What are your favorite BJD spaces online?

I really like the forum style too but a way to host the images is the issue. At this point, I don't really post photos anymore because Flickr limits how many photos free accounts can have.

While I do use Discord, I don't really use it like this. I use it for meeting up with local doll collectors. Or to chat with friends I made here!

I miss free image hosting with quality. RIP Photobucket before you were bought out.

 

Instagram is where I do most of my doll stuff, and that's only because the community there is quite active and it's marginally more usable than Facebook. Facebook is just extreme sensory overload in my experience, the worst BJD platform by far. At least Instagram stories are more or less restricted to people you follow and in chronological order... they're almost entirely what I use instagram for nowadays.

I wish tumblr was a more popular platform for BJD hobbyists, but it's a pretty unpopular platform in general nowadays. It's pretty good for images and text, and your dashboard is chronological and only people you follow. I know I've seen some people say they were scared away by confession blogs, but those seem to be sort of a thing of the past.

I tried to use Bluesky briefly, but I just couldn't get a hang of the tagging system and couldn't find other hobbyists that easily. But I can see it working for people who are comfortable with that twitter-like layout.

 

I miss the Flickr era. It was a nice place. Now I mostly use DOA and Instagram, but I wonder if there are any alternatives.

 

I find the Instagram setup a bit (or a lot) of a pain, to be honest.
The need to have a picture in order to post is offputting. You can't just type something and post it, you HAVE to have a picture. It's a hassle just taking them, let alone getting them off the camera, and onto the computer so I can post them.

I dislike photography, I regard it as a necessary-evil if I want to share my dolls online but I don't want to be taking a picture every time I want to post something. The Flickr/forums is far better as I only need a picture if it's needed to illustrate the point I'm nmaking in my written post. I can load pictures to Flickr in batches and they sit there in my albums until I need them.

I dislike setups like Discord as I find discussion moves too quickly and gets worse the more people who are actively posting (by the time I finish typing a response and am ready to post it, what I'm responding to is three screens back and the discussion has moved on a couple of topics - far too frustrating to bother with). I like the forum setup since it's not so fast paced, and posting pictures from Flickr is easier than taking a picture specifically to post each time.

EDITED TO ADD: Also with the Instagram type setup - you can't catch-up on a specific topic, like you can on a forum, if you miss checkign it for a day or two - your feed gives you what your feed gives you and if you go to a particular person's posts, you get the most popular ones, not necessarily the most recent ones, and they only scroll back so far and don't necessariy have them in the order they were posted so you can't go back to check somethin posted X months ago without having a lot of scrolling (and guesswork as to whether you remember the correct picture) and that's if that post even shows up. It's horrible .

Teddy

 

Regarding doll stuff, I only hang out at DOA. I find the forum format the best and I don't mind uploading images using a separate host as I've figured out a good workflow for myself for that both on phone and comp; I find it a very small sacrifice to make, the forum would be very expensive to upkeep otherwise. I also enjoy how it's not a popularity contest over likes/comments/engagement and focuses on slower discussion in its core. And there are no annoying unrelated ads!

I do like browsing Tumblr but I haven't really felt the need to set up a doll related one for myself and it's not really good for discussion imo. I use discord for other communities but prefer a slower pace for this hobby. I love it when people have off-social-platform sites and blogs and sites but I don't have energy to keep up with one for myself at the moment - and, again, it's hard to have regular discussions with other hobbyists like that.

Honestly, for me it's DOA or nothing, I don't see myself moving elsewhere. I am a luddite to the end and would rather fix a still fitting thing 900 times over than invent a new one

 

I'm mostly here, but I like tumblr I'd love to see more bjd pages on neocities too! Although the latter lacks some of the interaction you can have on doa and tumblr.

I don't like instagram since it's so picture-based and has weird algorithms, and discord is just messy because the servers are either a super small community that posts twice a month, or so many people that you can't have and follow conversations properly. Neither is good in my opinion>_< the bjd subreddit is okay, though not super interesting.

 

