Thinking about how small the active self ship/ f/o community is.
If we imagined the current community on the old web, we could easily all be sharing the same busy, active message board, with an irc chat and a dozen mods.
I’m imagining one sub-forum for ask games; each ask game is it’s own thread, and people who want to play all answer the questions in the same thread.
One sub-forum for f/o art. Each user has their own thread to post their art in– mod rule one thread per user, not per f/o! Post as much at as you want, but please only bump for visibility once every 24 hours.
Another sub-forum with similar per-user rules for gushes, and one for imagines. One for self insert fics, and one for x-reader fics.
A chitchat forum where we could talk about our day and play non-f/o related forum games.
If I was really ambitious, i’d say it should have a forum avatar dress up game like gaia online or neopets.
And of course the whole forum would be moderated to be rated pg, with all of the adult/18+ content kept strictly on the hidden 18+ parts of the forum. Maybe even with an extra hidden “dark” area for especially taboo f/o material.
I wish forums were still a thing…
If anyone was particularly good at website building, I know domains are pretty easy to get and I’ve seen a post floating around about a year ago with a link saying people could literally make their own forum-based site pretty readily with a little elbow grease. It’s possible! I just have none money and the brain of a koala.
The hell of it is that I could easily create and run a site like this (maybe minus the gaia avatars) and have run large message board communities in the past.
I just don’t know that anyone would bother using it in this day and age.