easier to find information and helpful topics in forums or websites, the data does not get "lost" so easily. FB and other social media is little bit too fast and overwhelming for me. It took me years to finally get Discord last Autumn (it seems the place to be thesedays), but I am rather inactive in doll groups, other than a small group for a local community. I use FB mostly to sell/buy stuff and Instagram to post / see other people's inspiring photographs, but I don't feel like they are good platforms to built a community. I am super thankful DoA still exists and I try to write/comment here more actively this year.

 

@daeki I'm 100% in the same boat. I've been active on different social media platforms in the past, but they never really suited me, for exactly the reasons you outlined. I'm so glad I can still be a part of DoA!

 

.

 

Yeah, as someone pretty new to the hobby, it feels super difficult to find any sort of community

I used to use Flickr for photography around 15 years ago. Wish it were still as popular as it used to be, because I could see it being a nice place for doll photography. I know some people still use it, but it just feels like a place to dump your photos but not interact with anyone else's photos.

I'd be way more motivated to use Instagram if they hadn't obliterated their tagging system and made it impossible to find new posts. The fact that not many people see MY posts doesn't bother me as much as the fact that I can't search the tags and find new posts myself.
I still use it, but the tagging issue is so frustrating . . .

I've started using Tumblr a bit more; it's at least a platform that I know how to use and navigate since I've had a few different moderately popular art blogs over the years. At least the tagging system actually works there lmfao. But the doll community on there seems to be much smaller than on instagram.

Idk. Personally, I really hate that Discord seems to be the place to be now.
I don't even know any of the popular discord channels, but even if I did I'm just like ugh . . . My experience with Discord in general is that it tends to feel like some kind of middle school popularity contest where there's the popular group who interacts with each other, and everyone else is just kinda ignored at best or talked shit about at worst. The BJD community confessions blog on Tumblr just seems to confirm that that's how it goes with BJD Discord.
I also just like having my own space, like a Tumblr blog, Instagram account, etc, where I can post all my stuff and keep it in one place. On Discord, I'm just another username floating around that's not a part of the established popular group or whatever I already experienced being unpopular and getting bullied in middle school irl, I don't need a repeat of it on Discord lmfao.
Everything just moves too quickly on Discord, too. In any I've been in, the conversation just moves along and changes before I can get a word in. The instant messaging pacing of it just feels overwhelming.

DOA is kinda my favorite place for BJD community right now

 

The community is very much active just not here on DoA. No shade to this forum that I have been on for nearly 20 years and love very much, but as a very active member of the boogieman of Discord there is also a very practical reason there are not as many new people here: they can't register. It's manual approval and there seems to be a backlog of applications. (Which is not meant to be pissy at the moderation here, I assume everyone is busy and I'm not even sure how many mods are actually active.) But new people can't even read the forum to do a vibe check without registration, which has taken months for approval.

I haven't really found much of a dip in hobby activity overall, honestly. Just here on DoA which is probably due to a lot of factors. The on-topic thing is definitely one of them, too.

I will put out a plug for the BJD Discord (Join the BJD Discord Server!) if that IS your thing, though. Everyone is pretty nice, and it's certainly active! I think here and there (and other spaces besides) just serve different functions and fill different social needs.