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
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...)