#fandom migration

[the-bar-sinister]

Whatever the fuck appened to forums or finding alternatives to other Internet applications? Like what the people at the Indie Web are doing? What about the people who are deshittifying things.

I know people are fighting back but I can't help but feel like we have to be submissive (thanks doomers). Because all this and the reactions have nearly made me doomerist.

Anyways I hope this leads to riots.

There are still forums out there, and people still use them! Check out the spacebattles.com forum for one of the biggest out there!

Honestly, part of this is a *scale* problem. There are so many more people online nowdays than there were in the days of forums and personal websites. And a lot of those new people are, well, normies. People who don't really have either the know-how or a good reason to run their own forum or website. So they gravitate toward the big sites where everyone else is.

There ARE barriers to creating your own site or forum, we can't pretend there aren't.

If you use free hosting, you have to abide by the terms of use and community guidelines of whoever is giving you that free hosting. Often, that includes content guidelines about what can and can't be discussed on the platform. Sometimes it even includes giving up the rights to whatever you post there.

The other option is of course to pay to host your own forum or website (like I do). Then no one can tell you what to do, but it does cost money.

And the "normies" like I mentioned above, who don't have a good reason to host their own stuff, certainly don't want to pay to do it. So they just, again, circle whereever everybody else is.

for this specific case of discord, people definitely ARE looking for better alternatives. Stoat (the platform I've been suggesting as a discord replacement) is an open-source project run by a small team.

[anneapocalypse]

Inevitably with the state of social media and content platforms right now we're going to see Pillowfort getting recommended again, so I'm going to just remind people who are thinking of making an account there to read their TOS and content policies carefully--in particular, some of the content policies that afford moderators a high degree of discretion on whether something looks like a violation, making them more or less impossible to enforce consistently.

If you've had a good experience on PF, I'm glad, and honestly with how things are right now, if you want to hedge your bets by trying out other platforms, go for it. Just be wary on all fronts. A lot of the issues of Pillowfort's early days (domain issues, major security issues, banning a user for something not against the TOS and then updating the TOS after the fact) seem to have been largely forgotten, and that does concern me. You can read about the history of the site on Fanlore, and I'd recommend doing so, including the links to fan discussions about the various incidents. I won't say don't make an account, I'm just saying, don't trust them with regard to free expression any more than you'd trust any other for-profit site.

[shsl-fujoshi]

Going Forward

Back in the livejournal days, I wrote a lot more posts that were long and involved, more thought out, and more personal.

I think all of us-- fandom and nerds and geeks specifically, but along with us everyone in the world-- I think we have been immeasurably harmed by corporate social media.

We have been harmed by conforming to an arbitrary word count, by the pressure to post short, “content” multiple times a day, for that content to be “relatable”, tepidly ‘family (advertiser) friendly’, and in the service of getting as much shallow ‘like/share/reblog’ attention to this “content” as possible. In service to our own egos, yes, but beyond that, in service to the desires of the vast, money hungry corporations who graciously allow us to provide free “content” for their vast, money hungry machines of social media.

We have been harmed, too, by the social pressures these corporate machines of mass communication create. The pressure not to be too cringey, too weird, too arrogant; the anti-intellectual pressure never to be “pretentious”.

Well fuck that my posts are not “content” and they are not created for the money hungry corporate machine, and they are not for it to drip feed to a mass audience like baby birds with their mother’s heavily digested pap.

My posts are weird, they are pretentious, and they are not fucking advertiser friendly.

They have contorted our minds to demand constant attention of the mass-communication money making machine they’ve created, and I don’t want to be part of it any more.

Back on Livejournal we were thrilled if a post made it to a few dozen comments.

And you know what? A few comments is leagues and lightyears better than hundreds of nothing-interactions. “Likes” and “reblogs”.

Shallow interaction for the machine to fill a few more milliseconds of scrolling for a few more people.

My posts are worth more than that.

YOUR posts are worth more than that.

I’m in the middle of a vast self-exodus to my own hosting-- as twitter is destroyed from within, and reddit eats itself, and AO3 is the victim of mass campaign of canibalization by fucking normies who are the front of useful idiots for conservative christians, and for terfs-- I am leaving.

Social media is a corpse on the ground, and we “””content creators””” are the soul of it. That soul will not die, we will simply all find new bodies to inhabit and infuse. 

But until that corpse is gone, I intend to be one damned annoying poltergeist for the scavengers to deal with while they rip apart the corpse of social media.

Fuck corporate interests. Fuck the money machine. Fuck the christian conservatives and the TERFs and everyone else who wants to hold you down and make you conform and lay still while they eat your corpse.

