It just occurred to me that with about 60 members online at any given time, this is actually a pretty small community. There really aren't that many of us, are there?

I like the Dutch for multiple reasons, and your optimism is one of them.

Well there are just below 64,000 people registered on the site, so only 1/1000 online at any one time. On the other hand, that's quite small compared to 9 billion on this fair planet. Quite the exclusive club!

There are also a lot of people who aren't on UMD who enjoy this fetish/kink too
It's nice to have a small, designated space.

Somehow being a member of such a small subset of global sexuality doesn't make me feel special...

more like lonely, really.

Yep, not many people logged in at any given time.

However, when you see how many views posts get, you can see that the number of active users is much more than 60. But a lot less than 60,000

It is also possible to browse the site without logging in.

Also, this is just a forum, an old fashioned type of website by today's standards. There are people doing WAM that never come here. There's a pretty decent site selling videos that never posts here and seems to want nothing to do with UMD.

I would say that's on umd but I've been a wammer all my life and didn't know about umd for a long time.
So i suppose it depends on how you look at it

I think that there are a couple of major factors with our numbers here. One is that because of how conservatives like to weaponize kinks people are still in the closet. We have had quite a few amateur producers that have left and closed up shop because of personal life issues caused by these kink shamers. The kink shamers have used it in custody battles, trying to impact people professionally etc. The other major factor is the lack of social skills that a lot of people in the male community here have. A lot of the females in our community have been chased off by cringy males and their messages. There have been improvements made on this front by MM like not auto allowing private messages as the default for female members, having the report features available to try to weed these people out and other behind the scenes things. But, on the flip side of that there is some misogyny that rears its ugly head every so often that can be off putting to people. We have lost members because of this as well. In my mind the reason we don't have as many active members as we have had in the past or as many as we could have comes down to the actions of some of the members here.

So true, dalamar666! Misogyny ruins everything! I don't understand why someone's gender makes any difference in whether you respect them as a person and see their viewpoints and attitudes to be as legitimate as any other. I have known so many women to be smarter, more disciplined, funnier and all around better people than me that I can never discount the potential of all genders to be awesome people. Of all the things for which people are judged, out of the gate disrespect for a gender or race is the most stupid! It closes you off from any possible joy, wisdom or fun that another individual may have to offer. And being hurt or insulted because someone doesn't want to share a part of themselves with you is the biggest waste of time. We like what we like, and we don't chose what we want. How come so many people find that so hard to understand? There's no harm in asking, but if the answer is no then leave it alone, and don't be bitter about it. Nobody inherently owes anybody anything.

And fetish shamers suck!

I get more likes on Twitter than I do here and have more followers. But overall, there's definitely more wammers and content that I see on here over what I see on Twitter.

Now thinking outside of here...I've been into this scene for something like 24 years now, and I've never run into another person in real life who shares the fetish...but then again, most of us aren't out there broadcasting that we're into this off of the internet, so maybe I have ran into someone and just not known it, but I have a feeling it's really rare. I won't say I'm the only one in my state into this, but I'll bet I'm the only one in my city into it.

I used to not share pictures of myself/hide my face if I did...but then I was like "Nobody I know is ever going to see that I'm into this weird shit..." and started sharing. So far no one has come up to me and confronted me about it...so no one knows, or no one is saying anything about it. I guess that's a good thing? Although to be honest, it would be kind of cool to run into someone who recognized me from here/Twitter...but just not when I'm out with family

Yeah, I'm with you GHF. At first, I was worried about showing my face, but I think you're right about nobody I know ever seeing this community. I kinda' wish somebody would come up to me and say, "you're Shinyslick1999, aren't you?", because that would not necessarily be a bad thing.

Why the f***k did I have to be into something so incredibly fringe?!!!

Keep in mind that a huge number of the visitors to the site are not registered members. They read the forums and go on about their business without interacting.

Oh, yeah, I totally get that. (Used to be me ) But I wouldn't really call them members of the community. I was thinking more of the people that actually participate, indicating a higher level of motivation to share their wam interests and activities with others.

Well this is an adult site, so I guess a lot of people don't leave the tab open 24/7 and might only be online for 1/2 to an hour-ish; which gives you the low live view counts.

Judging by the activity on the main page, which is sometimes more than a full page a day, there is a lot of through traffic and people checking in- some of the posts have pretty good conversations going for them.

If we become a much bigger community, you'll find you may start missing content on the main forum due to the signal:noise ratio being considerably worse and posts being buried much faster.

I think it's a good size. There's enough niches to keep things balanced. It's easy to know the folks in your areas which I like. I've always liked the size and I've never felt very overwhelmed here.

It's all a matter of your perspective. For me, having been part of the ancient snail mail mud network where VHS videos of movie clips were traded with perhaps not much more than 100 fairly steady members and then watch the numbers grow as the Messy Fun newsletter brought a large influx of folks previously not in contact with others into a new mud network less based on tape trading, well, I'm amazed at how many of us there are.

We used to debate whether there were 1000 of us or 10, 000 of us worldwide and really, I think both of those early numbers were about right, it's just that it wasn't an either or thing, rather, there were about 1000 of us sort of in contact and perhaps 10,000 not yet in contact.

So, the Internet mud network has grown really large, but, on some level, maybe not as much as it seems. Originally, there were folks who did mud and there were armchair mudmen who only looked at what others filmed, their commonality being that they're all mud fetishists. The Internet enables a sort of third type of even more casual interest that is somewhat less than that of a true mud fetishist, someone interested in mud who scarcely measures on the mud obsession meter.

The mud fetish community sure seems a lot larger than it used to and seems to still be growing, especially among the casual category.

Yes, the numbers are small.
But this is a happy place.
It's better to get three genuine responses to a post, three people who get it and understand each other, than to get 300 passers by.
Peter

Happy it is, Mr. WetShirt, happy it is.

It depends what you mean by the community. If you mean WAMers who are active Umd members then yep that's small. The way the internet and Umd has had to change over the years means there's really only one kind of WAM site and those sites primary purpose is downloading porn. If you don't want to produce or purchase porn there's not much to hook inane member. On the other hand back when there were multiple wam forum, clip hosting and or story sites Umd didn't have the best rep. I was strongly advised by other WAMers to stay clear then there was a period where Umd became the only active wam site that wasn't directly linked to a single wam producer the calendar function became well used, splunches sprang up all over the uk at that point the wam community in the uk included many sploshers who were also BDSMers who weren't part of the UMD community. In short things change. I really miss some aspects of the old BDSM communities like how accountable you were because if you did something that caused harm you'd be ostracised on the other hand I don't miss how the local prodomme would set the tone of the community. I miss the sense of wider community Umd used to have I don't miss arguing with some other community members about what was or wasn't ok. I think the number of/population of WAMers is a lot bigger than the population of Umd members.

Indeed - I was WAMing long before I discovered UMD