Lolitas on Amino

After the EGL Community on livejournal started to die out because of the rise of various lolita facebook groups, it seemed like the lolita community fractioned and disappeared, no longer having the worldwide feel it had before. There was an attempt to bring everyone together in lacebook, which has wonderfully looking skin, but it seems it didn't catch on. Lately, I heard about Lolita Amino, and it seems that is where a worldwide lolita community thrives nowadays!

Amino is a phone application for Android and iOs. It's a place to host communities easily. People create communities with common interests, then others join them. In every community separately, you have your profile page, you can write posts and #hashtag them, and there are also chats, users lists and lists of people you follow. Moderators purge the community of unrelated content.

The largest lolita communities on Amino are:

Lolita (5565 members) is the biggest and most active lolita community.

• Ladies in Ruffles is intended for lifestyle lolitas. The Lolita community doesn't allow for non-fashion posts, while in this one you can discuss anything lifestyle like baking, knitting or other such interests. Lifestyle lolita was the predecessor of the community above, but the moderators became inactive and so people went and made the community anew as Ladies in Ruffles.

• Adult EGL (117 members) is intended to keep just the core of lolita community using strict rules: no kids, newbies, or replicas. Three outfit photos are required to verify that only people actively participating in the fashion are in the community, so there should be no dubious lurkers or ita beginners. Personally, I think they could allow 15+ but I love the idea that they allow only true lolitas.

Amino is quite confusing the first time you open it, so let's fly through the basics to quickly orient beginners! When you enter the community, you can see Front Page. It contains featured posts, the posts the moderators flagged as interesting. On the top of Front page are pinned posts, make sure to read these!

Tap your icon and again your icon to get to your profile in the community. The main three parts of your profile are the Posts, which are your addition to the community, the Wall, which works like public Facebook posts, and the Bio, where you should put some basic info about yourself. Images uploaded into Bio will show in the header of your profile :) You can Follow other users, write on their Wall, and also send them personal messages (go to their profile, tap the three dots in the corner, tap Start a Chat).

Amino has also built in public chats. To see the chats, tap your icon and pick Public chats. Choose chats to join and don't Leave the chat until you lost interest in it. While you're taking part in the chat, you will be notified of new messages in said chat; regardless of whether you have the chat page open (notifications can be turned off in the settings). Your joined chats along with personal chats with other users (private messages, essentially) are later available as a speech bubble icon.

These are the most essential features of Amino, but theres so much more! Its basically a message board combined with Facebook and chat. Go and explore!

Tip!
As Amino is a phone app, youd think you cant use it on your computer and are stuck writing long posts only on your phone, but thats not necessarily true! There are many computer programs to run Android virtually on your computer, so use one of these, install Amino on your virtual Android and you are set to go!

More reading: Amino Tutorial