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Treads.nz has been a lot of things, under a few different names, over more than two decades. What it's always been is a home for people who love trainers - collectors, traders, fetish, non-fetish, all of it. If it's about sneakers, it belongs here.
Some of our members have been part of this community since the very first version of the site, back in the late 1990s. If you're one of them - welcome back. If you're new - here's how we got here.
It started small - a site called crushme.dyndns.org, hosted out of a home ADSL connection. It focused on sneakers, and on trampling ("crushing") - and it got big, fast. Fast enough that a friend in the USA stepped in and took over hosting on their cable connection, because the little ADSL line that started it all just couldn't keep up any more.
By 2004, crushme had outgrown a self-hosted connection altogether, so it moved to a real domain: squishysquishy.co.nz. The name came from a friend of the site's owner, who started calling trampling "squishy" - and it stuck. What had started as a small sneaker/crushing site fast grew into a proper social network, and it got some real traction.
2010 brought another big change. SquishySquishy moved onto professional hosting, funded in part by small subscriptions from members who wanted to help keep it running. Advertising was tried too, but that didn't really work out - the site's content wasn't exactly a natural fit for mainstream ad networks, so subscriptions from the community carried it instead.
SquishySquishy was pumping, and on 6 May 2015 it moved onto its own VM. The site's owner now had a thriving IT company on the side and was learning new ways to code. The community kept growing - more people joined, and stayed, and visited daily. But the internet was changing fast, and the site wasn't changing with it. Smartphones were taking over, and a decision loomed: build an app, or build a site that actually worked properly on a phone?
That question is where Treads.nz came from. A full rebuild kicked off - but not long after, the owner's health took a turn for the worse, and the rebuild ended up on the back burner while other things took priority.
2020 - the black years of the COVID pandemic - had everyone locked down, and in that time Treads.nz got its first real draft. It was built on the latest technology of the day and actually worked. But once the world opened back up, there was plenty of paid work to chase, and the site went back on the back burner once again.
Then came the rise of AI coding assistants - Claude, Gemini, Copilot and the rest - and building software got easy, and quick, in a way it never had before. With that, Treads.nz finally got finished. This is the story so far.
Today, Treads.nz is the home for sneakerheads - not so much about what the site used to be about back in the crushme days, but about what it's grown into: a place for anyone who genuinely appreciates trainers. Collectors, traders, the fetish crowd and the non-fetish crowd alike - we're all a bit weird about sneakers in our own way, and that's exactly the point.
There are still pockets of members here who go all the way back to the crushme and squishysquishy days - you can follow them and see where it all started. And soon, that circle gets a lot bigger: we're bringing every SquishySquishy.co.nz member and all of their content over to Treads.nz, so the whole community ends up back under one roof.
What's next is still being written. There's talk of an app, and maybe video down the line - but honestly, more than any single feature, the plan is just to keep growing the community and building on what's already here. If there's one thing 25-odd years of this site has proven, it's that the people are what make it worth building for.
Whether you're new here or coming back from way back when - there's a place for you.
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