On finding new fandom communities
Dec. 31st, 2018 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enchantedsleeperHi, Dreamwidth! Like a lot of people in the wake of the Great Tumblr NSFW Content Purge, I've decided to give this journalling thing a go.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about fandom communities since the first dregs of Tumblr's purge began back in November, and have been reading a lot of discussions about them, along with most of the rest of fandom. I find the conversations that are happening right now - about fandom migration, fandom platform(s) of the future, decentralised fandom, and how we can own the servers on social media to prevent this happening (yet) again - absolutely fascinating. (I've also been documenting them on Fanlore, which is my obligatory plug/invitation for you to join me if you're interested in that kind of thing. It's a lot of fun :D)
They've also made me think a lot about my own perspective on all of this, my fannish history, and my participation in fandom. Here's where I'm at right now.
I tend to think of myself as a, well, not a Fandom Old exactly, but someone who's been around fandom a while. I was writing fanfiction long before I had access to the internet (and that's just as well - the less said about those early Famous Five, Pokémon and Harry Potter fics, the better), but I consider 2004 to be the year when I entered fandom: when I started taking character quizzes to develop characters from my totally-original-Xiaolin-Showdown-and-Code-Lyoko fusion story, stumbled upon Quizilla, and discovered fanfiction. A year later, a friend told me about Fanfiction.net and the rest is basically history.
So, 14 years of reading and writing fanfiction, making the odd bit of fanart, writing and recording filks, occasionally cosplaying, participating in a few online fan communities, running an IRL fanworks group, and most recently, obsessively editing a fandom wiki and volunteering with the Organisation for Transformative Works is enough to make me feel like I've been around the block a few times. Especially those last two.
And yet listening (I'm using that term figuratively, because they're all online discussions) to other fans talk about fandom communities and fandom migration often makes me feel like I've been doing fandom... not wrong, but at least differently to most people.
For example, a lot of discussions of fannish communities and fandom migration seem to revolve around the idea of fans making one website into their Fannish Home, on which they Do Fandom, until eventually some corporation comes along and pulls the rug out from under them, forcing them to migrate elsewhere. So, for a lot of fans, LiveJournal was their Fannish Home, until Strikethrough/Boldthrough pulled the rug out from under them (and I know that the actual death of LJ wasn't anywhere near as sudden as that metaphor implies, but I'm simplifying for the sake of brevity), and for many other fans, Tumblr was their Fannish Home, and the recent NSFW content purge has now begun to pull the rug out from under that. And while people might not use their Fannish Home exclusively to Do Fandom, the implication is that they mainly use it to Be Fannish. At least, that's how it comes across to me.
I don't have a Fannish Home in my narrative. I never really got into journal fandom - as a teenager, I didn't see the point of blogging (since I thought it was basically for writing about your day, which I find boring) and was proud of never posting a single entry to my personal LiveJournal, though I was part of some fandom-specific comms and posted stories to those. I missed them when they fell inactive around 2009-2010-ish, but I had no idea why that had happened and didn't find out until many years later. I didn't know anyone on the site to talk to.
Tumblr is the same - I was aware of what was happening on the site pretty early this time because of the OTW (i.e. I heard about it from people in the Org whose sources are infinitely better than mine), but I've never made friends there or found a community. The only two fannish communities whose collapses have really affected me are Quizilla, and Pottermore. As I've said, Quizilla was my gateway into fandom, and I made my first internet friends there. I remember my despair when I realised that the blanket implementation of the Story format (which was ironically supposed to cater to long-form writing) had decimated all of the fics I loved and had bookmarked. But Quizilla was never my Fannish Home; it was more of a publishing platform with social features, like Fanfiction.net, and I only ever published one quiz series to it myself. By the time it died, I had already moved on to reading and publishing all of my fic on FF.net.
The loss of Pottermore hit me much harder, but Pottermore was a weird case to begin with: the community grew around Pottermore the website, but mostly interacted away from it (on Facebook). When the site killed its interactive features in 2015, our community died along with it, even though we had the same means of interacting with each other that we'd always had. (There was a mass migration to HEX, another Harry Potter gaming/discussion community, but I was one of those that never really made the leap across). Most people also don't know about the small but extremely dedicated fandom that grew up around Pottermore, so I can't really discuss what happened with anyone. Still, Pottermore is probably the closest that I've come to having a Fannish Home (even though the site where most of it happened was actually Facebook - and a number of dedicated spin-off sites), and I still feel like I'm grieving its loss more than three years later.
