Just testing the waters of this community

[Lunatique]

This is mainly why I found myself here too, to be honest. I really want a more slow-paced, archived community that favours longer discussion and more in-depth replies. Folks knowing each other, a sense of community etc. And obviously a place to learn and be able to share knowledge in return. This is a hard sector we're working in, one where the learning never ends and an industry that currently feels more volatile than ever. We need spaces to talk and support each other that are not just social media spaces that favour the quick, controversial or quippy. I suspect I'm quite a bit younger than you but managed to catch the tail end of forum-based online culture and really hope we manage to retain it or keep it alive somehow.

I think the spirit of what you're talking about definitely still exists. I snooped through your profile out of curiosity and it seems like you're based in Cali, there's a bunch of really active and vibrant art groups close to you. Warrior Painters is one, both their discord group and their irl painting meet-ups seem really amazing. My own country has essentially no art scene though, so my views might be skewed. A lot of this experience intermingling seems to have moved largely onto Discord now. There's a couple of great places for resources and learning with plenty of fellow professionals, but some of the best are either invite only or very hard to find. There's definitely more of a transactional feel to a lot of these places too, with many of them starting off as an artist's personal server (usually someone offering classes etc) which is a pity, but I'll take it over having no spaces at all. I definitely envy your experience. I never embraced the jump to social media, and really wish I had been able to experience this sense of a collective journey or community forums like CA provided.

Thanks a lot for writing up this retrospective of your experience with the online art communities back in the day. I've been lucky enough to attend a few workshops by folks like Mike Azevedo, or Ian McQue and they mentioned similar things too. The rest of us get to vicariously have a small taste of the excitement of those days through you.

Maybe one day we'll see a similar resurgence, who knows.

I think all the old-timers feel it, and if they're doing something about it, it's all in private with private groups that aren't open to the public. 

The problem with Discord is they are designed for relatively real-time interaction, and once a post has scrolled up far enough, it's very hard to find unless you remember the exact key words to search for, the person who made the post. And replying to an older post would be kinda weird, unlike in forums where revival of zombie threads is very common and that conversation would take off again easily when there are new input from members. Some Discord servers have tried to create structures similar to forums, but that doesn't fix the transient feeling of older posts scrolling away further and further. 

I checked out Warrior Painters' website, and it seems nice, but very specific with a focus on plein air painting meetups. 

Now that I'm here, I'm doing what I have always done in forums back in the day, and I don't know how much that contributes to this community, but at least it's something.