how did the facktkin community look like when you first found out about it, did it change a lot to as it is now
I can only speak to the online factkin community because I am not part of any otherkin circles irl at the moment but in my experience it has only grown and become more vibrant! When I first learned about the factkin community online it seemed very small. This would be circa 2017.
When I started this blog there were only a handful of factkin or factkin-friendly accounts here. Every kin blog I wanted to follow, I had to scour for a DNI that included factkin and more often than not I found one. The factkin tag was about 10% actual factkin and 90% factkin hate.
It wasn't just here, so many otherkin discords, aminos, and groups on other sites seemed perfect for me but in the very last lines of their descriptions they said "no factkin" so that was that.
I even made a second kinlist to put in discords that I wasn't sure were factkin-friendly. It included all my kintypes, minus my facttypes and fictotypes I deemed to "problematic" (Among them were Sterling Archer from Archer and The Monarch from Venture Bros) so I could be mostly myself and test the waters. Testing the waters often turned to hiding my "undesirable" kintypes indefinitely.
I made attempts to talk about factkinity with people on forums and in servers with designated AMA and debate chats but was often shut down by moderators or by people piling into the chat to tell me off.
In about 2018 I discovered a couple of otherkin Amino groups that advertised themselves as accepting of all and they absolutely were! I was with other factkin there, people with unorthodox kintypes, people who didn't care that I had fictotypes from Adult Swim shows, and it was PERFECT. These groups were full and celebratory of every otherkin identity. I am still a part of one of them although as the years went on it slowly became less active. For a few years, this was the place that I had to be factkin visibly.
Then in about 2019-2020 I saw a major shift. I saw more factkin and pro-factkin accounts popping up on every social media I frequented and I thought "hey I should be doing that" so I started this blog. At first, a lot of hate asks rolled in but nowadays I am SURPRISED when I open my inbox and find an ask that is anything short of genuine.
In 2021 the term Diaunthro was coined and that just makes me so happy because I know that if it had been coined in 2016 it would have been shoved into DNI lists right next to factkin. People now seem to try to understand the nuance of the two terms and people in the otherkin community seem more interested in understanding us better. The growing community support for factual identities like facttkin, factkith, and diaunthros warms my heart.
There has been an enormous shift in the factkin community. As a whole I think we have become more sure of ourselves and with that comes a growing feeling of legitimacy from other parts of the alterhuman community.