Maybe I'll dedicate a separate post to The Tragic Tale of Pottermore Fandom.
Anyway. Do most fans have - or have they at some point had - an all-purpose online community that serves as the focal point for all their fandom activity, or am I misreading things? Either way, it made me think about what I look for in a fannish community. Because I was never that big on Tumblr, I'm not a "Tumblr refugee" or looking for a replacement for it, but all the discussions and ideas that have been sparked off by its (possible, potential) demise made me want to explore some new places.
I spent most of my online life on forums. Specifically, Gaia Online, plus a handful of roleplay-specific forums and one fan forum (Hide the Rum, a Pirates of the Caribbean fan community for Will/Elizabeth shippers). But with the exception of HtR, I wasn't being fannish on those forums 90% of the time. I started off roleplaying (and I was part of a few fannish RPs, but again they were in the minority) and then moved on to avatar creation contests, art and writing contests, running a comics studio, and a whole host of other stuff I don't even remember. Gaia was my primary online hangout for about eight years (2004 to 2012, roughly), but most of that wasn't fan activity.
But I met fans on there, mostly anime fans (if you wanted to be very broad strokes about it, I suppose Gaia Online could be considered an anime fan website, but there was a lot more to it than that), and made friends with them and messaged them on AIM or MSN, and that was how I did my fannish socialising. It wouldn't be accurate to say that we met through fandom, since I met most if not all of them through roleplays. But we were all fans of something, and a lot of those interests overlapped.
My point is that I think the narratives we construct around online fan communities/fannish social networks and fandom migration tend to characterise certain websites as the be-all and end-all of fannish activity (i.e. the primary purpose of fans being on those websites is to Do Fandom, and when they migrate they go to Do Fandom somewhere else), and I can't relate to that, but I have no idea if that's just me, or if it's not and I'm just misreading/over-simplifying the narrative. Maybe it's just the circles I now move in, which are dominated by people who were either once in LiveJournal fandom and miss it, or are in Tumblr fandom and are trying to figure out how to replace it.
For me, I've realised that what I miss most are forum communities, where I could talk about anything and everything, but with the knowledge that the people around me were all fans of something, and wouldn't treat being fannish as something unusual, even though our primary purpose for being there wasn't fandom or fanworks. I haven't been looking for a new fannish community so much as just an online community where I can be fannish.
The OTW's main chat space has definitely been one such community for me, and the fact that it's technically private but still very large (the OTW is made up of hundreds of volunteers) gives it that public-but-private feel that I enjoyed during my forum days. However, it still feels like a bit of a bubble - and the fact that I volunteer there under my legal name (which is why, if you're reading this and are an OTW volunteer, you might not recognise me) and don't want to link it directly to my fannish handle (this one) has restricted many of the ways that I can be fannish there.
The other thing I miss so badly from my forum days is anonymity, or maybe I should say pseudonymity: going by a name that has no connection to my legal name (or Muggle name, as we called it on Pottermore), but is nevertheless me, and not having to worry about what I say being found by tutors or employers, or about whether it's contributing to my professional profile. Even before these conversations about Tumblr and fan communities began, I was looking for a way to bring that back into my life. I joined a new social network, Mastodon, under my fandom name - and promptly found nothing to do there, as my "fan self" had no friends xD I also dusted off a WordPress blog from my late uni/early journalism days where I used to blog about fandom, web culture and digital journalism, unpublished the couple of posts I'd published as part of my coursework (I hated having to do that, but my journalism course required us to have A Blog, and I didn't want to start up another one) and revived it.
The Mastodon story has a happy ending, as I was invited to join an instance called fandom.ink which is quite small and intimate, but full of fannish folks, and I can talk about anything and everything there - including, but not limited to, fandom :3 I've found some Marvel fans to squee with, some fellow bookworms, and some interesting chatter about politics and -punk subgenres. While it's only been a couple of days, I'm having a lot of fun there so far, and it's given me a lot of renewed hope in finding new online communities where I can be myself without having to overthink things.
