X-ing Over – This Week in Anime

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Steve and Lucas follow the migration of anime fans from Twitter/X to Bluesky and trade fond (and not-so-fond) memories of other online spaces where we used to congregate.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.

Lucas

Steve, I think that deleting Twitter/X/Elon’s alt-right playground off my phone a few months ago was the smartest decision I ever made! My mental health has improved, my skin is clearer, and a big part of that is because a newer social media platform, Bluesky has a THRIVING anime community!

So I’d like to use this column to chat about this new home for anime fans and remember a few of the places where we’ve all hung out before.

Steve

Might as well! A little nostalgia never hurt anybody. A lot of nostalgia, yes, but we should be fine with a little. And while I commend your mental fortitude, I must cop to my continued existence on Twitter. I’m not proud of it, but I suppose we each must sup on our own poisons.

Hey, I totally get it. If folks have more of a following over there than on other platforms, it’s hard to leave. Twitter is also still the best way to gauge public opinion on a series or catch new anime-centric memes, since it’s still one of the biggest and most approachable social media platforms around.

That being said, to anyone thinking about jumping ship, I promise it’s worth it! The community vibes are way better on Bluesky and the people running it actually care about moderation. There’s still drama and rough spots, but that’s built into any social media platform, and the thriving community of anime nerds more than outweighs the downsides.

Yeah, I have started to use Bluesky more since one of the recent mass Twitter exoduses, and it’s nice! I think it’s just big enough now to sustain a decently active timeline, and it’s been catching up on a lot of the basic functionality people expect out of their social media. It has the juice.

Also, I like that it abbreviates itself as “bsky” in the URL, which makes me think of Bisky from Hunter x Hunter every time I see it.

Oh my god! Did you read the latest chapter!?? Hisoka fans are EATING and I’m living for it!

I haven’t yet, but that explains why my clown senses were tingling.

Thankfully, those senses won’t fire off too much on Bsky! I’ve gotten a little bit of weirdness on the platform in the year and a half I’ve been there, but folks are mostly cool and every bot that’s tried to scam me has been shut down by the platform within a few days of them popping up.

More than anything, though, I dig the authenticity of the community I’ve found on Bluesky. The brands haven’t found the platform, and hopefully never will, and the lack of a promotional feed means that I’m only seeing stuff from people I follow or stuff on specific topics tied to a feed I chose to subscribe to.

I mean, if there is such a thing as a “honeymoon” period for a social media site, Bluesky is definitely in it right now. It’s not too algorithmic. It’s not too big. It isn’t inundated with ads. Those are all selling points, but they’re ephemeral ones. Eventually, the site will have to make money somehow, and it probably has to grow big enough to attract the dreaded brands to do so. The alternative is that it shrinks into nonexistence. That, sadly, is what recently happened to Cohost. It was beloved by its user base, but it just couldn’t keep the lights on.

I feel for the folks who tried to re-home on Cohost, and it sucks that Cohost didn’t seem to have much of a long-term plan for the platform. Thankfully, though, Bluesky’s leadership seems to be inspiring more confidence and I’m hopeful that’ll become the place for nerds of my ilk for a good long while.

And even if it doesn’t have leges, we’re anime fans! We’re used to jumping from one place on the internet to another to find people who share this hobby! Christ, I don’t think I’d be reading manga today if it weren’t for the old pirate site Mangastream, and that place hasn’t been around for like half a decade.

Absolutely! As with many niche nerd interests, anime really found a home on the internet. Quite a number of homes, actually. And it makes sense. Back in the day, anyway, it was a lot easier to go online and find people who enjoyed Tenchi Muyo! than it was to sift through your IRL acquaintances for the same.

I know anime had a bit of a presence in the early days of U.S. and European sci-fi conventions, but the Western anime community really didn’t come into its own until the 90s and more widespread internet access allowed us otaku to unite from all across the world.

Plus, timing-wise, I personally didn’t have access to the internet until the early 2000s, at which point there were plenty of anime webrings and wallpaper repositories for me to enjoy. That was by far the easiest avenue I had into the fandom as a whole.

By the way, I found a desktop background I definitely used on my old brick of a Gateway laptop in high school. Can’t say if mine had the “animewallpapers.com” watermark, but that, too, feels like the era.

That wallpaper is sick as hell and I feel like I should be looking at the current animewallpapers.com website with that Gateway laptop!

There aren’t a lot of those older anime websites left, and a lot of the ones that are around have been modernized, but I can’t help but have a soft spot for all of the sites that have held onto what’s now a retro aesthetic.

The death of Geocities was a tremendous cultural loss. All that animated text was gone, like tears in the rain. But that kinda ties back to our earlier point that these internet-based communities migrate and evolve with the times. Or, occasionally, they move for stupider reasons that end up having world-altering outcomes. Lest we forget 4chan’s humble beginnings as an aggrieved offshoot of peeps from Something Awful’s anime forum.

