December meme: look I posted this one before midnight!

[melannen]

I was originally planning to use this post to talk about difference between Dreamwidth and newer-style social media sites, but a lot of pixels have been lit on that topic in the last few days, and honestly I think between staranise’s post I linked yesterday and this tumblr post I was tagged on, they covered everything I would have said, only much more concisely!

Instead, here are two important Dreamwidth tips I haven’t seen in many of the posts going around:

1. Yes, Dreamwidth does have a full-text site search! IIRC it was, in the best tradition of the LJ codebase, something that mark threw up over a weekend because he wanted it, and it was rolled out with very little fanfare and isn’t well documented. But it’s there! You get there by going to the “Explore” menu and then “Site and Journal Search” (this is not the same as the “Site and Account Search” in the main search box, confusingly, or any of the options that come up under “Search Dreamwidth”.)

It’s somewhat limited (individual users can opt their content out), and some parts are limited to paid accounts, but free accounts can still use the basic sitewide “public entries” search (despite the message you may get that says it’s disabled - try it, it’ll still work.)

It’s not as developed as AO3’s search, and I don’t know if there’s any secret advanced syntax you can use (does anyone else?), but I believe it is running on the same basic code as AO3’s main site search box, so you will get the same kinds of results for a simple query. It is, however, worlds better than Tumblr’s search, in that it actually brings up the stuff you are looking for in a logical order!

2) If you have a paid account and you want people to be able to leave kudos on your entries, you can use the poll system to do it by copy-pasting this code at the end of every entry (if you're using the html or beta entry pages):
<poll name='' isanon='no' whovote='all' whoview='all'><poll-question type='radio'>Kudos poll<poll-item>I would like to leave kudos here.</poll-item></poll-question></poll>

And it will look like this:

Poll #20841

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 24

View Respondents

Kudos poll

View Answers

I would like to leave kudos here.
24 (100.0%)

Or you can go to the Poll Creator and make your own. Unfortunately there’s not much to be done about the formatting (unless somebody knows a CSS trick I don’t?) but you can do things like change the wording, add more options, restrict the people who can vote, or limit who can see the list of voters.

***

And now, I am going to bring out the magic 8-ball and make some predictions about where fandom will be after everything shakes out in 3-5 years!

• Tumblr will probably still exist and still have active fans on it, but it will be a lot slower and less vibrant, and it will no longer be fandom’s main culture hearth. Honestly I think it had already peaked before this, in terms of influence, but the current unpleasantness is going to a the turning point in which a critical mass of people realize it’s not going to be their forever home.
  
  • If it doesn’t exist anymore (I give this about a 40% chance), it’ll be because Yahoo just plain shut it down, not because everyone left.
    
  • The last reblog will be “GNU Terry Pratchett” even if I have to log back on to do it myself.


• DW will almost certainly still exist, and be pretty much the same, although maybe with shinier image hosting and posting. It will be busier than it was last month, but not not by an order of magnitude. It will also not be the main gathering place; it doesn’t have enough of the things people expect in an internet home these days, and it can’t become that without fundamentally changing in ways that would destroy what it is.
  
  • If it doesn’t exist in the same form anymore, it’ll be because Mark and Denise both got hit by a bus (and then eaten by alligators.)
    
  • I will still be on DW


• Pillowfort, if it hasn’t crashed and burned completely (I dunno what the odds are here, somewhere between DW and Tumblr), will have an active fandom community who want to cling to the Tumblr format the way DW people have clung to the LJ format, but it also won’t been the center of fandom. When fandom moves on, it doesn’t go to a site that’s just like the old one but slightly better, it goes to something entirely different.
  
  • Especially with Pillowfort, where, other doubts aside, the goal seems to be to make a place that’s just like Tumblr but more locked down and controlled - which is a goal I admire for building a community, but something built on the principle of “more locked down and controlled” is never going to be the place where the explosive growth and creativity is happening; that’s not how human culture works.


• Twitter will continue its slow decline, and will probably stop being the place where, for example, pro authors feel like they have to be, but the people who do fandom on Twitter will continue to do fandom on Twitter.