I agree with everything you have said sintex. There isn't really a perfect place for the bjd community these days to me and personally I think the closest is Tumblr, that has the tools and features that fit the most with the way most people live the hobby. It's just a shame it's not more popular, but of the platforms available that I know of I consider it the best option as of right now.
Personally I still use Flickr until I run out of space I guess and because it can still be useful as a hosting place for some photos you want to post somewhere else. I tried Discord and I pretty much hated it, it was pure chaos to me and required too much of my time to be able to keep up. Reddit is ok for discussion but it doesn't seem that good for photos.
I don't like Bluesky and similar Twitter platforms because the features and functions are limiting and I don't consider it very good for photos, discussion, comments, etc.
I'm on instagram and old instagram times were good and it's still the place where probably most of the community is right now, but as mentioned the algorithm, the hashtags, the adverts, no space for discussion, the push for reels, the things I was getting in recommended and other things have made me really not want to use it. I mostly still have an account because it's still the place where most people are and I like seeing everyone's content and sharing, and I'm patiently waiting for the day something better comes around that appeals to people. Meanwhile I keep posting on Flickr as well to have a bit of an archive and I'll be posting more on Tumblr.
Pros of Tumblr? It allows for posts of different types, it's chronological, the hashtags work better, you can make communities for specific things, you have a dashboard similar to instagram with the people that you follow. I've used Tumblr (although not for dolls until recently) for 15 years and it will depend on which community you're in but it's still fairly active, not in its peak but still used. The BJD community there is very small, but for example the fiber crafts one is bigger and more active, and depending on which fandoms are very big, you can find a bit of everything.
Cons? As mentioned by cobaltconduct discussions are a bit more difficult since they'll mostly be appearing as replies to a post (probably the best way to do a discussion there these days) or as a post with reblogs each adding to the original and it can get split and lost depending on how much the original poster tracks it and tries to keep it contained on their own blog. It's not very good in that sense. But either way the community has pretty much discarded the use of the platform due to those confession blogs that used to be there and stuff like that. It has a reputation now and people don't want to touch it, what is a shame.
I've heard of other platforms that I believe have no BJD community but that maybe could work well for it like Pixelfed and Mastodon but I haven't investigated to know for sure.

For me what I remember from the past fondly was the peak time of Flickr and the forums. They complimented one another quite well I think. So maybe it was not one centralised platform but one covered what the other didn't as much, and the community in general seemed to me also more active in reaching out to one another, leaving comments and participating in that manner. It still exists to a very very small scale but it's not the same.

 

I like tumblr but as other people said, the community does feel a little an small there, but the posting format, image quality is much nicer than Instagram. However I still do keep using Instagram as it feels like most of the hobby is there. I also use reddit quite a bit. It's "kind of" forum like and the native image hosting in a post or comments is nice.
I actually use both Tumblr and Reddit to host images for DoA occasionally.

 

I also prefer forum format, even with the free image host issues. I use tumblr and Instagram as quick tools, to search up my own tags/photos. My memory has always lacked, so I need a tool to check if I already own something. I am terrible at labels and even when I do label my photos or folders, I forget what those were! DX

I lost interest in BJD for a long time a few years ago, so I also used those two to share OT projects. Otherwise, as an old-fart in life and this hobby, I prefer forums. Which are sadly not what youth prefer so they are dying (I feel like only DoA and only one OT collector forum, to which I've belonged for centuries are the only ones still consistently active). Not that I need to be spamming on other places, nor am I a social butterfly, but wanted to join in, as an older forum user. (:

 

I don't enjoy using Facebook (it's just not terribly conducive to .. anything I want to do, hobby-wise, and the only groups I keep up with are Smart Doll groups there) - Instagram has been rendered largely useless by removing chronological tags and dashboard posts (same as FB). It's also restrictive in how you post and clunky to navigate from a desktop pc, and not very intuitive on mobile.

I miss the days of Flickr, but I was there for the buyout heckery and haven't really looked back since.

Tumblr on desktop/laptop while using the XKit Rewritten browser extension is most favorable for either text posts, image posts, chronological tags - but, I've been slow about making a sideblog for doll hobby stuff there. (I don't know why. I'm just slow.)

I miss the ~2014 era of largely-functional internet and it probably shows.

At this rate, I'd better set up that Tumblr sideblog instead of whining about other largely-unusable platforms.

 

Oh, if folks need a working image host to post pics here on DoA, I've had good luck with ImageBam so far. Unfortunately, Imgur/Flickr/etc have all introduced AI-driven shadow-banning and the like.

 

I'll chime in and say I love the format of tumblr too, but the tag system is so overrun with kids misusing tags these days. I feel like only two years or so ago it wasn't so bad, but I think the "2014 coquette girlblogger" thing must have got popular on TikTok (idk, I don't use it) and the tag etiquette is so different. I've been on tumblr for 13 years so maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but it does feel like it's affecting the functionality of the site. I'm also so frustrated with what happened to tags on Instagram; I recently went to Dolly Day and want to see photos from that event but can't sort by most recent. It used to feel more like a community when everyone could share to a specific tag. The internet in general is so much more "Look at me!" than "Let's enjoy this together" than it used to be.
I'm not a fan of Discord; where a forum feels archival, Discord for very fleeting. I like that I can read posts from 20 years ago on DoA. It's like preserving a moment in time. I also get a feeling of elitism from Discord with servers needing invites and approval. While DoA does have an application process, as a website it feels much more "discoverable"

 

@SilverDawnArrow - I definitely agree about the shift on the internet these days, 'look at me' vs. 'let's enjoy this together' - I miss community, especially around shared interests.

(In regard to tag abusers - I just block every account that even mildly annoys me, that seems to have cleaned things up quite a bit lol)