It started with too many tabs
Here's what tracking BL dramas looked like before DramaLlama: Viki for watching, MyDramaList for cataloging, Twitter for the conversation, Discord for the deeper community stuff, a random Google Sheet someone made to track release dates, and Instagram for clip edits. Six apps minimum. None of them talking to each other.
And that was the good scenario. The worse one was when a Discord server got nuked, a Twitter account got suspended, or a subreddit went private — and suddenly a community that took months to build just vanished.
I watched it happen more than once. The KinnPorsche fandom alone went through three or four major platform migrations during the show's run. Every time, people got lost. Conversations disappeared. New fans couldn't find where everyone went.
Nobody was building for this audience
The frustrating part wasn't that there were no platforms. It was that none of the existing ones cared about this audience specifically.
MyDramaList treats BL as one tag among thousands. Reddit buries BL communities in subreddits that most fans never find. Twitter is powerful for real-time conversation but terrible for anything lasting — try finding a recommendation thread from three months ago.
Every platform either ignored BL fans or lumped them into "Asian drama" as an afterthought. Nobody was building something specifically for how this community actually watches and talks about shows.
So I started building
The concept came together in February 2023. I'd been deep in BL fandom for a while and kept having the same conversation with other fans: "Why doesn't something like this exist?" At some point the answer became "Because nobody's made it yet."
The first version — DramaLlama v1 — went into beta in September 2024. I built it mostly alone, learning what worked by watching how actual fans used it. Some features landed exactly right. Others missed completely. The release calendar was an immediate hit. The early version of Herds needed a complete rethink.
Beta taught me the instinct was right but the execution needed work. People didn't want a drama tracker with a social layer bolted on. They wanted a place that felt like theirs, where everything was designed around how BL and Asian drama fans actually think about their shows. Not "drama fans in general." This specific community.
What v2 is about
DramaLlama v2 launched May 1, 2026. It's a ground-up rebuild based on everything the beta community taught me.
Herds are community-owned spaces now, with custom moderation and their own culture. Your Herd for Bad Buddy theory posts runs differently from the one for Thai BL release tracking, and that's the point.
Discovery breaks down BL by country, mood, and subgenre instead of treating it as one big category. Your feed learns from what you actually do, not just a genre checkbox you ticked during signup.
The release calendar covers premieres, episodes, and specials across every country and platform we track. No more fan-maintained Google Sheets.
And the whole thing is free. No ads, no data selling, no engagement tricks. The business model is "build something fans love and figure out sustainability later in a way that doesn't ruin it."
What this is really about
DramaLlama is a fan project that happens to use technology, not the other way around.
The reason we built spoiler tags into the core platform is because I've had finales ruined. The reason Herds have custom moderation is because I've watched communities implode over one bad mod decision. The reason the discovery feed breaks BL down by country and mood is because I've been annoyed by the single "BL" tag on every other site for years.
This whole thing comes from being part of this community and being tired of making do with platforms that weren't designed for us.
Your dramas. Your people. Your home.