With any luck, this one will be another :D
I've spent a lot of time thinking about fandom communities since the first dregs of Tumblr's purge began back in November, and have been reading a lot of discussions about them, along with most of the rest of fandom. I find the conversations that are happening right now - about fandom migration, fandom platform(s) of the future, decentralised fandom, and how we can own the servers on social media to prevent this happening (yet) again - absolutely fascinating. (I've also been documenting them on Fanlore, which is my obligatory plug/invitation for you to join me if you're interested in that kind of thing. It's a lot of fun :D)
They've also made me think a lot about my own perspective on all of this, my fannish history, and my participation in fandom. Here's where I'm at right now.
I tend to think of myself as a, well, not a Fandom Old exactly, but someone who's been around fandom a while. I was writing fanfiction long before I had access to the internet (and that's just as well - the less said about those early Famous Five, Pokémon and Harry Potter fics, the better), but I consider 2004 to be the year when I entered fandom: when I started taking character quizzes to develop characters from my totally-original-Xiaolin-Showdown-and-Code-Lyoko fusion story, stumbled upon Quizilla, and discovered fanfiction. A year later, a friend told me about Fanfiction.net and the rest is basically history.
So, 14 years of reading and writing fanfiction, making the odd bit of fanart, writing and recording filks, occasionally cosplaying, participating in a few online fan communities, running an IRL fanworks group, and most recently, obsessively editing a fandom wiki and volunteering with the Organisation for Transformative Works is enough to make me feel like I've been around the block a few times. Especially those last two.
And yet listening (I'm using that term figuratively, because they're all online discussions) to other fans talk about fandom communities and fandom migration often makes me feel like I've been doing fandom... not wrong, but at least differently to most people.
For example, a lot of discussions of fannish communities and fandom migration seem to revolve around the idea of fans making one website into their Fannish Home, on which they Do Fandom, until eventually some corporation comes along and pulls the rug out from under them, forcing them to migrate elsewhere. So, for a lot of fans, LiveJournal was their Fannish Home, until Strikethrough/Boldthrough pulled the rug out from under them (and I know that the actual death of LJ wasn't anywhere near as sudden as that metaphor implies, but I'm simplifying for the sake of brevity), and for many other fans, Tumblr was their Fannish Home, and the recent NSFW content purge has now begun to pull the rug out from under that. And while people might not use their Fannish Home exclusively to Do Fandom, the implication is that they mainly use it to Be Fannish. At least, that's how it comes across to me.
I don't have a Fannish Home in my narrative. I never really got into journal fandom - as a teenager, I didn't see the point of blogging (since I thought it was basically for writing about your day, which I find boring) and was proud of never posting a single entry to my personal LiveJournal, though I was part of some fandom-specific comms and posted stories to those. I missed them when they fell inactive around 2009-2010-ish, but I had no idea why that had happened and didn't find out until many years later. I didn't know anyone on the site to talk to.
Tumblr is the same - I was aware of what was happening on the site pretty early this time because of the OTW (i.e. I heard about it from people in the Org whose sources are infinitely better than mine), but I've never made friends there or found a community. The only two fannish communities whose collapses have really affected me are Quizilla, and Pottermore. As I've said, Quizilla was my gateway into fandom, and I made my first internet friends there. I remember my despair when I realised that the blanket implementation of the Story format (which was ironically supposed to cater to long-form writing) had decimated all of the fics I loved and had bookmarked. But Quizilla was never my Fannish Home; it was more of a publishing platform with social features, like Fanfiction.net, and I only ever published one quiz series to it myself. By the time it died, I had already moved on to reading and publishing all of my fic on FF.net.
The loss of Pottermore hit me much harder, but Pottermore was a weird case to begin with: the community grew around Pottermore the website, but mostly interacted away from it (on Facebook). When the site killed its interactive features in 2015, our community died along with it, even though we had the same means of interacting with each other that we'd always had. (There was a mass migration to HEX, another Harry Potter gaming/discussion community, but I was one of those that never really made the leap across). Most people also don't know about the small but extremely dedicated fandom that grew up around Pottermore, so I can't really discuss what happened with anyone. Still, Pottermore is probably the closest that I've come to having a Fannish Home (even though the site where most of it happened was actually Facebook - and a number of dedicated spin-off sites), and I still feel like I'm grieving its loss more than three years later.
Maybe I'll dedicate a separate post to The Tragic Tale of Pottermore Fandom.
