No ill will meant toward voltra in its current state, its still such a very cozy site--definitely my favorite avatar site remaining.
But I cant help but feel a little sad when I pop on on occasion. I always get the feeling like i really wanna come back to these things and hang out longer. But there's not a lot going on. I kinda miss logging into a site and every time I refresh the page, theres a bunch of new threads popping up at once. I hate feeling like forum-like websites like these are a dying fad because they were always such a wholesome corner of the internet to be in.
My happy little place to mingle with the best kinds of people--for some reason these sites usually draw in amazing personalities and creative types.

I still enjoy voltra on the occasion that I do drop in to chat a bit.
I hope to see it bustle again some day. Maybe when we all get too sick of mainstream social media again, who knows? Perhaps avatar sites can get a second wind some day XD

@Alorrena:
Right, I get these moods where I just wanna pop on and chat with everyone
and I love the chats I get with people but then I run out of thoughts to have, and there's no other threads active to like... jump in and join a conversation somewhere else.

I used to always thread hop back in the day. Was so much fun having a variety of people to chat with or read their threads. Always user made events going on and things to do that last more than a moment because enough people are involved. If that all makes sense, I'm being real vague XD

I just miss the old spark of avatar sites so much!

@Jolly: I was never on ernya, but menewsha like... 6 years ago was pretty nice. it was busy but not too busy, and there was always someone to talk to regardless of the time of day. It was also super easy to just pick a couple threads and sit in them and chat and create a sense of community. Sometimes when sites are slow it's hard to make friends i think. Gaia forums scared me so i barely touched them unless i was rping. and even then, that was rare. gaia forums were intense and often felt hard to navigate.


@GoblinsAndTea: i'm like brand spanking new here, so i look forward to any events!

@Jolly: it might be an adhd thing. i can see that. i had to have at least 3 active rps going in order to feel satisfied, and if any of them slacked i'd try to find another partner to add into my list! and then like 1 or 2 hang out threads where i could just chitchat with people.

i haven't been on gaia in ages, but when i was a teenager that was practically my whole life. but i was literally only ever on towns. that's actually where i met my hubby (this was like 2005 or 2006? something like that.) i didn't like him romantically back then but he became my best friend. he also didn't get on forums ever either. Roliana was my first website where i was in forums semi regularly, but i wasn't on roliana regularly, so... there's that. Menewsha was my home, for sure, but then life happened and i just didn't have time to get on or i didn't have a working laptop. and now it's basically dead, which is sad. but i know a few people i talked to on mene are on here, as well as a few people i DIDN'T talk to, so hopefully it turns out okay. i do like the small community feel Voltra has though. Its cute :]

I think some of the problem is that no one even knows what an avatar site is anymore!
I used to be able to google the words and get a bunch of articles on "10 best avatar sites of 20**!" or threads within various avatar sites that just happened to pop up based on verbage used in the titles. Now, it pops up with irrelevant results D:

But another part is that people are addicted to the kind of social media that feeds ego
I'm guilty, going so far as to draw something only because I know it'll grab attention on some algorithm.
I'm super tired of it though, especially after that recent thread I made complaining about en-eff-tees

@Shark:
saaame, discord is too quick for my pea brain :vanora_xd:
or theres just only room for one discussion at a time, depending on the server im on
and then I run into an awkward situation where I'm the only one over 13 (and 29 being a big jump, begins to feel uncomfortable so I leave)

but it is the closest thing I get to social fulfillment sometimes, outside of worklife socializing

Partially why I came back to Voltra was because I wanted to wean off other social media because I noticed I was just scrolling a lot lately, which doesn’t feel healthy Dx It is sad to see though that forums are a dying breed. I miss the old days when there was so much activity, and sometimes Discord feels rather overwhelming or hard to jump into.