Is Eurobricks the New "AFOL" Meta-Forum?

[fallentomato]

A little context about my experience with the on-line FOL community - when the Internet and I were young I stumbled across rec.toys.lego which was the place to talk about lego online. I remember when Lugnet was introduced and for a while I followed that, although I put off by the over-specialization of the forums. On of the things I liked about RTL was that everything was all together and so the culture felt very tight knit. Once things got split out by theme and sub-theme the community sort of splintered along those lines as well (at least in my mind). Then I got distracted by high school and college and while I was still a FOL, I wasn't in any active online.

When I returned to the FOL community last year I floundered around for a bit. LUGnet seemed more or less abandoned and (as many have pointed out) ancient in presentation. There didn't seem to be anything to replace it, but there were a whole host of new specialized communities (Classic-Castle, Classic-Space etc.) and people were split not only by what they built, but also by how they displayed their pictures (Brickshelf, flickr, MOCpages etc.). As a fan that builds in many themes as well as building things that don't really fall in any theme I had little interest in the specialized communities. I started reading The Brothers Brick, as they seemed to cover a wide range of themes and have the latest news. At Brickworld 2008 I met Hinckley and talking with him convinced me that it was time to rejoin the community. EB was clearly the best option. I then joined flickr and started following anyone I could find who post lego pics. Those three were my personal solution (although less and less the BB now-a-days as I often see things through flickr or EB first).

Oops, l that "little context" ended up being pretty long Now to bring this around back on to the topic at hand. I feel that EB is already the largest, broadest lego fan community (at least that I've come across). Is it everything that LUGnet was? No. But I don't think it needs to be. What really makes EB great is the community. It may not have all the resources that LUGnet does hosted on site, but it has people who know where those resources (and others) exist and are happy to point the uniformed in the appropriate directions. At the Serious Play Session this year there was a lot of talk of creating a centralized site/portal that would stitch together the various splintered FOL communities into one Neo-LUGnet. While I see the appeal of that (and was one of hte people who spoke about it), I also think that there is sometimes too moaning about the internal division/splintering of the community. What the proliferation of individual communities says to me is that this community has grown tremendously since I first discovered it a little over a decade ago. If our biggest issue is that our community is big, diverse, and decentralized, we're doing pretty well.

I think that EB is definitely filling the place LUGnet used to fill for many people. But unlike the particularly nasty community split/migration that happened between Brickfilms and Bricks in Motion, this one has been peaceful and natural... Oh my look at the time I need to get to bed, and there's still so much I wanted to say. Well I look forward to continuing this discussion with y'all in the coming days.

[Rick]

this one has been peaceful and natural...

And I feel that this is largely due to an excellent and active moderator team who seem to speak with one voice all the time. When there was still some activity over at Lugnet, there used to be a fight every other day or so. So a big thank to our to our mods