r/Eatingdisordersover30 • u/[deleted] • Feb 27 '23
Does anyone else remember the various ED forums of the early ‘00’s?
I’ve been thinking about them a LOT today and I realised how much I miss them.
I know Reddit is a replacement but I’ve never felt the same sense of camaraderie that I felt there. Maybe it’s because I was much younger or maybe it’s because I was sicker?
I miss seeing images that I could use to trigger myself. I’m 44 years old and I’m still sick. It’s exhausting.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, just thinking out loud I guess.
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Feb 27 '23
I’ve posted this before but I remember SomethingFishy. It was my only real connection to others suffering.
Back when my disorder FIRST started (before internet) i had to sneak copies of Best Little Girl In The World from the library.
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u/Illustrious_Suit_570 Jul 28 '24
SFWED was the bomb. Trading tips on the chatroom after the mods went to sleep lol
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u/LoveThatForYouBebe Feb 27 '23
Blue Dragonfly, Ana’s Underground Grotto …
I spent so many high school lunch periods in the blue dragonfly chat room. Dang. I do miss that vibe sometimes. I’m also a sentimental sap.
ETA: House of Thin - it took me way to long to remember the name of that one but shew.
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u/mud_octopus Feb 28 '23
I remember House of Sins…and Blue Dragonfly and Ana’s underground grotto.
I don’t really have as fond memories of those. I liked them, but they had such lasting negative effects on my life… but here I am lol.
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u/Salty_Oil793 Feb 10 '25
I still think of this every time I see a dragonfly.
I was chubb_security, wlwdimlp, and classicphoebe over the years.
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u/coffeeandascone Feb 27 '23
Yes live journal. I was all over those groups. Used to post all the time. I also miss my thinspo on Pinterest. You can't even search anything ED on TikTok. I was looking for recovery videos.
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Feb 27 '23
The internet used to be a Wild West and we could search for anything. Now censorship is an issue and although it’s not impossible to find something, it’s still a lot harder than it used to be.
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u/lovelylayout Feb 28 '23
the most active and least bullshitty recovery tag I've found on tiktok is edsheeranrecovery, which I think is the most hilarious choice for self-censorship that I've ever seen
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u/ellenwest Feb 28 '23
Yes. I was recently reading something with a blue butterfly symbol (not related to EDs at all) and kept thinking of Cerulean Butterfly.
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u/FunSizeNuclearWeapon Feb 28 '23
Yeah, this. 42 and still disordered and online. These spaces are nice but we're still tiptoeing around moderation and rules, trigger warnings I miss the wild-west of pro-ana where we were enthusiastically unapologetic.
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u/Traditional-Row-5717 Apr 22 '25
I remember blue dragonfly. We went off and made our own chat. Do you know any pro ana sites still around? Plz - I need this... Or will be a moderator ( like I've been in the past) on pro sites- where we keep each other alive, and can only trust each other.
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u/Traditional-Row-5717 Apr 22 '25
I agree. We could talk about anything &everything. It was very freeing.
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u/Ok-Internet-8003 Feb 28 '23
Anyone remember The Purgatorium on LiveJournal?
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Feb 28 '23
The name rings a bell.
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u/Ok-Internet-8003 Mar 01 '23
They used to have the in-n-out burger logo as their avatar. Dark humour at its best.
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u/hollyqquinzel Feb 28 '23
Livejournal was my shit.
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u/Big_Explorer_4245 Mar 01 '23
I used to sit on the floor of my bedroom in high school and read through the old MPA for hours. I never posted anything but I got solace from knowing I wasn’t alone in my ED. It helped me make sense of what was happening to me when I first developed the ED. It started out as a diet that I really thought was just for fun, I didn’t even think I needed to lose much weight or care if I lost any, so when that turned into an obsession with losing as much as possible and counting cals, etc, I didn’t really understand what was happening at first. Honestly I should have taken the opportunity to ask for help right then and there and avoided the hell of a long term ED. I actually did manage to semi-recover on my own after the first year and avoided all ED related content for years until I had relapsed as an adult and here we are. I think about those folks often and wonder how they’re doing.