• AO3 will still exist! It will still be AO3, and it will have gained even more market share in terms of fanfic posting. It will have added some major new highly desired features, but they will not include vid hosting, a social network, or an app, and it will still be mostly an archive, not a social center.
  
  • People will have mostly stopped asking for an app, as fewer and fewer websites bother with them.
    
  • There will probably be more meta posted to AO3, maybe even with better infrastructure for it.


• There will likely be an AO3 for fanart, where the servers are owned by a fan-led nonprofit.
  
  • It might or might not be part of OTW, but it won’t be part of AO3
    
  • It’s at least a couple of years down the road
    
  • I don’t know exactly what it’ll be like, but like AO3, it will be primarily a place to host and organize works and link to them from other places; the promotional and social network and community organizing stuff will be happening wherever fandom’s new central space is instead.
    
  • I don’t know that there will be something for vids yet. Vids are a lot harder.


• I don’t see the peer-to-peer/distributed things like mastodon and freenet and so on that I’ve heard being proposed becoming the next big thing. I’m not super familiar with them, but they aren’t sites or networks or communities - they’re technologies. You still need to figure out what you are using the technology to build (I mean, afaik you could even run some kind of Dreamwidth or Archive instance on some of the peer-to-peer networks if you wanted.)
  
  • They also shift a lot of the load - in terms of computer resources, expertise, time and organizing - onto individual members (that’s the point of decentralized.) In theory this is good; in practice, it’s a pretty big barrier to entry for a lot of people who don’t have those resources, and fandom has gotten used to venture capitalists shouldering a lot of that load.
    
  • (It’s also not really new; it’s the same basic idea as torrenting, and as the filesharing we did in college 20 years ago when we all had static IPs on the dorm network and no security and a /pub folder on our linux partitions.)
    
  • They’re also inherently fractured; Mastodon is a bunch of small servers, each of which work slightly differently, and each of which depend on the volunteer efforts of one or two admins in order to stay up; and that plays against it becoming the creative center as well - a creative center needs to be a crossroads.
    
  • If there are major legal losses for internet freedom in the next few years - well beyond what we've already been seeing, such that a non-distributed, non-censored social network becomes unworkable, more of fandom may move to these sort of places - but we in the process we will lose a huge majority of the sort of people who are currently on Tumblr, due to the resources issue, and fandom as a whole will get smaller and sadder.


• The thriving new center probably won't be some newly created, not yet started social network made just for fandom to move to. It's never worked before, and I don't really see it working better this time; a another new site may go up and even become sustainable, but I don't think it will be the happening place to be. I will give "maciej creates a miracle and ends up buying facebook in ten years" maybe 20:1 odds.

So what do I think will be replacing Tumblr?

• It won’t be designed as an intentional replacement for any of the previous ones. It will be something that operates in a completely different way. That's how every other shift has happened.
  
• It probably already exists, and there is probably already a small but growing fandom community on it, many of whom have never even had a Tumblr.
  
• It will also have a large number of non-fandom users on it, doing other things: it will need to be someplace where people who don’t know yet that they’re fans can easily stumble into the fringes and then join up, providing new voices and ideas and growth; and also something where the non-fandom usage can subsidize some of that load.
  
• It will be expansive, and it will allow everything, more or less, at least for now.
  
• As a result, we (still) won’t own the servers. It will probably be another advertising or investor funded site, unless the internet economy as a whole undergoes a seismic shift, because fandom has come to expect easy media sharing, and expect capitalism invisibly subsidizing the space in exchange for data, and fandom really doesn't have the capacity to support something of the size and complexity of Tumblr without that.
  
• It will probably allow more user control of content and privacy than Tumblr did; I think after tumblr discourse we are ready to swing back a little bit in the opposite direction; but that won’t be its major selling point.

My best guess right now is that we’re moving toward at least a few years of Discord being the center of fandom. Discord is still a lot more fractured and locked down than I’d prefer, and certainly from a fandom archivist’s point of view it would be a mess. But that’s where I’m seeing actual enthusiasm and growth going on right now, and it ticks nearly all the boxes for what I’m expecting.

