Fandom Wishlist

[melannen]

Snowflake today is about making a fandom wishlist, and I had a little trouble with it, mostly because? Fandom is being pretty good to me right now! I can find plenty of the things I want from it. Fandom ♥

So most of the things I can come up with for a fannish wishlist are more "I wish I was better at dealing with that" or "I wish I had the skill/time/attention to make that", and that's not really the spirit of this prompt.

But I thought about it and threw together some wistful "if only" thoughts I've had lately.

1. More posts to fictional_fans!
2. Any fills for my fanart requests from Wrapping Paper this year
3. Some kind of resolution - or at least acknowledgement - on the whole "Fanlore editors are reposting other fans' works in whole to Fanlore without permission or notification and ignoring fans' attempts to control archiving of their works". It is really bad to have AO3, which is so strongly in favor of making sure everyone who wants to can control who sees their fanworks and when and where, and Fanlore actively working against that in the same org.
4. A way to easily download my whole AO3 reading history to a spreadsheet, since the app from last year is still down and I still don't understand logins well enough to scrape it myself.
5. Some kind of gathering place for fannish types to talk about coding. Like, most of these I've seen are aimed at specific projects, or ancillary to other projects, and I have neither the skill nor focus to feel like I belong there. Is there like a discord for people who want to be able to talk about stuff like throwing together bookmarklets and javascript toys for fandom, or running their own fansite or forum or wiki, all the way up to way more complicated stuff.
6. A fic where you know who your soulmate is the first time you touch them (or see them, or talk to them, or whatever.) Some people will never meet a soulmate, some people have only one, some have a few or a dozen. You though you didn't have one until you heard some friends talking about how it felt to meet theirs and realized that was just what you'd felt every time you met a new person your whole life???
7. Some kind of place where you can just throw out prompts and you don't care what fandom/pairing they are written in. Like Bulletproof Exchange is running now, where you write prompts but the filler can fill with any fandom or pairing? Like that but not an exchange because I'm too tired to do more exchanges. A kinkmeme maybe, if if could be active enough to actually get fills!
8. Somewhere I can play multiplayer Minecraft with other older fans! I have never played multiplayer and I'd love to and there's so much potential to make fannish stuff in it, but I don't really want to dive into the wider Minecraft community.
9. Fanfic recs from people on dreamwidth! Especially aimed at people who may not be super into the fandom, but it's just so good. (Also, more dreamwidth people to link their own fic on their dreamwidths, I don't use AO3 subscriptions heavily and I am always shocked at end-of-year roundups where I'm like, wait, they posted fic this year? Also I just miss the days when my reading list would be chock-full of good fic every day.)
10. I miss in-person fan meetups. I never even went to that many but I want to be in a world where it feels possible again.

Comments

[sophia_sol]

I really ought to post fanfic recs more often. These days I pretty much only do it for yuletide once a year, and everything else is just like "I bookmarked it on pinboard I'm done now." But recs posts are good!

[melannen]

You get a pass on that one because your recs are one of the main things that still keeps pinboard.in/popular/fandom seeded with good fic. :D

(More pinboard bookmarks from Fandom-marked accounts should've also been in 9.)

[sophia_sol]

ahaha why thank you! yes I really really really want more pinboard bookmarks from fandom-marked accounts too, popular/fandom could be such a great resource :(

[melannen]

I need to be better at that! But I really wish Maciej would roll out read-only free accounts, too, like he said he was looking into when he locked it down, so I could keep linking people who don't have seed accounts to it. You can still see the popular pages without an account, but that's it. :/

[sophia_sol]

oh dang, I had no idea that change had been made, because I only interact with pinboard when logged in! yeah read-only free accounts sound like a really important thing

[melannen]

Yeah, I think it was mostly that he was having massive issues with bots overrunning everything, so he had to lock down to users-only to keep the bots out. But with accounts now being a yearly fee and everything else hidden to non-account-holders, it makes it a lot less useful as a community resource. :/ People begged for read-only free accounts at least, so they could still use it for things like public indexes and links lists for courses, but no updates on that afaik.

ETA: It looks like he's actually planning to take time off from activism to put work into Pinboard this year, though? So fingers crossed.

[sophia_sol]

ugh that makes sense as a reaction to the issue but it really does limit community usability, as you say :((( but that's exciting that he might be putting more time into pinboard this year!! I love pinboard but there are definitely some things that need attention