This website contains age-restricted materials including nudity and explicit depictions of sexual activity.
By entering, you affirm that you are at least 18 years of age or the age of majority in the jurisdiction you are accessing the website from and you consent to viewing sexually explicit content.
When I was 9 or 10 I decided I wanted to dress up as a character from a show I was watching at the time for carnival.
Together with my mom I performed a web search in order to find images of that character.
We found a website specializing in that show and after a while I found out it had a forum attached to it. My mom allowed me to register there and I started to participate in it.
Most of my social contacts during my teen years were in online communities I found indirectly through that forum.
Nice! I still communicate daily with a small community who found each other in a paid forum of a gaming magazine 20 years ago. We also have meetups sometimes. Initially, when the forum dissolved we created our own little forum but switched to Slack at some point.