That's a journey and a half! :D I am especially interested in the fact that you initially hated Tumblr and then became such an enthusiastic user of the site. I think my big problem with Tumblr was that I never found a main fandom that I wanted to interact with there. I joined because I was overflowing with MCU feels and wanted a place to squee about that, and I still follow primarily MCU folks there because of that, but I never wanted to commit to making my blog an "MCU blog", because I preferred to keep my options open. (And sure, I know a lot of people have blogs that cover a few fandoms, but I never wanted to commit to making mine anything. I resisted adding an "intro" in my sidebar like most people did saying hi, this is my blog, this is the kind of stuff I reblog here. I liked having it be a "blank slate" that just reflected whatever I was feeling at that particular moment, but obviously few people were interested in following a blank slate. I probably would have had a better time on Tumblr if I'd committed more to embracing its conventions and culture, but I also felt like I wasn't consistent enough for it to be worth bothering. Tumblr moved too fast and forgot too quickly).
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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timeasmymeasure
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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!