thanks to archivists at the GLBT Historical Archives in California, we now have open access to the first four years of TGForum.com, as compiled on an official CD-ROM back in 1999. it is an absolutely bonkers treasure trove of early-internet trans culture and politics, warts and all, and I wrote about it for Them!
this was a really fun piece to research but took a LONG time, so I hope you enjoy reading it! I have a few stories that I had to cut for room (I already doubled my planned word count as it is) so I will thread them here soon. If you find something cool in this archive I didn't mention, let me know in the comments!!
EDIT: I totally forgot that the archivist is on cohost! Give @caraesten some appreciation (and thanks @atomicthumbs for the reminder)
this has got me thinking. a lot of queer online spaces nowadays are impossible to archive because of where we host them. things like discord servers, subreddits, tumblr blogs - hell, even cohost, are not easy to make quality archives of. you can take a scattershot "scrape as much as we can find and dump it on IA" approach a la archiveteam, but that's not gonna get you as perfect preservation as something like this. you'd need cooperation from the service hosts to get a perfect snapshot, and like - discord cooperating with you to archive the message history of your 6 year old server of trans friends? that's a good one.
its kinda sad to think about how our spaces could just up and vanish, never to be seen again. something like this archive is unlikely to ever exist for the most prominent online communities today. i think if we want to even have a chance of preserving community history, we've just gotta go smaller, more independent. host our own spaces, with the abundance of tools we have - costs aside, it's easier than ever to get A Server On The Internet, and there's plenty of us with the skillset to maintain such a thing. time though, maybe not as much. idk i'm getting pretty rambly at this point i don't really have a concrete point to make here. just some unorganized stream-of-consciousness thoughts after reading that article