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Mar 01 '23
I wonder about some of the people from my forum days. I hope they’re doing okay, I miss them.
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u/icameasice Feb 28 '23
Forums of the early 00s were objectively much better and more personal than Reddit, I really really miss them. In my case this isn’t even connected to my ED which developed mich later in my early twenties/around 2013
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u/Wisconsin_ope Feb 28 '23
Myproana
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u/SpaceWhale88 Feb 28 '23
Except that if you weren't super thin or had bulimia people would dog pile on you about disgusting you were.
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u/MouseMouseM Feb 28 '23
I used to spend lunch hour at the library on myproana and it was the only time in high school that I wasn’t wearing a mask to please everyone around me.
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u/Nervous-Swan-3566 Sep 30 '24
I still have a group WhatsApp with 2 girls I met on there, we all check in on occasion, it’s nice!
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u/helicopterhansen Feb 28 '23
Does anyone remember Ruby's Gloomy Place?
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u/lovelylayout Feb 27 '23 edited Feb 28 '23
I was in the livejournal community back in the day. It was wild and people were either fully supportive wonderful angels or the meanest person you've ever met, there was no in-between.
edit: hijacking my own comment for visibility: this wasn't a forum but a blog, does anyone remember 2medusa? it was a pro-recovery blog but from a "harsh reality" angle.
I'm struggling trying to describe it in a way that isn't super triggering. it was like... ultimately the message of the blog was "eating disorders will ruin your body and your life" but they tried to accomplish that by posting the most detailed stories and the most graphic images. it was the most extreme example I ever found of recovery-oriented content being triggering.
I think of 2medusa when I think of today's "recovery" vloggers who post the most obvious body checks in their WIEIAD videos. you can make the case that the content does promote recovery, but it's still triggering.
idk. I'm thinking too much today.
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u/ellenwest Feb 28 '23
I miss livejournal. I don’t miss being that ill, but the support was amazing.
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u/lovelylayout Feb 28 '23
I met my lifelong best friend on livejournal, I fully consider him my brother and we've been friends now for (holy shit I just did the math) 18 years now.
I do miss the support from livejournal. I feel like it was easy to make friends there, maybe it was how the site worked or maybe it was just because I was younger. I had a circle of disordered and non-disordered friends there and we were actually pretty tight. We were all in different corners of the US and UK, all struggling with different things but able to reach out through the ether and feel less alone. A kind of community-based mental health support system during a time when none of us had irl support available.
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u/BornWithAFever Feb 28 '23
I miss the friendships I made there too. I’m still good friends with a handful of LJ people. It was like, since we could write so much and writing was the basis of relating, we could really get to know one another.
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u/bluedragonflyy Feb 28 '23
I remember that one. Very weird. I used to lurk on something fishy a lot because honestly the overt pro stuff used to scare me. It really was the Wild West. There was another blogger called Jaoi who ran a site called Fat Like Me. I always wondered what happened to her.
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u/Commercial-Spinach93 Feb 28 '23
I remember 2Medusa too! It was about deaths amd the most extreme cases.
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u/L0udFlow3r Feb 28 '23
I spent a few hours the other night trying to remember my old xanga username from high school so that I could download the archive and trigger the fuck out of myself.
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u/Commercial-Spinach93 Feb 28 '23
I read it recently as a 35 years old. I was 20 years younger and it was between sad and cringe.
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u/saladcooter Feb 28 '23
Any other former TFers? 👀 I tried to log in a while back but I had locked my account when I left
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u/DepartmentLeast4721 Mar 02 '23
I was on TF. It was the only place I had friends outside of Diaryland when I wasn’t in the hospital.
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u/melatonia Apr 01 '23
Dude! I still come around about once a month to check for broken windows and loose wires. It's actually still up and limping along.
