lirazel | (no subject)

Warning: these thoughts are very preliminary and more coming from a place of instinct than well-formed thought. I am happy for anyone to push back against anything I say provided you do it respectfully.

Hannah and I were talking yesterday (in a very un-nuanced way) about how weird it is that within fandom circles, there are fewer and fewer people willing to engage in commenting/meta-writing/actual fannish conversation (or hell, even reblogging of art on Tumblr), but more and more people who think nothing of paying for online stuff? I am shocked that this ko-fi thing has taken off--I guess I'm old school enough that the thought of monetizing fandom is horrifying to me.

I mean, I guess there's an entire cohort of people who never used the internet before Facebook introduced the like button and so don't know the joy of full-on fannish engagement. And those same people are accepting the commodification of...everything.

It's just really, really weird to see. I know there was a gap in culture between the pre-internet 'zine-and-conventions fans and then the very first fans who were using the internet before the world wide web and then again my generation who started using it in the late 90s and came up on message boards and mailing lists and such. But the gap between those earlier generation of fans (and by generation, I'm very much talking about "when you got involved in fandom," not what age you are) and the current one seems like a chasm. I just don't recognize how they do fandom, and I am actually pretty sad that none of them seem to want to do it the way we do it (only, you know, with greater diversity, etc. I'm not pretending like the internet in 2001 was perfect. It was much whiter and richer, and lots of things about accessibility have changed for the better since then).

I've just always really loved that fandom is a gift economy and that the gifts go both ways. That I write fic because I want to share it with y'all, and y'all respond and engage with it, and we all have a great time together. A "content"-based view of fandom where you just ~consume~ is just so repugnant to me and I don't want anything to do with it, and I know we're not going back to a livejournal kind of fannish experience, but I'm just...really not looking forward to further changes in fandom. I don't see good developments coming down the road, and I can't figure out if this is me being all Old Man Yells at Clouds or if I'm right and things just aren't as fun anymore.

And yes, this is partially about me getting fewer comments when I write fic for a huge fandom than when I write for a Yuletide-sized fandom, but also it's about a general feeling that people just don't view fandom (or even the whole internet) as a place of two-way interaction anymore.

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If I may ask, what do you look for in a platform, in terms of providing a rock to hide under?

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure of what I'm looking for, or if any of the ideas I imagine would actually work in practice. But one of the things that makes me most uncomfortable about doing fandom on Twitter and Tumblr is how visible it can make fandom activities to the uninformed public, because I think it's important to have a clear separation of fandom from the subjects of fandom (ie. media creators, actors, etc).

So I guess I like the thought of something slower paced and largely out of the public eye (as much as feasible these days), not a social network so much as a community hub, with a lot of privacy options and community building tools. I think the absence of a wider sense of community in fandom sits at the core of a lot of issues and having a site geared around hosting moderated fannish communities would go a long way in restoring some of that old sense of camaraderie. A modernized DW is pretty close to an ideal for me, actually, though I'd add a like/kudos button on posts and possibly the ability to "reblog" your own posts to communities you're a member of.

But that's just me, and considering how quiet Dreamwidth is and how difficult it's been for me to persuade any friends over here, I don't know if something running that close to the current DW functionality would be attractive to enough people to sustain a userbase.

(I hope this answers your question, I might have gone a BIT off topic 😅)

I was about to say, that does sound a lot like Dreamwidth, apart from the exceptions you mentioned.

The reason I ask, though, is because I wondered what you'd think of Pillowfort.social, where I've been hanging out more often. It's pretty slow and quiet, has privacy options, "communities" (same as DW communities), a "like" button, and a reblog feature. The main downsides that people complain about are actually that it's too quiet, and also that the site staff have sometimes been slow about bug fixes and updates. (Pillowfort's a lot younger than DW, so there's more stuff like that to hammer out.) Because of the small userbase and such, you might face the same uphill battle to invite any friends there -- but it does at least have some of those more Tumblrlike features (likes/reblogs) that (I figure) might make it less of a jump from what they're used to.

Oh, yes, I'm aware of Pillowfort! I was actually a pretty early adopter back in 2018 but I never really found my niche on there - like you mentioned, it's pretty quiet, and it absolutely was an uphill battle to try and shift people over even back then in the wake of the Tumblr exodus. Community building is hard! After the site went down for a while I just never went back, but it is still on my radar. I've kind of been watching it grow from afar and waiting for a good time to try it out again.

Community building is hard -- you can say that again.

For what it's worth, if you're interested in meta-fandom discussions like this, you might be interested in following MultiMeta or WebDiscussions.