Anyway. Do most fans have - or have they at some point had - an all-purpose online community that serves as the focal point for all their fandom activity, or am I misreading things? Either way, it made me think about what I look for in a fannish community. Because I was never that big on Tumblr, I'm not a "Tumblr refugee" or looking for a replacement for it, but all the discussions and ideas that have been sparked off by its (possible, potential) demise made me want to explore some new places.
I spent most of my online life on forums. Specifically, Gaia Online, plus a handful of roleplay-specific forums and one fan forum (Hide the Rum, a Pirates of the Caribbean fan community for Will/Elizabeth shippers). But with the exception of HtR, I wasn't being fannish on those forums 90% of the time. I started off roleplaying (and I was part of a few fannish RPs, but again they were in the minority) and then moved on to avatar creation contests, art and writing contests, running a comics studio, and a whole host of other stuff I don't even remember. Gaia was my primary online hangout for about eight years (2004 to 2012, roughly), but most of that wasn't fan activity.
But I met fans on there, mostly anime fans (if you wanted to be very broad strokes about it, I suppose Gaia Online could be considered an anime fan website, but there was a lot more to it than that), and made friends with them and messaged them on AIM or MSN, and that was how I did my fannish socialising. It wouldn't be accurate to say that we met through fandom, since I met most if not all of them through roleplays. But we were all fans of something, and a lot of those interests overlapped.
My point is that I think the narratives we construct around online fan communities/fannish social networks and fandom migration tend to characterise certain websites as the be-all and end-all of fannish activity (i.e. the primary purpose of fans being on those websites is to Do Fandom, and when they migrate they go to Do Fandom somewhere else), and I can't relate to that, but I have no idea if that's just me, or if it's not and I'm just misreading/over-simplifying the narrative. Maybe it's just the circles I now move in, which are dominated by people who were either once in LiveJournal fandom and miss it, or are in Tumblr fandom and are trying to figure out how to replace it.
For me, I've realised that what I miss most are forum communities, where I could talk about anything and everything, but with the knowledge that the people around me were all fans of something, and wouldn't treat being fannish as something unusual, even though our primary purpose for being there wasn't fandom or fanworks. I haven't been looking for a new fannish community so much as just an online community where I can be fannish.
The OTW's main chat space has definitely been one such community for me, and the fact that it's technically private but still very large (the OTW is made up of hundreds of volunteers) gives it that public-but-private feel that I enjoyed during my forum days. However, it still feels like a bit of a bubble - and the fact that I volunteer there under my legal name (which is why, if you're reading this and are an OTW volunteer, you might not recognise me) and don't want to link it directly to my fannish handle (this one) has restricted many of the ways that I can be fannish there.
The other thing I miss so badly from my forum days is anonymity, or maybe I should say pseudonymity: going by a name that has no connection to my legal name (or Muggle name, as we called it on Pottermore), but is nevertheless me, and not having to worry about what I say being found by tutors or employers, or about whether it's contributing to my professional profile. Even before these conversations about Tumblr and fan communities began, I was looking for a way to bring that back into my life. I joined a new social network, Mastodon, under my fandom name - and promptly found nothing to do there, as my "fan self" had no friends xD I also dusted off a WordPress blog from my late uni/early journalism days where I used to blog about fandom, web culture and digital journalism, unpublished the couple of posts I'd published as part of my coursework (I hated having to do that, but my journalism course required us to have A Blog, and I didn't want to start up another one) and revived it.
The Mastodon story has a happy ending, as I was invited to join an instance called fandom.ink which is quite small and intimate, but full of fannish folks, and I can talk about anything and everything there - including, but not limited to, fandom :3 I've found some Marvel fans to squee with, some fellow bookworms, and some interesting chatter about politics and -punk subgenres. While it's only been a couple of days, I'm having a lot of fun there so far, and it's given me a lot of renewed hope in finding new online communities where I can be myself without having to overthink things.
With any luck, this one will be another :D
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Date: 2019-01-01 12:59 am (UTC)Because I am Extremely Old™️ I've always kept my online presence centralized around websites I own. Like, I will crosspost content to where the community presences are at (ref. e.g. here), but I treat it as a transient interaction and always have an archive/home base I own. So it's not such a big deal when third-party sites and communities come and go.