The main obstacle to Discord, I think, is that, at least from what I've explored so far, it doesn't really have any fully public spaces - that is, if you want to share something for everyone to see, you can't do it through Discord, and you can't really create a fully public ID there either. That's something we've been used to in the Tumblr/DW eras that would be a big change if Discord becomes the primary hearth.

But in the LJ days, we archived fic there too, and transitioning to doing that on AO3 instead seems to have worked pretty well. And before LJ, we never really had everything all in one basket. So it's not a requirement. ETA: And I meant to add here that I think the only reason Tumblr was able to become what it became is that AO3 already existed - we didn't need the main social site to be good at archiving fic, because we had a separate and reliable tool for that already. So if we get more reliable side-tools, the role of the social hub might change back to more the way things looked in the pre-LJ days.

So I might envision something like this, by the time 45 is out of office:

• AO3 is where fanfic, and increasingly, meta, are posted.
  
• There's an AO3 for images that serves the same purpose for visual artists.
  
• Vidders and audio people are still sort of nomadic, because those are just harder.
  
• Discord is where all the actual 'networking' part of social networking happens, and where casual fans who don't do a lot of producing original content spend most of their time
  
• (--anything that happens in that part of fandom that doesn't end up on AO3 or Fanlore is lost forever to history)
  
• Most content-producing fans have something resembling a blog - maybe on DW, maybe on Wordpress, maybe something else - that functions almost like personal websites in the ML days, where they can have a public-facing home and put up things that don't belong on AO3 or wherever, so that they can be linked to on Discord.

Dunno though. Maybe we'll just all end up on Reddit instead. Someone come up with a more convincing scenario.

Comments

[treewishes]

Whereas I would really like to see Dreamwidth be the social heart of fandom. It seems to me that a structured link to a photo host (and gif host) site would make that happen. If we need to create that host, I think we could also do that.

What do you see as the big roadblocks to queen DW?

[melannen]

I think it's mostly what's in the tumblr post I linked - they put it better than I've ever managed to. DW really doesn't have any way for lurkers/non-content-producers/etc to participate in fandom, not the way they can on a site like Tumblr or Twitter or even AO3 where they can create a visible presence and feel like they're contributing via likes/kudos/reblogs/tags and things like that. Sure, you can be part of DW fandom without writing fic or longform meta, but you still have to do a lot of writing things in your own words, and do it on the regular if you want to make any sort of impression, and the people who want to engage even at that level are very much the tip of a fandom iceberg.

Back before Tumblr's generation of social media, we all just accepted that those people were invisible watchers; but now they've gotten used to not being invisible, and we've gotten used to them not being invisible too, and they really did contribute a lot of the richness of Tumblr fandom, as did the ease of transitioning back and forth between consume-and-reblog mode and content-producer mode as you had the energy. I don't think fandom as an aggregrate is going to be willing to give that up (and we will lose a lot of we do).

A discord-type site isn't going to allow that kind of casual engagement in the same way as Tumblr or Twitter, and we'll probably still lose a lot of those people, but from what I've seen so far, that kind of quiet casual fans are much more willing to do something like hang out in a discord room than to transition to something like Dreamwidth.

(I don't actually think social networking that allows for the reblog-only type of engagement without turning into an uncontrollable dumpster fire is a solved problem yet, though. If someone does solve it, that is definitely where fandom will end up.)

And honestly, I don't think Dreamwidth could survive being the next tumblr, anyway - I don't think there's any way Denise and Mark would be able to get the resources together to support that kind of load and content, at least not without selling out, or completely starting over with a new codebase, neither of which they're going to do. (TBH I'm not even really sure I want DW to be the social heart of fandom; I'm happy with it continuing to mostly be reliable and comfortable and here for when people are tired of being in the happening place, and hopefully eventually pay half-a-dozen employees a good wage, and be mostly full of people who have already seen things and been through stuff.)

[slashmarks]

Your scenario for fandom seems pretty reasonable to me, and puts into words a lot of the feelings I've been having about other people's suggestions. I'm not sure that you're right that Discord in particular will be the new home of fandom, but I wouldn't be shocked if you were, either.

