Active doll community on other platforms?

If I may offer my two cents as well:

I agree with a lot of what has already been said, but I wanted to add that I think the death of "cringe" in online spaces has had a knock-on effect on building an online community as a whole. I've been aware of the hobby since 2009 and actively involved myself since 2013. If you go back to that era on this forum or almost any other website, you'll find that a lot of the enthusiastic enjoyment also came with a heaping helping of things we would now consider "cringe," such as the emoji use, asterisk roleplay, rawr xD so random, and more. On most social media nowadays, it's a cardinal sin to engage with anything you enjoy in a "cringe-y" way, which limits the amount of enthusiasm people feel safe to engage in, so many just don't engage at all anymore. I have a fandom Twitter that I loved being ridiculous on, but much of my community there vanished because they got harassed for being "cringe." It's no fun to hang out there anymore when the lighthearted silliness is gone.

I'm in a few of the big doll Discord servers and, honestly, I really can't stand them so I don't participate much. Forums are slow-paced enough that even if I miss quite a bit, I can go back and catch up in a timely fashion. If I miss something in Discord, there's no way for me to catch up and join the conversation without massively derailing the topic that everyone else has already moved on to. I only pop in occasionally with some commentary or to answer a question, but unless you keep tabs on it with your phone 24/7, it's almost impossible to keep up in a larger server. (I also have a whole other rant about the expectation in some online spaces to be constantly available thanks to smartphones, but that's a different topic.)

I also think we're currently in an era of platform decay, colloquially referred to as "enshittification." I get it, websites with any kind of regular traffic are incredibly expensive to run and companies have to recoup that expense somehow. Unfortunately, that's why so many social media websites have been making changes that no one asked for and make the user experience actively less pleasant: increasing profits. Even in just the last few years, the mad dash to up profit margins at the expense of the userbase has decimated places where online communities used to flourish. Forums are an alternative to that but, as others mentioned here, DoA doesn't always have the best reputation with the larger community and the barrier to entry is a bit of a turn-off for the younger post-forum generation.

I don't really have a neat way to tidy this up into a conclusion. We're just in a very turbulent era of change, both in real life and online, and the new world is struggling to be born. I do think we will eventually get back to a period of community coalition and creativity, but I can't even begin to fathom when or where or how it will come about. In the meantime, be the change you want to see! Make videos even if they get no views. Post pictures and stories whenever and wherever you feel like. Someone has to become the new "old guard" of the hobby, so why can't it be us?

 

And yet, ironically enough, I never once made an a genuine friend in this hobby until Instagram, nor found much interaction with other collectors for that matter.

"What if social media but too much" is such a reductive, lazy, Banksy-style take. People have moved platforms consistently from the dawn of networked computers, falling in line with the greater evolution of human communication since the beginnings of higher intelligence: from BBS, to Usenet, to IRC, to instant messaging apps, to blogging hosts, to numerous social media platforms, to semi-decentralized VoIP/IM/video conferencing hybrids like Discord, all victims of an inevitable demise against a better alternative within their relative near futures.

The community never died; it moved to modern, digital pastures, and (generic) you stayed behind. There's only one solution to fixing that, and complaining about it won't solve anything.

 

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned before, but if you don't mind looking towards the Chinese bjd community, Lofter and Weibo have large bjd communities!