i think the comments about the age of this site, changes and moderation are a little unfair. there are a number of active mods, and there have been a bunch of updates over the last couple of years.

are there still bugs and quirks, sure. i almost enjoy the occasional "chat leak" now.

munchies' note re: blocking reducing community engagement got me thinking about the "format" of a site, and how that influences how users interact. for instance, this site is primarily message, forum & chat driven. blocking in regards to personal messages and chat seems pretty straightforward, but in a forum situation it becomes more complex. especially when threads sometimes are active for years!

when i think of social media, i think of x, bluesky and feabie - posts are made, they can be shared, re-shared, and they are not dispersed and not cohesive. comments can be made on the share of the post, and never relate back to the source, etc. in that situation, blocking is much more important because you want to exclude someone's material from your "feed" which is curated by an algorithm. whereas in a forum you just don't open the thing and ignore the thread.

there is another forum that i frequent that has one active participant that i find really annoying. (i am sure others think they're great, not judging - just my taste.) whenever i see they are the last to respond to a thread, i just bypass it. i ignore it. i am not interested.

so i kind of understand the webmaster's stance - what would blocking do our forum? there was one troublesome user some time ago (initials: j.s.) who, i believe was banned from the site. so as long as these individuals are being dealt with, i would say i think it works, doesn't it?

if this is a question about other online feedism spaces, there was a thread on that recently:

fantasyfeeder.com/forum/posts

if it's an issue with blocking here, maybe post it in the feedback/suggestions forum.

i admire your willingness to take the initiative here, that is to be commended. i thought i would chime in with my perspective as i have been to maybe 20 events over the last 15 years or so, most of them here in the greater toronto (canada) area.

first, if it's an informal event not being known by a known group or club, someone involved in the organizing of the event needs to be established in the community. i see your account is 6 days old, you and i don't know each other, and i don't know if you've been an active member in the past. but i know most of us in the community would not even consider going out an meeting other from this (or any other online community for that matter) without having already built up a certain amount of trust.

once you get past the hurdle of actually attracting people to the idea, location is a tough one. it need to be central enough to get enough people to make the trip, which can be really tough. toronto is a big city with a lot of traffic. it is hours away from someone in the 'burbs. so this is always going to be a compromise. back before the pandemic i attended two meet-ups, one in the west end and one in the east end, and out of maybe 25 people only 4 of us attended both.

you also have to be interested in the social aspect enough that, if it's just a bunch of single thin fat admirers that show up, you're still interested in getting to know each other on a human level, not necessarily as a fetish. the last event my partner and i went to, it was 3 couples, and while food was a topic, it was pretty vanilla and chill, and that was great.

good luck! i wish there were more meet-ups, they seem to have dwindled down a lot since the pandemic.

starting out thin, there's a lot of little milestones along the way, i think. i remember being barely over 200 lbs when my belly got in the way when i was getting out of bed - i felt so fat!

little did i know what was in store! at over 400 lbs, just standing is hard work! stairs really make me consider my options...

when i got very fat, my hips and butt took on a bunch of weight. my moobs aren't huge, but definitely more feminine than my pecs used to be, and my fupa is very large. so yeah, definitely more feminine, but not enough to mistake me for a woman.

when my partner shaves my body, i find that is way more feminizing. it definitely makes me much more androgynous.

nash the slash

the new season of doctor who... my teenage daughter is now a fan. i grew up watching this on pbs in the 80s so it is a kind of circle of life things...

before the pandemic there seemed to be at least a couple of fat appreciation events every year here in the greater toronto area. they weren't feedism-centric, but there was a lot of overlap between fat admirers, fat positivity and feeders and gainers.

so it's been a long time since i've seen one of those larger events. i've been to a couple of meet-ups that were posted here in the forums more recently, though.

it's great to meet people in person that you've talked to in chat rooms or in the forums for years. it's a shame that canada is so big, because there a lot of people even from my own country that are just too far away to participate.

what, we can't describe someone as a "bitch?" someone who isn't even on this site, from a event that may have happened decades ago?

she didn't say "all women are bitches" or "all skinny women are bitches," she merely mentioned that one skinny teacher she had was a "bit" of a bitch.

it wasn't even the point of what she was writing about, it was evidence presented challenging a preconception (fat teachers being mean and skinny ones being nice).

i would be interested to know specifically how this is being interpreted as offensive enough to be censored - i am genuinely interested, honestly.

i think we may all be a little biased towards ff i love the chat room here, i love the forum format, and i love the story library. for those three elements, i think it is the best. the pics and videos are just icing on the cake, for me.

i am also on feabie and grommr. it's a different format - they are like facebook without the algorithms. posts come and go, and only have a short half-life for comments. there is more shouting into the void (kind of like the shouts used to be here, but i see them less and less, which is fine). i don't find it as engaging because, unless you are keeping tabs on it every day, several times a day, things get stale and fall out of context, which is why i prefer the forum format where you can have an ongoing exchange over time. i use feabie a few times a week, and grommr only occasionally.

dimensions requires $ to join now? really? that will kill that site, i think. i don't even know if i have a login there anymore, i haven't used it in ages (well before the pandemic). but 10 years ago it was starting to get quieter and quieter as social media platforms made forums look old fashioned, and less phone-friendly. when the site became *just* a forum and got rid of the rest of the site, that killed a lot of the interest, i think.

i have made friends on ff, feabie, and dimensions that i have gotten to know over decades now, visited in person, and care about a great deal. i think each format has its weaknesses and strengths, and people will find their preferences. i see a lot of people here, and elsewhere, complain about "other users" and "everyone just wants..." [fill in the blank] - and when i look at the profiles, posts, interactions, etc. of the people complaining, it is obvious that they have made little effort to make meaningful connections. they either expect others to do all the work ("i am not going to fill out this profile, just ask me!" why would anyone bother???) or they only spend their effort projecting their own fantasies on everyone else.

i hope ff will run for decades to come!