In particular I agree it'll be something new, not dreamwidth and not an intentional tumblr clone; and not something that requires massive technical proficiency before starting up, unless it has to be the latter because suddenly you have to illegally dodge internet censorship to be a part of fandom at all. Which I really hope won't happen for reasons well beyond fandom, and there do seem to be pretty major barriers in the way at least in the United States that 45 couldn't disassemble by fiat. (I guess if it does happen, at least the internet bases of other countries have paved the way for us.)

Honestly, it strikes me that decentralization might be a barrier for Discord, too. The code's all already there, but you need (a) mod(s) for any given private chatroom to keep them running who have learned how to do setups for various aspects of the rooms, not just the social aspects of modding. And modding a live chatroom is a more significant investment than an LJ comm.

[melannen]

I don't think Discord is the perfect next place, but I haven't seen any place that seems likelier, and a lot of people are already doing most of their fandom there.

The decentralization on Discord is my main reason to doubt it, but it is more centralized than even something like, say, slack - you can have a persistent identity across channels (including "friends" connections that are separate from any channel), and easily be in multiple channels at once in the same app/window and see what's up in all of them, and you don't have to have a "home base" channel like on Mastodon that will leave you homeless if it fails. It really is almost more like a bunch of locked LJ comms in terms of centralization, except it's a lot simpler to invite new people to the comm.

I think the modding required on a live chatroom varies as much as it does between LJ comms - a busy lj comm could require a full-time team of mods, active 24 hours. There just aren't many that are that busy anymore! Whereas I've been in active IRC chats where the only modding that ever happened was somebody remembering that it was possible to change the joke channel topic every so often, or kicking someone if there was a glitch that didn't log them out right. (TBH, I think a lot of fandom discord channels are heavily overmodded right now. There's no reason a channel with 30 subscribers needs 40 subrooms, each with their own topic rules, all of which are heavily enforced.)

[sophia_sol]

Your scenario sounds very convincing to me. Given what I've been seeing happening for the last little while I've been worried for a while anyway that discord or something like it is going to be the next major happening place for fandom, which means I will not be participating in the major happenings. Honestly dw/lj style fandom is still my jam - largely longer-form text based. Thankfully dw doesn't seem to be dying, but it'll be sad if, next time I fall into a new fandom, I can't really go to wherever that fandom is happening

[melannen]

I have just finally gotten into Discord - I don't like it as much as I liked IRC and I haven't really found a Discord channel I'm enjoying as much as some of my old IRC rooms - but think I could manage the transition if I had to.

But I spent pretty much the entire Tumblr era away from the major happenings, except when I was really deep into Les Mis (and even then I was mostly interacting with DW friends and IRC people) and I think I was happier that way.

[ambyr]

Plausible—I definitely think Reddit and Discord are the places to watch. I have a slight sad in that I vastly prefer Slack to Discord (it has threads! Threads are great!), but I accept that format war has already been lost.

I do think people underestimate, as you say, the importance of having a platform with both fandom and non-fandom people if we want fandom to grow (or even balance out attrition). I think DW’s failure to attract many non-fans is part of what keeps fandom from really flourishing here.

[melannen]

Slack is so much more USABLE, OMG! And tbh the two most successful fannish channels I know of are on Slack. But it's also a lot more complicated to learn than Discord, it's less centralized - if you're in more than one Slack at the same time, you have to log in to all of them separately, and it's more complicated to add people to a Slack - and it's a lot more interested in pushing paid accounts as well. Slack is just not as casual-friendly, and it seems to have lost the chat client war as far as fandom goes. (Also the Slack app still crashes my phone.)

[jadelennox]

That's defining fandom as a certain core group of people, though. The substance of that group of "fandom" will change with the technology, just as it did from zines to mailing lists to LJ to DW to Tumblr and Twitter. Meanwhile the kids who became fans on Wattpad and Youtube don't even know the rest of us exist, except maybe some Tumblr overlap. I'm sure there's Whatsapp fandom and Snapchat fandom, if I knew what they looked like. I know Wattpad kids who do Yuletide, because they know about because their moms do Yuletide.

