Max Fisch appears to have dropped off the net. It’s been flaky for years, but one has to wonder if this is the final goodbye.
For those that don’t know what I’m talking about- Max Fisch is (was?) one of the longest running Femdom forum sites and Domina directories. It first showed up back in the 1990’s and for years was one of the primary sites for pro-domme information and discussion. Sadly, like a lot of these sites, social media sucked away a lot of the potential users and the admins and moderators lost interest in maintaining it.
The loss of internet forum culture to a few huge social media companies is a great shame in my view. It’s not that the quality of the debate was particularly great on the forums – online people are the same all over. But the forum’s were more focused, the conversations longer and the posts were both durable and searchable. You could post a review of a session and another user would be able to find it years later. Good luck doing that on Twitter. You also didn’t have to deal with all the algorithmically driven rage-bait garbage the social media sites throw out you.
Of course there’s nothing technically stopping someone running a femdom forum today. The problem is getting to critical mass when so many of the casual users gravitate to social media. It’s hard for simple web base forums to compete with thousand of social engineers doing whatever they can to drive more swipes on a media feed.
If you’re like me and find the history of femdom and internet culture fascinating, using the wayback machine to browse old domme site can be a great way to kill a lot of time. For example, looking at the very first capture of Max’s domme listing from 1999, I spotted a link to the famous Ilsa Strix. That in turn led me to her archived site and old interviews with her. You can even still find her original contact protocol.