I’m pretentious. I’m long winded. And I’m not safe for advertisers.

Rattle those chains, baby. Rattle those chains.

appendix beneath the cut

related links:

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things By Cat Valente

The Enshittification of TikTok by Cory Doctorow

Special note: X-Posted to my personal offsite blog

[disorganizedkitten]

Random question (feel free to ignore! /gen): Have you become interested in any new fandoms recently? If so, why, and which ones?

I have!

 So, I’ve been poking around Danny Phantom for a few years, haven’t published anything other than a cute little crossover fic but I have a whole folder dedicated to them - I like the vibes, the way it can be played to horror or trauma or just for sillies. And I like playing with dead things! The cast is fun too; everyone has their little things but they’re still a team.

 I’m most active currently in Harry Potter as far as writing goes, but reading wise I’ve been on a huge DC kick - mostly batman, but it’s fun to branch out when I get the chance.

 I also stumbled onto the Winx corner of Ao3 a month or so ago; specifically DragonflyxParodies’ A Fable, Agreed Upon series - I’m feral over them. Go read it, it’s lovely. And there are so many cool winx rewrites and redesigns floating around tumblr, it’s so much fun.

  Let’s see, what else; I periodically check in to minecraft smp fandoms; there’s so many options and so much lore to catch up on that it scares me, but it all looks so cool and I really want to catch up and know all the little references I keep seeing.

 I’ve been a Scooby-Doo Gremlin since I was two, and it’s hard to find SD fics that scratch the itch but there’s loads of lovely fanart.

 I can be caught periodically getting very excited about The Coldest Girl In Coldtown by Holly Black; it’s a vampire novel with a lot of really cool worldbuilding and a cast I’d die for.

 Let’s see, what other new fandoms... Megamind’s not new, but it’s been a while since I checked in; once again I think it’s really fun to see the worldbuilding opportunities, and the character dynamics are glorious. 

Other than that: I started watching Only Murders In The Building, and Lucifer recently - I didn’t expect to like either of them as much as I have. Lucifer is way more fun than I thought it’d be, and the characters are exasperating but not in an annoying way. OMITB is interesting but I get so much second hand embarrassment that I can’t binge it. My roommates are also doing a great job of luring me into the Studio Ghibli fandoms - those movies are emotionally dangerous but absolutely adorable, I’ve enjoyed them.

[collsssss]

Is anyone still here?

I know I don’t tumble very well, but I’m still around an still like space shows. How’s it going?

[yahoo-geddon]

Allows adult content, fandom friendly

From the owner of Squidge.org:

"Squidge.org has a robust mailing list software package in place that is a healthy alternative to Yahoo! Groups. It does the usual mailing list stuff, but it also does private file hosting per mailing list. If you need an alternative, ping me. Your list subscribers and archive can be imported (as long as you can export them, or grant me access to be able to grab them), though you will have to upload your file archive manually to maintain proper file security.

Questions? Ping me here or email or Twitter. “

[fanhackers]

Tumblrpocalypse Special, Part 6

Today's scholarly reaction to the Tumblrpocalypse comes from Emily Roach. "One of my big concerns is where fan communities will actually migrate to if Tumblr does end up driving huge parts of fandom away and/or deleting blogs. Dr Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym's research on migration from the journals to Tumblr identifies that the alternative platform needs to be sufficiently well established in order to encourage migration in the first place (see also a Slate article on this). At present the alternative platforms have their own glitches which drove people away from them and/or have left new users underwhelmed. Pillowfort is very new and is still ironing out issues. LJ still has the issue with its Terms of Service. Dreamwidth could work well for fandoms like Harry Potter that have a history of thriving on the journals and are quite meta/fest/fic heavy, but I struggle to see a very media-oriented fandom with a significant number of people who use their mobile phones for fan activity getting on with that space. Twitter is an established option for some fandoms, most notably celebrity fandoms, but it doesn't work at all well for other fandoms. Unlike the LJ to Tumblr move - where Tumblr seemed like the obvious choice to people looking to migrate after deleting LJs in 2017 - my sense is that people don't have that natural space to move to. This will lead, in my view, to people continuing to use Tumblr until the bitter end - see LJ, the biggest migration seemed to come in 2017, some ten years after Strikethrough/Boldthrough - and a new urgency around trialing alternative platforms, seeking out Discord chat spaces (and equivalent) and so on. While people find their feet on other platforms I think fandoms are likely to fragment as I don't think people see any one space as the obvious alternative at present."

[vincennesdimanche]

Someone should tell all the new users on Dreamwidth about the use of icons, and the fun you can have communicating with your icon choice for every comment.