So this is really a question more of "where will the people who comprised Tumblr fandom schism to", and as someone who sat here on DW and watched my LJ/DW fandoms splinter to Tumblr and Twitter and even Facebook, while the mailing list old timers sat in the corner cackling and laughing, the answer is "several places", I bet.

In any case, I agree with most of this, but I can't imagine it would be Discord. Obviously the bad UI won't stop people because *cough* *cough* Tumblr, but Discord is specifically not a place where you can just happen upon a community without effort. That was the main selling point of Tumblr and Twitter for fannishness, as far as I can tell.

[deird1]

I agree with your thoughts.

I reckon most of fandom is more likely to migrate over to Reddit, while still ficcing in AO3.

[sara]

You may be right. I observe that my gamer son is on Discord...which worries me a bit because I'm not and it's therefore difficult for me to keep an eye on.

[melannen]

Discord is definitely where gamer fandom already is, yeah. The fact that it's a lot harder for your parents to track is probably one of the selling points over other social media...

[ratcreature]

I've only briefly checked out Discord. I never warmed to IRC either. The chat format makes interaction across different time zones much harder than flists/dashboards and comments which are asynchronous, and also I find chatting in a foreign language more exhausting than posting, because fitting in rereading and editing is harder. It is more like having to talk in English rather than writing English.

[melannen]

Yeah, a move to a chat-like system will be a real loss in a lot of ways! There will be a lot more people who just find it completely inaccessible than even Tumblr.

I don't *want* fandom central to end up on Discord, I just think it's likely it will. But I will still be here on DW regardless. (I haven't really had an issue with the format on Discord- having already gotten used to IRC and Slack - but I also haven't really found a Discord that I've clicked with enough to really feel like I want to spend time there just for fun. And with DW doing the thing, I haven't really had time to look for the past week or so anyway.)

[china_shop]

I will still be on DW

Me too. :-)

I found this analysis really interesting.

[melannen]

DW forever!

[kore]

I like all your predictions. I wish I didn't!

My best guess right now is that we’re moving toward at least a few years of Discord being the center of fandom. Discord is still a lot more fractured and locked down than I’d prefer, and certainly from a fandom archivist’s point of view it would be a mess. But that’s where I’m seeing actual enthusiasm and growth going on right now, and it ticks nearly all the boxes for what I’m expecting.

The main obstacle to Discord, I think, is that, at least from what I've explored so far, it doesn't really have any fully public spaces - that is, if you want to share something for everyone to see, you can't do it through Discord, and you can't really create a fully public ID there either. That's something we've been used to in the Tumblr/DW eras that would be a big change

That is really depressingly plausible.

[melannen]

I don't like them either!

(well, okay, ngl, I kinda like the ones about Tumblr and Twitter fading away. And fanart finding a home.)

[musyc]

Oh hey, an easy copy/paste kudos poll! That is fantastic. I'll have to save that.

[melannen]

Cool! Hope it works.

Although gotta say this is the first anything ever I have made where I got 5x the comments as kudos. :D

[stellar_dust]

So, what actually is discord? Basically a series of chatrooms? Has anyone written up a fandom discord primer?

I have a hard time understanding how something chat-based becomes the central location for fandom production ... I mean, I think about my LJ days, when chatting with fandom friends on AIM was definitely an important part of my fandom experience -- but the real stuff that mattered in a larger sense than chillin' with some friends, that was all on LJ where sharing, archiving, discussing, and interlinking could all happen easily. I kind of, slowly, resentfully, impotently followed fandom to tumblr, but I don't think I'll be doing even the minimum to follow it to discord, unless someone can convince me it's both more than a chatroom, and about as low-effort as tumblr.

I've been contemplating trying to reboot my DW presence. I never really got the hang of using tumblr for anything but lurking, and have been craving an excuse to dump the facebook hellsite for everything but irl necessities. Hmm.

(What I really want from tumblr is a way to archive my liked posts, but that's never going to happen, alas.)

