So long Yahoo groups

UPDATE MAY 2023: While we mention newTumbl as an alternative social media platform to use in this post, the platform is currently purging adult content in the same way others have in the past. We do not recommend using it.

If you’ve been on the Internet for as long as I have you probably remember Yahoo groups. They were the biggest thing in adult communities for quite a while. Around the same time MySpace was being clobbered by startup Facebook and YouTube was just getting its viral video skates on Yahoo groups was giving adults like us a means of connecting with other like-minded men in our cities and towns.

There were so many regional masturbation clubs on the site you could find one for almost any city in the UK and US. Some had thousands of active members swapping messages, telling stories, sending pics and offering each other advice, and of course many were using it to meet up for in-person fun. Other groups had just a couple of members here and there, inspired by the larger groups for cities like New York or London and wanting the same for their own home town.

That’s all coming to an end on December 15th, 2020.

Yahoo will be closing down their communities once and for all, and I can’t say I didn’t see this coming.

Aside from a brief moment a couple of years ago when we looked to reach out to those communities to bring them into the BuddyBate fold we hadn’t visited for a long time. We soon discovered that only a handful of those groups we’d once known were still active, and even then they were barely moving along with a message from a member once a week or a new arrival every few months.

Things really started to wind down last year when Yahoo removed the ability to post new content. Users could still message each other and plan their method of migration to new pastures but it was clear the end was in sight.

What does this mean for communities like ours? Not a lot, really. I would probably guess that among the hundreds of thousands of users we see coming here less than 10% knew Yahoo groups existed. Their groups have been replaced by apps, forums and sites like ours. Guys can meet other men for the same things on any one of a number of sites out there and with better functionality.

It is sad to see another community site go, especially one so large, but with the low cost of website hosting these days and the ease with which men can create their own local communities it’s probably not surprising that so many of those adult clubs have moved to their own domains or migrated their communities to faster and more interesting homes like Reddit or NewTumbl.

Did you ever use Yahoo groups? What was your experience of it? Let us know in the comments 🙂