"Were you doing fannish stuff before you knew of the existence of fandom?"
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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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? 🤔