- Joined
- Oct 20, 2024
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- Vossen Estate 🇦🇷❗
For those who don't know, Fotolog was this utterly gigantic social media site that allowed users to share their photos with the world (usually accompanied by walls of text) -- you can think of it as an "Alpha Instagram" of sorts.
We would spend HOURS "prettying up" our post stamp-sized cellphone pictures and digital camera photographs on programs like Corel Draw, early Photoshop (if your computer was powerful enough) or even goddamn Paint to present our blurry, washed up and badly lit memories to the world... And the reason we cared so much about making them presentable was because the free plan only allowed for a single submission a day, so we had to make it count.
It was so deliciously awkward.
And after everything was polished and posted, we would then take to MSN Messenger and spam the absolute hell out of our entire contacts list so people would go on and leave comments (known as "signatures") under our masterpieces.
To say that Fotolog was big would be the understatement of the aughts -- it was so incredibly popular that it even spawned its own subculture: the so-called "Floggers" -- people who lived by the platform and spent every waking hour playing the characters they had carefully created to appeal to their numerous fans and followers. It really was something to behold, especially since some of these people would be invited to talkshows to discuss their art with the general public, blurring the line between online and offline entertainment for the first time ever.
Looking back, the Floggers were the first "Urban Tribe" I ever knew of, followed shortly thereafter by the Goths and the Punks, all competing for the spotlight with such aggression that I ended up referring to the whole thing as "War Of The Mallrats".
But because this was the Internet on its more "primordial soup" state, Fotolog's popularity vanished pretty much as soon as it had arrived, losing much of its 2005 steam by 2010 (when most of its core users became adults and just HAD to axe that kind of content from their lives)... I was honestly shocked to hear that it was still around by 2019. But, much like other online pioneers like VampireFreaks, MindViz and Nexopia, the clock was already running down for a site that had lost almost its entire relevance by the time Instagram grew monstrous and just sort of drifted until it sank.
Still, visiting Fotolog.com (and specially the one on Terra.com) was much of what we did while in front of a computer during those wild, early years of "connected teenhood" and I wanted to acknowledge its place in history.
Whether it was posting crude collages underlined by shitty poetry or groaning hard when an MSN Messenger chat window lit up with nothing but a link to this site, I can't deny that we had a lot of fun making memories there.
What about you? Ever had one? If not, did you know about it? Tell us!