It wasn't necessarily a conscious choice to do things like that, though. I just... always have. And happened to luck into it working out pretty well (lol).
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 09:09 am (UTC)(Yes, I'm jaded lol. But... I really have seen this pattern repeat. Over and over and over again...)
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Date: 2019-01-01 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 11:47 pm (UTC)One of the reasons that it's hard for me to (retrospectively) fit my own experience into a "Fannish Home" narrative is that I never thought about my internet experience in terms of fandom. I think it's only since discovering the OTW and its associated projects (especially Fanlore) that I really started thinking about my own fandom experience, and thinking of it *as* a fandom experience, and comparing it to other people's. So maybe I'm just behind in that respect.
Of course, now that I am, I also don't know what I'm looking for in a fannish community/website because I've never really had one that did everything... On the plus side, it means my options are open, so I'm trying a few things on for size :)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 09:44 am (UTC)In the early and mid-aughts I drifted away from HP but got into other fandoms, mostly Final Fantasy VIII and Inuyaha, and joined a FFVIII forum centered around a pairing. I guess my fannish home at this point was that forum, though arguably the more abiding locus of activity was FFN. I got on LJ around 2010 when I got into Avatar: The Last Airbender. LJ was post-Strikethrough and long past its heyday, but DW was emerging as an alternative and I slid over painlessly due to the crossposting function. I was getting more comments on LJ than DW for a couple of years after I was posting mainly from DW, though that is no longer true.
In the mid-10s I went kicking and screaming over to Tumblr because that was where fandom was. There was little fandom activity on DW and it was hard to find people to follow. I hated Tumblr because it was so different from DW and I couldn't figure it out, but then became an enthusiastic user, especially as my primary fandom became Star Wars, and it ate my brain big time. I reconnected with many of my LJ/DW friends on Tumblr and made new friends too.
Perhaps proving that the medium is the message, the different types of posts Tumblr enables--plus its free image hosting--led me to make other types of fan works, such as edits and visual parallel posts. Tumblr helped me branch out as a fan and I don't regret the time I spent on it. It was, perhaps more than anything else, my Fannish Home. This was also when I started posting more to AO3 than FFN (yes, I am a hopeless dinosaur) and even got on Discord for a while, completing the Tumblr-AO3-Discord triumvirate of late-tens fandom.
It might be too dramatic to say I followed fandom out of Tumblr after the Great Nipple Debacle, since my Tumblr is still there and I'm still logged on occasionally. I did reduce my usage drastically, though, both because I object to the direction the platform is going and because of the personal drama I experienced there. I think I can call Fandom.ink and DW my fannish homes now, and I'm adjusting to the new pace while trying to figure out how to use these platforms. I've written about the advantages of DW over Tumblr as a repository for content and I look forward to organizing my own stuff here, though the limited image hosting is going to be a problem.
I'm still in touch with my closest Tumblr friends since I still log on occasionally to chat, and became closer to some on Mastodon and DW that I also knew from Tumblr but didn't interact with that often. Many I will drift away from some due to my lesser engagement with Tumblr, which is okay. I'm just thankful for the relationships that have lasted through multiple fandoms and platform changes--DW, Tumblr, and now back to DW/Mastodon.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-12 11:40 am (UTC)I will add one thing to my experiences with Tumblr fandom, though, which is a very recent development: as someone who writes fic, I've never found Tumblr a better platform for finding people to engage with my fic than AO3 is (as in, I've cross-posted a few fics to Tumblr, but never got a better response there than I did on AO3). Until my most recent fandom: The Strange Case of Starship Iris (a podcast). It's a small fandom no matter where you go, and it has exactly 20 fics on AO3 (mine was the 20th). So I wasn't really expecting a lot of engagement wherever I posted it. But the response on Tumblr surprised me - not only did I get a bunch of likes and reblogs (probably more than I've ever got for a fic?), but several people reblogged it with a bunch of lovely comments in the tags, which I always thought that was something that happened to other people and not me. And they don't even know me! I'm like... am I actually finally getting a real taste of Tumblr culture, after the platform might have signed its own death warrant? Really?
(But it's great, I'm not complaining xD The timing is just ironic)
This was also when I started posting more to AO3 than FFN (yes, I am a hopeless dinosaur) and even got on Discord for a while, completing the Tumblr-AO3-Discord triumvirate of late-tens fandom.
