December meme: look I posted this one before midnight!
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 ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
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):
And it will look like this:
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!
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.
Dunno though. Maybe we'll just all end up on Reddit instead. Someone come up with a more convincing scenario.
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):
And it will look like this:
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 24
Kudos poll
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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.)
- 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.
- People will have mostly stopped asking for an app, as fewer and fewer websites bother with them.
- 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.
- It might or might not be part of OTW, but it won’t be part of AO3
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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As far as reblogging goes, linkspam has been a thing for a long time. And I expect everybody on Dreamwidth has pretty much forgotten the "share this entry" link on every public post (there's one on this post!) because nobody uses it - it's for sending a link to the entry by email, how quaint! - but I can't imagine it would take much coding to change that into a "post this link" function.
Voila, lurker engagement within the current DW structure!
(Yes, I am probably missing Details, but I'm neither a coder nor a Tumblr user.)
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