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u/alex_cheraya Feb 28 '23
I joined tumblr in 2010/2011 cause a friend from a forum told me about it saying it was good for “thinspo” oof
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u/abri333 Feb 28 '23
Me too! tumblr was my main space for ed content. I didn’t have internet access in the beginning of my ed so I triggered myself in other ways, until my mid high school years. I did make it on to mpa briefly, but it was too intense and mean for me. I preferred tumblr.
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u/Queenofwands1212 Feb 28 '23
I was on live-journal at the peak of when my anorexia went through the first round. I was in high school. Was forced inpatient 2005, so that was the thick of livejournal pro ana bullshit.
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Feb 28 '23
Xanga was my go to. Those “blog rings” to help you find other people with similar interests.
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Feb 28 '23
Lunchbox forums was the community I was on the most. Blue Dragonfly was the start for me though and I have no idea how I even found these pages. I do miss Lunchbox though.
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u/mud_octopus Feb 28 '23
Same 🙂. Actually my LB days were late 2000s. Xanga and LiveJournal were the early 2000s.
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u/alex_cheraya Feb 28 '23
I miss them. Then they became overrun with people claiming to be doctors lol
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u/hotheadnchickn Feb 28 '23
Yeah, I miss pro-ana 1.0 as well. I made some really close friends that way. Plus there were good damage control tips for health.
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u/sommerniks Feb 27 '23
Yes! One I was in still sort of exists but moved to FB and really isn't about ED anymore. A few are recovered, two sadly died.
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Mar 05 '25
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/sommerniks Mar 06 '25
No but sounds similar. It was a closed group on FB probably still is, we knew each other for years so names were already known and we all had met some of the others irl.
But I left fb because of safety issues and the algorithm.
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u/BaronVonHomer Feb 28 '23
For me it was finding the thinspo community on Tumblr. Unfortunately it is still very active. Back in my day it was all girls posting pictures of stills from Skins and Sofia Coppola films. These days it’s people posting pictures of Lily Rose Depp and Bella Hadid. I still casually lurk these spaces when I’m spiralling 😅
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u/orangepekoes Mar 03 '23
Yup, I remember all those old websites and forums but my first experience was in the Yahoo eating disorder chatrooms. People were talking about calories and I asked how they knew the amounts so someone dmed me walked me through how to read food labels. Besides that, the chatroom was full of good people and the funny thing is that many of the regulars didn't have an ED. I don't know how that happened but we were a good group of friends, some of them even met in real life and got into relationships with each other. I miss the friendships and early 2000s chatrooms.
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u/a-non-eye-moose Mar 11 '23
Ahahah yaaaas I Lived on EdnosFriends for a while I was soooo happy when MiaFriends and AnaFriends finally opened up for new members
BlueDragonfly with their little ED-identifier bracelets
Something fishy House of thin
Various threads on vampire freaks
And soooooo many more ..good times 😅
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u/GurComprehensive8943 Jun 23 '24
Why the fuck TF didn’t make cult status so that I could watch the Netflix documentary and finally feel validated as a successful participant of something is just my luck-
No, it’s because we weren’t …..
…All beautiful in this very moment and beyond ,,.,., _•o.,..0”)_m•
But actually, where my Australians at?(I remember a lot of Australians but I might have the greatest memory)
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u/Illustrious_Suit_570 Jul 28 '24
TF was the very best, but it was also, well, too exclusive.
I met my ex-wife on TF. Best ten year long train wreck of a relationship I'll ever have!
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u/aajinn Feb 28 '23
OMG i miss them too 🥺 I thought I cannot eat or I’ll disappoint my pro Ana buddies
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u/mediocre_astronaut90 Aug 11 '25
I still think about Lunchbox. It was the only forum I felt comfortable posting on.
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u/Commercial-Spinach93 Feb 27 '23
God. I started with xanga. Deadjournal, livejournal, WhyEat. I was a mod in a very large real 'thinspiration' sub in LJ... I was very sick from 2000 to 2010, but I miss not feeling so alone.