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2:37am July 4, 2014
Anonymous asked: Where does one get involved in the autistic community and meet other people similar to themselves like you mentioned chat rooms? It's been very recently that I've found out that I have Aspergers and I'm frankly very overwhelmed with information and desire to meet people who are like and understand me.

I unfortunately haven’t been involves in chatrooms in a long time, so I have no idea for most of this.  

There’s the #actuallyautistic tag on tumblr.  They can sometimes be a bit unforgiving (okay that’s putting it mildly) if you wish to be cured from autism, so if that’s your wish you might want to keep it quiet or go elsewhere.  Or they might surprise you, but I wouldn’t count on it.

There’s a message board called Wrongplanet.net.

There’s a mailing list called ANI-L that can be hard to join, due to technical issues.  Here’s a page about it:

http://www.autreat.com/ani-l.html

I co-run (in name only, my co-mod does most of the work) a fairly low-traffic list for autistic adults dealing with daily living skills issues:  

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/AutisticDailyLiving/info

Aspies For Freedom:

http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/

Mind you these aren’t recommendations, they’re literally everything I can think of.  I’ve been out of the loop a long time.  Can other autistic people add forums or mailing lists you’ve found useful for autistic community?  That goes whether it’s a mailing list, a web forum, or what, anything I haven’t already added would be useful.

You’ll find the “culture” of each forum is extremely different.  Some are led by people with serious ego problems, others are led by people who are just overworked, and in a pinch it can be hard to tell the difference.  The ones I like best, you barely run into the leaders, or the leaders act like just one more of the group.  Some of these forums have chatrooms attached to them, like IRC channels.

I’m looking specifically here for places run primarily by and for people on the spectrum (but may allow some nonautistic people), not places run by nonautistic people that might also make room for people on the spectrum.  Some of those places are nice but they’re more likely to require some of the autistic people to be constantly educating the nonautistic people, which can get tiresome at best.  Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions, let me know.  And I’m well aware of the shortcomings of some of my own suggestions, it’s just all I have.

Notes:
  1. something-i-dunno reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone
  2. madeofpatterns reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    There are a LOT of facebook groups if you do facebook.
  3. chavisory said: Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, and a lot of the bloggers who comment there, have been good for me. TPGA itself is for parents and professionals as well, but lots of the autistic commenters have blogs that a smallish community has centered around
  4. withasmoothroundstone posted this