so joining cohost reminded me of an experience i had around I want to say 2013/14, although due to memory loss + just plain old growing up, my recollection of this stuff is fuzzy at best.
when i was younger (like, again, almost ten years ago now) i was pretty active in the homestuck fandom. at the time i really only used tumblr for this iirc. but it was also, for some reason, not unheard of for homestuck fans to start their own independent social media sites. these weren't like forum sites (which could be hosted easily on existing forum host sites, although i'm sure a lot have now been shut down and left unarchived) or like chatrooms (although pesterchum existed too!). they were ground-up social media sites built by and for homestuck fandoms. i seem to recall there being three in existence at one point?
the one i used and enjoyed the most was called gigapause. it started during--you guessed it--the gigapause in homestuck. the site definitely had a few bugs, and got hacked a few times; i'm honestly lucky my information didn't get leaked. but it was also just a really interesting website to use.
although you couldn't change the general layout of your profile, you could change the colors and backgrounds of everything on the page, giving it an almost tumblr-level of profile customization. i also remember them having a webpage that was blank, and the idea was that you could download an external browser extension (independent from the creators of the website) that would enable you to draw on webpages. these designs would be saved in the extension so that multiple people could draw on the same page. this gave the site a weekly (or so) collaborative art board that people could share drawings on.
i haven't been active in the homestuck fandom for a long time now but i look back on whatever weird era of the internet it was when things like this existed. i was too young to remember much about forum websites (although i did use a few ones), but it felt like a strange transitional phase from the forum age to the social media age when people still sought out smaller, less public communities, but enjoyed the dashboard-style of scrolling through posts that you might get on tumblr, wordpress, twitter, etc. and it led them to build entire custom websites for fan communities they were a part of.
did anyone else here use gigapause.com? it was by no means a perfect website or community but i remember it fondly because it filled such a weird niche in my online experience that other sites havent really been able to replicate since.