Aha, Discord is one platform that managed to mostly pass me by, though I'm now in a couple of fannish Discords, but they're Discords about fandom (like the distributed_fandom Discord) rather than Discords for a certain fandom. I've somehow never stumbled across a link or been invited to one, though I love the setup, because I'm already a big Slack user and Discord has almost all of the same trappings. (I wish it would let you quote comments more easily, though. And thread replies)
Thank you for recounting all that for me, it's super interesting!
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Date: 2019-01-13 03:57 am (UTC)That's one of the great things about Tumblr, that a post can circulate and even fans of small fandoms can connect with each other and get known. I've seen content from other small fandoms circulate on Tumblr too that I would have had a hard time finding anywhere else. That effect becomes a bit overwhelming on big fandoms which are already fairly well-connected. It's why I believe Pillowfort is doing something worthwhile by recreating Tumblr's reblog and tag systems while hopefully curbing Tumblr's worst impulses.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-12 09:55 pm (UTC)Discovering fanfiction through that site, and later through a specific user discovering FFN and kind of LiveJournal (I followed their blog but couldn't figure out the interface to find anything else I liked) and then later AO3 wasn't very distinct from my other experiences online. I think the only difference was that I was more comfortable with fanfiction, having read it for a number of years, and thus commented and was more open to talking about fannish things in relation to it. But I don't think I've ever had one true fannish home. Maybe AO3, since I'm always on it and looking for fics, but while it'd be a gigantic loss to me if it disappeared, most of my actual fannish community interaction happens elsewhere in chats on Slack or Discord or irl or on the forum Sufficient Velocity (which you may be interested in checking out, it's a multitopic forum with a bent towards sci-fi/some anime and has a strong fannish presence, including fanworks and interactive fiction (Quests)).
I'm not a lurker now as I do participate in things, but maybe it's my heritage as a lurker and the fact that I don't put out a ton of content (or at least am specific about who I put out my content to) that means I've never really had a fandom home? Idk, it's interesting to think about.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-22 10:05 pm (UTC)Yes, exactly - that sounds a lot like my early experiences of fandom :D When I was RPing, I would occasionally get involved in a RP about something like Code Lyoko or Harry Potter because I was a fan of those things, but I didn't seek out fannish RPs, or RP in any fandom-specific communities.
most of my actual fannish community interaction happens elsewhere in chats on Slack or Discord or irl or on the forum Sufficient Velocity (which you may be interested in checking out, it's a multitopic forum with a bent towards sci-fi/some anime and has a strong fannish presence, including fanworks and interactive fiction (Quests))
Oooh! That sounds really cool! I will check it out, thank you :D
I'm not a lurker now as I do participate in things, but maybe it's my heritage as a lurker and the fact that I don't put out a ton of content (or at least am specific about who I put out my content to) that means I've never really had a fandom home? Idk, it's interesting to think about.
Ooooh. That's something I've never thought about, but I don't put out a ton of content either - my average fic posting rate is like 2 a year xD Whereas an IRL friend of mine who's a super prolific fic writer has a huge following on Tumblr. I always knew that you needed a certain consistency of activity for people to pay attention to you on Tumblr (and most fan platforms, tbh), but you've helped me realise how much it can be tied to your "fannish home" and how integrated people tend to be with fan platforms.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 05:53 pm (UTC)(I linked to your post on my post here btw!)
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Date: 2019-01-22 09:25 pm (UTC)Thank you so much for the linkback! I love your round-ups and am stoked to have featured in one :D As I said on Mastodon, I'm very excited for the This Week in Meta newsletter as well \o/
no subject
Date: 2019-01-14 07:17 am (UTC)Ditto; I miss long meta discussions. Though we're having a lot of them now about the state of fandom!
I had the odd experience in the mid-00s of seeing the fanfic lists at Yahoo Groups go quieter and quieter, and having no idea why, until someone clued me in to the fact that fandom was moving to LiveJournal.