[sylvaine]

Actually, there is a way to archive your liked posts! I believe niqaeli posted the how-to the other day. (Of course, that does involve having enough disc space to save everything, which has so far been my stumbling block.)

[sylvaine]

I think your analysis sounds pretty spot-on, and while I hope really hard that fanart does find a forever home (and I think podfic and other audio, too, has good chances of that), the idea of fandom moving to Discord or Reddit is... completely horrifying to me. Neither of those platforms works for me at *all*, and I don't know how to live my life without being on the pulse of fandom. :| Unfortunately, I think you're right with those being the most likely candidates. Augh.

[melannen]

I think podfic/fancasts might get a better forever home, but fanmixes and that end of fannish audio, probably not, unfortunately.

I don't really like either of those option either! Maybe there's some vibrant community lurking somewhere on some site nobody's heard of yet that's just about ready to break out.

[lannamichaels]

Dunno though. Maybe we'll just all end up on Reddit instead. Someone come up with a more convincing scenario.

I'm thinking the next platform will be reddit, since it currently exists, is widely known, and already has some fandoms on it.

My problem with Discord is finding the damn things. I'm aware that there are various discords out there that I might be interested in, but how do I know where they are? How do I connect? I'm in the yuletide one, but that's just begrudging migration from yuletide irc.

The "how the hell do I even get there" was my barrier with usenet; I guess everything old is new again.

[melannen]

In my very limited experience, the main way you find more discords is going into a discord you're already on and going "hey, does anybody know of a good discord for X?" and then you get a bunch of invites.

It's not the greatest of systems.

I thought it was going to be Reddit for awhile, but then I actually got a Reddit account, and I just don't know anymore. And I don't even really know how to articulate it.

It sort of seems like Reddit is fairyland: stuff goes in, and there's glorious magic happening inside, but not much really gets out, and what does, can't quite survive in the non-Reddit world anymore (And you'd think that also applied to Tumblr, but Tumblr was going to make the outside world deal with Bredlik George one way or another! Reddit just draws you back to Reddit). And they need constant infusions of mortal creativity from outside in order to keep going. So it's hard for me to see it becoming a wellspring (even the shitty conspiracy theories seem to mostly really have their living centers on places like 4chan.)

It's also got some kind of weird time-dilation thing I don't understand going on where things rapidly fade back into the mists of history? Except when they don't?

But maybe I'm just in odd corners of Reddit and haven't figured it out yet.

[rivenwanderer]

I'm curious what AO3 for images would feel like... Maybe some amount of cool AI driven recommendations based on art style, plus robust tagging/searching/commenting like AO3? Ability to embed the images elsewhere?

[melannen]

At minimum, it would have lots of hosting space, ability to easily embed elsewhere (and some kind of extra protection against embeds breaking), some kind of ability to lock, and good ability to organize and control your images both within your account and sitewide (although honestly, I always hated the album-metaphor systems that both Flikr and dA used for that, so hopefully something other than that?) Maybe some equivalent of kudos/comments/like/collections/bookmarks to let users interact somewhat with the images, but not to the extent that Tumblr allowed it, and it might not even be necessary at all, if there was a different site people were doing most of their embedding on.

And a really, really carefully written TOS and a very, very good Abuse and Legal team that would make a whole lot of people very, very angry. First you'd need a very good system for preventing reposts of other people's content, which would be doable, but you'd need an entire tag-wrangler-sized team of people doing nothing but reviewing that, probably.

And you'd have to explicitly allow all kinds of legal adult content, and stay sex-positive and keep the antis out, but also somehow prevent it from immediately becoming a site used almost exclusively by professional sex workers. But I don't think banning art-for-sale would work even the way it has on AO3, because fanartists have a much longer history of working for money. Maybe it would, though, if your founders were resolute and steadfast enough to weather the initial outcry.

(And it's not that pro sex workers don't *also* need a we-own-the-servers site like that, but I think it needs to not be the same site that is made for cartoons of Bucky and Steve making out naked. The problem with pro porn on art sites is basically the same as the problem with allowing commercial promotion of original fiction on book/writing sites: there is so much unmet demand for it that the minute it's not banned, there's no room for anything else. And erotic photos have the additional problem that unlike your uncle's memoir about his constipation problems, people are actually willing to pay lots money for it, so it also shoots up to the top of all the rec algorithms.) (Maybe once you got the software written, you could run two instances, one for fanartists and one for people selling stuff, exactly the same otherwise? idk, that probably would get way too complicated too.)

