so i was just reading this fantastic article on google search enshittification from the people at housefresh. and they mentioned that Forbes published a bunch of chum articles about dog care to compete with sites like Dogster. that name gave me WAR FLASHBACKS.
today, dogster.com is an online dog magazine. but that's not what it used to be. it was basically a social media site! the name is a play on friendster. (it also had a sister site called catster.) here is what dogster's home page looked like in 2006:
the basic functionality of dogster involved making a page for your dog. you could talk about your dog's temperament, likes, dislikes, and story, upload pictures, and even give them a "diary," which was basically a blog. and you could post in the forum with your page. (also, if you knew about html, you could use one of your entry spaces to paste in code to do things like change your background or give your page falling objects, lol.)
of course, you could be completely normal about all this. you could write about your dog like "fido loves to tear apart squeaky toys. i rescued him in february 2005." you could post in the forums like "what's your favorite game to play with your dog? fido loves fetch." and i'm sure lots of people did use the site like this.
however, the site encouraged other things, too. note how your page doesn't just have a blog. it is explicitly your dog's diary. also, when you post in the forum, it is as your pet with a little thought bubble next to their head:
what i'm saying is it would also be very easy to write your page like "hi my name is fido and i love ripping apart squeaky toys! my mommy rescued me from a yucky shelter in february 2005!" and you could go onto the forums like "i love playing fetch!! what do you love to play!!" the design of this site kinda encouraged you to do this kind of roleplay. and a lot of people did. this is pretty much what the entire "social" area of the forums was like, and a substantial amount of groups as well, and most of the diaries.
enter: Freaky Child Xyzzy
i loved cats very very much. i also loved dogs, but i loved cats even more. i would buy cat fancy magazine, read it, and cut out cat pictures from it and tape them on my bedroom wall. i desperately wanted a cat, but i was allergic. i found catster.com and i was like "dang, i wish i could join and talk about cats. but you can't join if you don't have a cat to make a page for." (they actually enforced this rule. while i was there, i witnessed people being reported and banned for trying to make pages with random stolen dog/cat images from the internet.)
and then i realized. my grandpa had multiple cats, and he wasn't ever going to use this website. i had a lot of pictures i'd taken of the cats as well. i could just make pages for his cats and pretend they were mine and no one would ever know. i also repeated this on dogster.com with a nearby relative's dog. I Was In. and yes, i did start roleplaying, basically immediately. it was very clear that it was the thing to do on there. before long, i was a heavy user of both sites. (although i liked catster more. what can i say, i'm a cat person.)
the experience
it was an insane community, full of mostly middle-aged to elderly women. as always as a kid on the internet, i kept my age a secret, but i was aware of being one of the youngest people there. there was one teenage girl who was around in my circles, but even she was a few years older than me at the time. besides that it seemed like everyone was old enough to be my mom.
because you could make a page for each of your pets and post separately as all of them (i think i remember a drop down menu?), having multiple "personas" who would arrive as a group and start posting at the same time was also totally normal. another weird thing is that even if people's pets passed away, they did not want to leave the community or stop roleplaying as them, so there were a lot of pets with "In Loving Memory" in their names and animated angel wings on their photos still posting and palling around with other cats and dogs in these virtual threads. many of these same antics also happened in the privacy of groups, but i remember the interface of groups being a lot clunkier to use than that of the php-bb based forums. so even with them around, many things stayed public.
in addition to nightly hangout forum threads like "the moo boo club," "the late late show," and "the foreign legion," there were also regular scheduled "events" in the forums like holidays, birthday parties, weddings (yes, people regularly had their pets pretend to date and marry each other and the pets of other users), and "trips." when these threads were active, they would fly like a chatroom, and the regularly used threads would often hit thousands of pages and need to be remade before hitting a post limit.
people also often had ridiculous photoshopped photos of their pets on their pages. animated gif uploads were also allowed by the site and were pretty common. so if you could make photoshopped pictures for others, this was a good source of social capital. of course i immediately dipped my toe into doing that. i had a photo editing program on my computer that let you do stupid filter stuff like make your photo look like a watercolor, so at first i just started doing that for people. but later i joined groups to get instructions on things like using GIMP and making animated gifs. i still have a giant folder somewhere in my backups that i downloaded from someone in one of these groups of what they called "tubes"- basically little transparent decorations like borders, hearts, corner swags, etc that you could pop onto a photo in GIMP. here are some of my creations:
catster and dogster had multiple kinds of virtual gift features, so often that would be your reward for making something for someone. the site also had a paid monthly or yearly subscription "plus" feature that, among other things (like more images for your page, image frames, and no ads), allowed you to give people page gifts called "rosettes" (which would expire after a certain amount of time) and later "stars," which never expired. so those were a hot commodity. you could also gift other users a plus subscription. i would have never dared to ask my parents to pay for dogster/catster plus for me, but i actually was gifted it for a good amount of time by other users, both for making images and just for being an active forum community member i guess. i remember it really blowing my mind that someone would do that.
on dogster, i was a little less involved with the community forums and groups, but i was involved with the diary feature of the site. i did a lot of diary writing for my relative's dog, because i saw him way more often than my grandpa's cats so i had more to write about. the personality i gave this dog was very snarky and jaded for some reason. eventually i embarked on a big project in his diary- a fucking How To Train Your Human manual about avoiding dog training and getting your owner to do what you wanted, posted in chapters. (i never finished it.) but people seemed to really like the diary i was writing. it often showed up in the "pawpular" section, meaning it was getting a lot of hits, and once it was actually featured as a staff "diary pick." i remember that feeling like a huge achievement.
the end
however, it couldn't last forever. with the rise of sites like facebook and twitter, the old forum-centric model of the catster and dogster sites quickly began to feel dated. the sites had also always had other content- promoting adoptable pets like petfinder does nowadays and blogs about pet care and traveling with pets and stuff like that- and they pivoted more towards those things with a new logo and site redesign. they were also purchased by a media company. the community features did remain, but they were less and less spotlighted. apparently they were almost deleted in early 2014, but the remaining community rioted and they stayed.
in 2015, the site was purchased by and merged with Cat Fancy/Dog Fancy magazines. (hey, remember when i talked about cat fancy magazine earlier? turns out it was foreshadowing!) the websites would now be the home for the magazine content and the physical magazines would be renamed to "dogster" and "catster:"
i remember being so weirded out when i saw one of these magazines in person for the first time. also, i believe that around this purchase and merger was when the community features of the site were actually, finally deleted.
rest in peace, dogster and catster. thanks for all the MOLs (Meowing Out Loud)