I was knee-deep in the flash animation scene through the late 90s early 00s, and I don't remember anyone calling anyone 'Flashers'. China-only I suppose.

I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?

There was a group on deviantArt called flashers. I wasn’t a member myself, but some of their members made some neat stuff I remember.

The group hasn’t been active for many years now it looks like, but the group page still exists.

https://www.deviantart.com/flashers

Group founded 2004.

There’s not much in the group gallery now, so probably I was looking in the individual galleries of some of the members and I think some of the time some member would make something and post it to Albino Blacksheep and sites like that and maybe post a journal entry about it to their own individual journal on their own profile.

deviantArt also had IRC-like group chats. Flashers had a chat room. There’s a link to it still in the about section of the group, but that link doesn’t work any more. Even if a group didn’t have much posted into its gallery they could have a lot of member activity in those chat rooms. And from what I remember, I think I visited the flashers chat room a few times and that it was pretty active.

I think some chat rooms were private, and some were open even to people who were not in any particular group.

Yeh stick death definitely was before Xiao Xiao. I remember all the lads at school sat around a computer in school binge watching them all.

>I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?

Definitely remember Stick Death in highschool around '99-'01, 2+ years before this flashers group supposedly started.