(no subject)

[thedarlingone]

So does anybody know where all the fannish activity is these days? Is there any fannish activity? My tumblr feed is very quiet, my Dreamwidth feed has not picked up, and I don't know where to look.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

I've been avoiding even lurking on Pillowfort because their stance on archiving makes Tumblr's stance look friendly by comparison, but I hear a lot of people went there.

(That might sound like a Matter of Principle, and maybe kind of it is, but mostly just...if I *read* Pillowfort posts I might get *attached* to some of them, and then I have to choose between [violating the author's wishes by circumventing Pillowfort's anti-archiving measures] and [living with the inevitability that someday the site will shut down (or the blog will deactivate, or a natural disaster will hit the server they were storing it on, etc), and I'll never be able to read that post again].)

Mastodon is also popular and contains far fewer moral dilemmas, and sometimes I wander through and read a few acquaintances' feeds. (As for actively being there: the format is rather Twitter-y for my personal tastes, so I never really got into it.)

[thedarlingone]

Yeah, between the stance on archiving / deleting (I have no right to my content because I made it in response to someone else's content... seems odd on a platform supposedly designed for fandom i.e. a community based around derivative works, which I doubt they thought that far into the implications but I am nothing if not a classically trained philosopher) and the .io domain (seems odd that they chose a domain which specifically forbids porn for a platform supposedly designed for fandom i.e. a community based in large part around porn) and the utter nonfunctionality of the site on mobile, I haven't been on Pillowfort in months. If the main fannish presence has moved there... I might have a problem. :P

(Don't be an extrovert if you can help it. ;P Having fundamental psychological needs which can only be met by [existing in a sufficiently active community of reasonably like-minded people] sucks.)

[brin_bellway]

While those *particular* problems are, I gather, less bad than they look--you can't actually *put* commentary in a Pillowfort reblog in the first place, and they moved from .io to .social--yeah, I worry about what will happen if Pillowfort becomes the hub, big enough to draw in a lot of people who are only there for the network and not because they actually agree with the right-to-be-forgotten ethos.

You hear so much about how many purges and siterots fandom has been through, how much history has been lost and what close calls some of the surviving stuff had, and...if Pillowfort rules the next phase of fandom history, unless they seriously change their tune, twenty years down the line that phase of fandom history will just be *gone*.

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The Fediverse (Mastodon etc) might not be so bad as a hub, especially with the inter-operability aspect of it. I'm not remotely up to the task myself, but maybe at some point somebody will make a version that's more Tumblry or otherwise fits better with me than the Twitter- and Facebook-alikes they had last I checked.

(You come across so many news articles that casually assume that everyone is on Twitter and Facebook all the time, and I actually don't have *either* of those. unless you count those [faked social-media engagement] gigs I did, I technically have a Twitter for that)

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Even introverts usually get lonely *eventually*, though it takes longer to kick in and takes less to fix it.

It's the "like-minded" bit that usually gets me, IME. I keep trying social circles and burning out of them a couple years later because in the end they were too grating.

[thedarlingone]

It's the "like-minded" bit that usually gets me, IME. I keep trying social circles and burning out of them a couple years later because in the end they were too grating.

Yeah. I had about ten friends I followed and was very happy, and then tumblr imploded and it's going to be a royal fuckton of work developing a new social circle or combination of social circles that are not grating on me in the way so many are. Especially with "I am very liberal but please no politics outside these very specific parameters" being a factor :P

[thisbluespirit]

I think fandom is nowhere in particular at the moment, from what I gather. The tumblr exodus was too soon to benefit Pillowfort, which hasn't taken off much yet; DReamwidth got a brief rush (and is still a bit livelier) but is obviously (if tragically) the past, for many people tumblr is still the place, and twitter seems to have picked up the rest.

So we're all waiting for the New Place, I suppose. In the meantime, there was a big friending meme in Decmber. It's a bit late to post there, but still worthwhile seeing if there are people you'd like to friend. You could make a post to addme_fandom.

I mean, my tumblr is quiet, but I keep it that way, I can't cope with tumblr any more now than I could before, but my flist is reasonably busy and chatty, because this is where I've been. Post and comment and people will friend you still.

(I'm laughing about your Pillowfort conversation because that's the first piece of information I've seen about Pillowfort that makes me feel I might be willing to use it - one of the big problems with tumblr for me is the complete lack of control over anything you post, once it gets reblogged. It has its advantages (like when I deleted my blog by accident) but it's a huge deal and limits what you can post. Pillowfort there are just trying to use the LJ/DW model (where you can delete your whole journal and take everyone's comments with you when you go) and while I hope that most people won't do that, I respect and value the right to do so at need very much. And that tumblr entirely lacks.

ETA: Friending meme link: https://snickfic.dreamwidth.org/667727.html

[brin_bellway]

>>Pillowfort there are just trying to use the LJ/DW model (where you can delete your whole journal and take everyone's comments with you when you go)<<

You're not the first person I've seen claim that, and I'd like to point out that there's one very important difference between Pillowfort and Dreamwidth in this respect: Pillowfort is--I assume deliberately--set up to prevent scrapers like the Wayback Machine from successfully downloading it, while Dreamwidth is not. Compare this Pillowfort post with this Dreamwidth post.

Intellectually I know that some people find their blog continuing to exist about as viscerally repulsive as I find my blog *not* continuing to exist†, but even so I worry that Pillowfort goes too far. Dreamwidth gives you the *option* of making your posts uncrawlable (through access-locking); Pillowfort *forces* it.

...I guess, in a way, it *would* be fair if they take over, wouldn't it. Like you mention, a great many people who value ephemerality were coerced through network effects into being on Tumblr, a place where the very code of the site itself was hostile to their values. Perhaps it's my turn.