Further prediction: I will not be involved in creating the AO3 for images.

[cesy]

Thank you for this; the whole discussion is fascinating.

[cyprinella]

And AO3 might be out of beta by then.

[alyndra]

I'm laughing ♥

[alyndra]

I love this post, it says a lot of things that line up really well with what I've been mulling over on these subjects lately. Also, hi! It took me halfway through the comments section to realize why your name was so familiar — I loved your PotC fic back in the day! I'm rediscovering all sorts of people I used to follow here on DW, it's an amazing feeling.

I'll break with your other commenters by saying that I've been having enormous fun on Discord for most of the past year. I missed the eras of AIM or any other sort of chat completely, or maybe I was just too much of a lurker back then for anyone to pull me into one. I do think Discord is going to play a major role in the fandom experience of the next few years: it's grown too quickly, with no signs of slowing down, not to.

Is that a good thing? Some of what I've seen on twitter and tumblr make me think fandom has gotten a little too comfortable having private conversations in public: people talk shipping pretty freely on twitter as long as they aren't directly tagging the actors, and I don't know what to make of it. Fandom's gotten really public since I got back into it, especially SPN fandom maybe. So as much as I want new fans to be able to lurk invisibly like I once did, I also do appreciate and feel a little more comfortable being sort of hidden away in a private server. There's a lot of 'purity culture' on tumblr too, from younger fans who are disturbed by kinky content and getting increasingly militant about it.

I love the idea of fanart getting its own space/archive. Tumblr was never going to be that, long-term. It would be especially cool if it could be built close enough alongside AO3 for there to be some interconnectivity: gifting works or 'inspired by,' particularly. But I have no idea how tricky that would be to implement.

As long as I'm wishing for things, I also love the idea that DW could have a place in the fannish ecosystem not just as the place everybody goes to when each ad-run site inevitably in turn betrays us, but as a more solid, public 'landing pad' between Discord and the rest of the world. It just seems like there's so many sites these days to split our attention between!

Still, I feel pretty optimistic and hopeful about the future in general now, which is weird. People have been complaining about what a hellsite tumblr was for as long as I remember it existing. And the energy I see everybody putting into figuring out what's going to come next is really exciting. Who knows what it'll look like in ten years?

[attie]

Ooh, good point about the less-public nature of discord, that reconciles me a little towards the platform. (Especially having just gotten sniped yet again on twitter today by bots that retweet everything containing a specific word, no matter that you were a dozen replies deep into what is pretty much a private conversation at this point. No, I did not want this discussion of the minutiae of visiting an onsen while genderqueer publicly broadcast, tyvm!)

I figure I can probably manage to get along with discord despite the real-time nature of it, as long as I find some not hellaciously busy servers (whyyy are they called servers?? *tech person whine*). I managed to get into IRC, surprisingly.

[alias_sqbr]

Thank you for the kudos code!

[hebethen]

Skimming, I didn't see anyone mention it in the comments, but I do believe you can force phrase search with quotation marks around the phrase in question, similar to how Google (<growl>) used to work. Note however that punctuation marks seem to be stripped across the board (including hyphens).

[aethel]

I've heard rumblings of plans to set up new vidding and podfic archives. I don't know if those will pan out.

♦

[foreverdawning]

I've enjoyed reading your thought process on this. It's kind of alarming when you started listing out different alternatives to tumblr I realized I have an active presence in all of them.

For me, tumblr is the best social media for fandom/nonfandom stuff. I started using it when I was 15 and got used to the layout. When LJ was in its heyday I was too young to understand it or use it. It got me to thinking about why I'm still on DW despite the fact I normally hate reading long walls of text, but then I realized as an adult working on a computer all day I've got nothing but time on my hands. Younger me never really needed to sit down at a desk all day and also have unlimited internet access.