But even then, I knew that fandom was scattered all over the place - even more so than now, I think. We had massive directories to try to keep track of where everyone was on the web, as well as a zillion archives.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-22 09:31 pm (UTC)I think meta discussions are something that haven't really featured into my experience of fandom until just now. The kind of sites where they've taken place - LiveJournal, for example, or Tumblr - are the ones that I've never really got on board with. But also, one thing that occurred to me while writing this post, though I didn't wind up mentioning it, is that I wouldn't have had much of anything to *say* about fandom prior to about 2011. I didn't really have an awareness of "fandom" as an entity, and I don't think I thought of myself as being "in fandom". 2011 was when I discovered AO3, and by extension the OTW, and started reading and thinking a lot more about what it meant to be fannish.
"I had the odd experience in the mid-00s of seeing the fanfic lists at Yahoo Groups go quieter and quieter, and having no idea why, until someone clued me in to the fact that fandom was moving to LiveJournal. "
Ugh, I can't imagine how weird that was. I'm glad that someone was able to let you know what was happening, though. Do you know why people migrated away from those lists? Did something change about Yahoo Groups, or was it more that LiveJournal provided a more attractive space?
no subject
Date: 2019-01-22 10:10 pm (UTC)"2011 was when I discovered AO3, and by extension the OTW"
I stumbled across fanfic by accident myself, though I'd known about SF fandom since I was a teen. Once I found one fanfic site, I began bouncing all over the fanfic web, by way of links and webrings. That eventually led me to the e-mail lists, and since there was a directory of fanfic e-mail lists, it wasn't hard to find the ones that interested me.
Were you doing fannish stuff before you knew of the existence of fandom?
"Do you know why people migrated away from those lists? Did something change about Yahoo Groups, or was it more that LiveJournal provided a more attractive space?"
I missed that whole discussion. :) I don't recall that there were any grievances being voiced at the e-mail lists I belonged to, besides the usual grumblings about Stupid Corporations That Are Determined To Spoil Fannish Space. LJ offered a number of advantages over lists - I can't begin to convey what it was like to have to format and post multi-chapter fic to multiple e-mail lists - but I'm guessing that the social factor was the big one. I always laugh at the official "social media history" timeline, because the folks who create such timelines almost invariably forget LiveJournal.
(Unless, of course, they've watched The Social Network. It's creepy to think that Mark Zuckerburg was posting those awful messages at LJ about his female classmates, just around the time that all those fangirls were arriving at LJ.)
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Date: 2019-01-27 11:18 pm (UTC)Oh yeah, I'd been doing fannish stuff since 2004: reading fic on Quizilla and Fanfiction.net, posting fic to FF.net and some other fic websites, and hanging out with other fans in LJ communities and forums. What I meant was that... I didn't think much about being someone who was "in fandom", or about the extent and history of fandom. Mostly I just wrote fanfic, and occasionally hung out with other fans on LiveJournal or in forums. I couldn't have conceived of an effort like AO3 or the OTW, and although I knew that Fanfiction.net would sometimes ban or purge users with explicit content, I had no idea that this was a wider issue that spanned generations and platforms.
Part of it I think was that prior to 2011, I was mostly in anime fandoms, whereas a lot of these discussions and projects took place in (heavy quote marks) "western" fannish circles. But I was also in Harry Potter fandom, and a few others like Pirates of the Caribbean, Superman Returns and Spider-Man (the Sam Raimi trilogy)... so I think it was more that I just wasn't connected to a network of other fans or interacting much on any of the big pan-fandom social websites.
"I always laugh at the official "social media history" timeline, because the folks who create such timelines almost invariably forget LiveJournal."
Well, I think there's an argument to be made that LiveJournal is more of a blogging site? I don't think of it as a straight-up social network either. I've always thought that Tumblr existed in that grey space, too, although people seem determined to class Tumblr as a social network. It's both, really, but I used to think that Tumblr should have leaned more into the blogging side of its interface - because it's really well-suited to blogging and website creation - and developed a revenue model around paid-for themes and domains, instead of relying wholly on advertising, which doesn't seem to have done it any favours.
Anyway, that's a whole other topic xD But still - where does a blogging site end and a social network begin? 🤔
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Date: 2019-01-29 11:00 pm (UTC)Good question. I think blogging becomes social media when the blogging network makes it easy to read and comment at other blogs - that would have been whenever LJ added its Reading page.
After all, Twitter is a microblogging platform, and one could argue that Facebook - like its predecessor, MySpace - is a blogging platform also, with its status updates. When Mark Zuckerburg co-created Facebook, he was obviously paying attention to what LiveJournal did successfully.