With ADISC closing soon, a lot of us are asking where we go next.
I’ve seen a lot of good suggestions about other places on the Internet to look for community. It’s good to build community wherever we can. But Internet communities are vulnerable right now. Small forums are facing pressure from age verification laws. Larger platforms that can afford to do age verification need income to operate. They face pressure from the increasingly prudish policies of payment processors.
We need to build community that’s more resilient. That means looking beyond Internet forums and social media platforms.
The best way to build community is in person.
Some of us don’t live near many other ABDLs. Some of us genuinely can’t attend kink-oriented events, for one reason or another. If there’s a regular ABDL gathering near you, such as a munch, and shyness is the only reason you haven’t gone yet, get out from behind your keyboard and meet people. If there are other kink-related events in your area that are of interest to you, consider going to them, too.
Organized gatherings are the safest way to meet. Go without any expectations other than meeting some interesting people and having some conversation. That may be all that happens. Or you might find out about a TV show or a band that you’d never heard of but is totally your thing. Or you could meet someone who becomes a play partner, or a life partner, or a lifelong friend.
Consider starting a personal website.
I’m old enough to remember what the Internet was like for ABDLs in the mid-to-late 1990s. Lots of people had personal web pages with stories, essays, art, or (low-res) photos. Most of these websites had a bunch of links to other sites of interest. If you found one ABDL website, you could easily find a bunch of others. You’d quickly realize that a lot of people had the same interests.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the new online safety laws are targeting social media sites and other websites that allow users to interact with each other. A static website or a blog without a comment feature doesn’t face the same legal risks. There are plenty of web hosting services that have strongly pro-free-speech policies and will happily host ABDL and adjacent content. Some of these are either free or very low cost.
If you have writing or art you’d like to share with the ABDL community, consider creating a website of your own rather than putting everything on someone else’s forum or social media platform. There are some web hosting companies, like Neocities, that let you start a website without buying your own domain name. If you buy a domain name, make sure you get domain privacy protection. Whatever you put online, be mindful of your privacy.
You can use a content management system like WordPress to build your site, if you like. I think it’s worth learning HTML and a little bit of CSS. You can do things your own way, your site will load very fast, and it will probably still work fine in ten years even if you don’t change a thing.
Stand up to prudery and unwarranted judgment.
When you hear people expressing prudery, or judging LGBTQ people, or kink-shaming people (for any kink, not just ABDL), resist. You don’t have to call people out in an angry way. You can signal in a gentle way that you don’t agree.
A world that’s more open-minded and welcoming for everyone is a world that’s safer for us.