Ugh, I forgot that 4chan was a Something Awful spin-off that was immediately A LOT WORSE! I’d rather focus on more fun and positive spaces, though. Do you remember what anime corners of the internet you used to bum around in back in the day?

I mean, for better or worse, I did cut a good amount of my teeth on 4chan’s /a/ board back in the day. It wasn’t great then (I guess that’s what happens when you inherit Something Awful’s posting culture), but I don’t think you can tell a complete history of Western anime fandom without it. It was huge! Lord knows what’s happening on there nowadays, though. And frankly, I don’t care to find out.

Mood, and, though I’m far from an anime historian, I also think it’s important to remember our community’s warts, missteps, and all the work that went into making most of this space more approachable and welcoming.

I remember reading through MangaFox’s (or maybe it was a different manga pirate site?) forums quite a bit, though I hardly ever posted anything. I also remember spending a lot of time on a now-defunct anime meme website called Funny Mama when I was in high school.

I wasn’t much of a forum poster myself, but I definitely lurked more than a few, all of which I have to imagine are defunct by now. Except I see the Utena fan forum “Something Eternal” is still kicking! I don’t think I could even recall the username I used to have on that, but it does my heart good to see it active. I mean, that it in itself is a relic of a bygone era: a forum dedicated to a single anime. All we get now are Discord servers, if that.

Oh man, I don’t care how convenient and centralized Discord is, this kind of hyper-specific and dedicated website is SO MUCH cooler and more personal than anything on this app.

Oh! Fun peak behind the curtain, we type out this convo in a dedicated channel in the ANN Writers Discord and then publish it to the site a few days later. The more you know!

Discord does its thing well enough, but I think it’s a poor substitute for forums and, by extension, fan communities. It’s good for conversation, but not cataloging/archiving. Just look at Empty Movement’s full site. It has to be one of the most comprehensive fan-driven collections of information, material, and miscellanea about a single anime from the ’90s. And you can tell it’s been maintained for over 2 decades. That’s history right there. They simply aren’t making them like this anymore.

Tell me about it! In a similar vein, I totally understand why Fandom is the go-to place for anime wikis that document specific IP (also, total disclosure, I used to work for them as their Anime Community Manager), but it doesn’t feel great knowing that one company going under could lead to the loss of most digital information about most anime series.

Not to mention their reputation on the end-user front is, from what I’ve been able to see, rather reviled. These are not wikis you want to wander into without an ad blocker. But, as you said, they’re also basically the only game in town, so people continue to build on their infrastructure. And ain’t that just the story of the internet? Fewer and fewer options that only grow worse with time.

Oh yeah, most Fandom wikis’ ad loads are an ad OVERLOAD! But that trend toward profits-first centralization is why Bluesky feels like such a breath of fresh air. So far it’s everything I liked about mid-2010s Twitter with none of the downsides, and it’s energizing to be able to engage with something new and good on the internet in 2024.

True that. Mid-2010s Twitter basically rekindled my love for anime. I forget if this was the precise sequence of events, but I think I wrote a few Tumblr posts on The Flowers of Evil, connected with some fellow Hiroshi Nagahama fans on Twitter, and eventually found myself in a great community there. I believe Twitter as it currently exists is explicitly designed to prevent things like that from ever happening again, so I’d love for Bluesky to be that for more folks.

If nothing else, I’ve only realized more and more as I get older how important well-maintained digital and physical spaces are to my own well-being and the well-being of a community. Here’s hoping that Bluesky can be that space for the anime community for the foreseeable future, but I’m confident in our ability to find a home for ourselves someplace else, if or when that time comes.

Especially nowadays, when anime is the most popular it’s ever been. The internet may look more homogenous than ever, but the communities themselves hardly are. It’s just a matter of finding one that matches your vibe. And I’m a big proponent of vibes. They’re way more important than tastes. You gotta find people who can hang, and then you’ll know you’re in the right place.

Totally. It took me a while, but I’m thrilled to be in the spaces I’m in and share them with so many other cool people. Finding folks you can call peers takes time, but everything worthwhile does, and I’m grateful to the anime community for every opportunity and relationship I’ve experienced thanks to it.

Not to get too schmaltzy, but I truly have met a lot of wonderful people thanks to these online anime spaces. And, heck, a Twitter DM is how I got the offer to write for this very column. My life would look a lot different if my brain didn’t suffer from posting rot. And that’s why I can never log off.

My path to this column and writing for ANN more broadly is pretty similar! Just goes to show that, so long as you’re logging on for good, you can find your niche and help build it into the space you want to see. And I’d much rather be schmaltzy than cynical!

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