Hello,
This place is as good as any. I'm Myriads, your forum Admin, and unofficial keeper of the histories. Let me see if I can answer your questions without writing a tome.
The forums origins lie with an individual who used the handle Psycho. In the late 90's he created a number of websites Psychos world, and later Psychos universe that were some of the earliest tickling oriented webpages. In '99 using the brand new EZboard forum system he created the TMF. He appointed some admins and was off and running.
The forum was a success, and EZBoards had some limitations so he looked to create a dedicated forum of the nature you see here today. He found some backers, among them Jeff, who owned Magic Touch, one of the early independent video producers. Psycho also gathered almost all the significant players active the community at the time to be his mods. He had a 'Knights of the Round Table' sorta vibe. With all this in place the work to get the software, a server and so forth began and the TMF was scheduled to go live.
But life has surprises. And Psycho has a religious conversion of the sort that happens in a moment. And he felt that being involved in the forum was not proper and wrong for him personally. He chose to leave. Jeff as primary backer was left in charge, and he proceeded with the roll out, asked me to be site Admin, and we opened, and were successful. And are still here today.
So the inspiration for the TMF came from one person at its root, as a further expansion of his old websites, each which was better then the last. But it very much took a community of people to make it happen, and keep it working. It still does. Of the two founders Jeff is still here, and Psycho is gone. He never returned after he chose to follow his faith.
As to the changes in the demographics and sociology of the site things have changed. Very few women were active in the community when we started, and one of my first big initiatives was to encourage female membership and participation. That was very successful. We have one of the highest female active participation percents of online sexual orient forums.
When we started any form of tickling that was */m was often met with some pretty sad responses by the community. Over the years we have worked to make it clear that we are a place that supports all the combination of Ler's and lees and slowly the different combinations have started to all see more representation beyond the F/F which was the norm 20ish years back.
The TMF was also the earliest platform that enabled gatherings to really get going all around the country. There was a huge growth of face to face meets after we got established, and that really strengthened the communities identity in many ways, and bonded a generation of members. That is something else we are quite proud of.
The evolution of the tickling community as a whole is a question of huge scope, and extends beyond the TMF both before and along side us. But the overall trend is that it's better connected, more comfortable with itself, and visible. All things that help the constant flow of new people who pull this fetish from the deck, and help them feel a bit less odd and alone.
Hope that brief snapshot helped. I'm happy to follow up and answer anything you might want to follow up on.
Myriads