I do wish we could all come to a better compromise, though. Certainly a better one than Tumblr, which was/is kind of the worst of both worlds. Something more, well, Dreamwidth-like: opt-out per-post archivability, if you're able to see an opted-out post you're probably close enough to the person for it to be reasonable to ask them for permission to take a local copy, if they grant that permission local-copy-taking requires very little time and effort.

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†There are at *least* five copies of my Tumblr (counting the original), four of which are actively maintained and an overlapping three of which are publicly accessible. (I also know of two people who took snapshots of my blog in December 2018 after I told them they could, but I don't know if they kept them.)

[thedarlingone]

Yay, friending meme! I've added about three dozen people, some of whom I was quite excited to find again. We'll see if any of them post.

[thisbluespirit]

Hurrah! Good luck. More people must at least make that a little likelier! And don't worry too much - I've found that it tends to get weirdly quiet online from about now till Aug/Sep - summer in the northern hemisphere, I suppose!

And I was thinking, how about some comms? As I mentioned elsewhere, there are fandomcalendar, fandom_on_dw and dw_community_promo which are all good for hearing about what's on and new comms.

Then there's yuletide (I know you haven't done it in a while, but you used to like following the chat and looking at noms and things; also yuletide_admin, of course.)

Reccing comms - the busiest one, which is for all types of fic is fancake, and there's also gensplosion, my Calufrax replacement tardis_library, and fanart_recs.

fictional_fans tends to the same type of audience as metaquotes, but has some general chatting posts you might enjoy.

And hopefully the promo comms will help you to find others.

If you want activity comms to spark off short things in between your epics, I have loads of flash challenges (fic and multi) and bingo comms and the like I can rec to you!

(Actually, nosing at comms on people's profile pages is also a good way to find places to follow.)

[thedarlingone]

ALL THE COMMS! :D

It's not ideas for short things I lack, it's time. I have approximately a quintillion ideas of all lengths. (I had thought for a moment that a drabble I posted a while back might retroactively qualify for tic_tac_woe, but the minimum is 300 words. Damn. It was a very good apocalypse.) Maybe when I get a few of these epics whittled down... ;S

[thisbluespirit]

That's why I didn't add any until I knew whether you needed any! Time is always a problem. *nods* Just ask the Doctor or Sapphire and Steel.

Oh, that is a shame. is my minimum 300 words? lol, I had forgotten!

[thedarlingone]

There really aren’t very many challenges that allow drabbles, except ones specifically designed for drabbles. Which is a shame really. :P If I try to write to drabble length consistently, I wind up going longer and longer, but if I try to hit a word minimum it doesn’t happen.

[thisbluespirit]

There are a few - there's fan_flashworks which allows drabbles and upwards. And indeed craft and cookery and just about anything. I haven't taken part in a while, but it's good fun.

Of the bingos, genprompt_bingo's min is 100 words for fic, plus again allowing most other formats you can think of. (The prompts are gen, the fills can be anything you like of any rating.)

[ashkaztra]

For me, I guess I got so used to the easy posting tone on Tumblr that DW just doesn't feel the same. Posting over here feels like way more of a commitment, while on Tumblr, a lot of my posts were just shower thoughts.

Mostly I poke around Twitter these days. Not so much for fannish activity, though I follow some art accounts, but it's more suited for my more pointless posts. I feel like if I'm posting here, I need to actually make sense, while on Twitter I can just post "toe beans" and nothing else. I miss that from Tumblr. That and my Tumblr friends. Not much else, though.

Of course, I'd probably feel different if I actually did anything fannish these days and didn't just waste my time watching Youtube and playing Match 3 games. :P

[thedarlingone]

Posting over here feels like way more of a commitment

Yes! I don't know why, but it really really does. Whether that's just because every post requires some minimum of original content / effort and you can't just slap the reblog button when you have no brain, or whether it's the dignified serif font or what, but it definitely does, and I can't be the only person who finds that irrationally intimidating.

[contrarianarchon]

<3 this entire discussion.

I'm in fan-discords for various things, but those are vary much specific to the thing? Discords are a dozen little hole-in-the-walls, not a civilization, which is certainly a way I like doing fandomy things (And social media in general). It's hard to find the one for a specific topic, though - you have to be active and watchful and leap on opportunities.

[thedarlingone]

Yeah, I’m in a couple of fan-discords but only really keep up with one. Discord really doesn’t work for my brain as a primary way of doing fandom, both because I like having the civilization rather than a string of holes-in-the-wall, and because I can’t control how much I have to keep up with other than abandoning sections completely - I can’t subscribe and unsubscribe to specific people as my life gets more overwhelming. (And I *cannot* skip bits of an ongoing conversation. I just can’t. So if there’s too much to backread... I keep hearing that Discord may be the next fandom hub but I really hope not. I wouldn’t be surprised though, honestly, as a backlash against the tumblr “everything is public all the time” deal.)

[contrarianarchon]

Interesting that we come at "Cannot not read everything" from very different directions. I like the mindset of the holes in the wall because I cope very poorly with the open horizon - I can't tag-crawl because I end up feeling obligated to read *everything*. Ditto with large communities - my inability to keep up with literally everything that happens sours me to them somewhat, though I have been doing better.

I ... mostly keep up with the back-reading thing with pruning and a hour-long stretch during public transport dedicated to reading backlogs of stuff that happened while I was asleep.

[thedarlingone]

That is fascinating! I'm the exact opposite - something about the way tags and comms are delineated means I find it a lot easier to say "these are the only parts I Have To read", where on a discord I have to keep up with every channel. I can mute channels, but then I feel like I'm missing out... ;P

(Course, I never really did tracked tags on Tumblr, and I kept my dash strictly pruned, both of which helped it be less overwhelming.)