A friend of mine, Agaming, has been doing some writing lately and was wondering if there was somewhere he could post his stories online to start building a following.
I have of course recommended he share his stories here with us (I personally really enjoy his writing, he's great at eldritch horror style creations!), but I wondered if anyone might have any other suggestions for sharing one's writing with the world?
We're certainly happy to have more stories here :) Beyond that, I think a lot of it depends on what sort of following you want! If it's a particular genre thing, then there'll be certain genre communities, but also, how much effort, time, and money you want to put in changes the game a lot. Building a social media following is a lot of hard work and is for some authors more of the job than the actual writing - which is partly why I don't do that sort of thing for myself much. I think if you want a small body of dedicated readers, just finding every niche genre community and tumblr/mastodon/etc hashtag is probably not a bad start, but that won't necessarily ever get you the kind of reach that you can actually, say, properly leverage to make a sensible amount of money off writing.
I'd also say that in my view in the medium term it's a mistake to go too into a locked down platform, so better to be keeping writing either on a forum like this that's publicly readable or on a blog is a good basis to then share elsewhere: however, some people do just go all eggs in one basket and that approach does work for some cases.
What about archive of our own? Magazines and web magazines too obviously.
There are definitely online communities for sharing specific genres eg. fantasy, erotica, political writing.