Notes about Fandom

Notes about fandom spaces, fan life, fan output, etc. Some crossover interest with internet notes. Newer notes are at the top.

newbie fic authors, shooting themselves in the foot: This fic is bad haha I suck at writing lol I am being mean to myself in the hopes that you will be nice to me but actually am dissuading anyone from even clicking on my fic because all I have done to advertise it is tell you why you shouldn't read it

me: I am King Big Dick of Fanfic Mountain and I have arrived in your fandom with the Express Intention of writing my Very Favorite Fics, which I will generously allow you to read. You're welcome.

Source: formlessvoidbest (Tumblr) (archive) / Noted: 2025 April 18 / Discuss: On Dreamwidth

This is a slow fandom zone

None of that “Oh no they bomb-dropped all the episodes in a week 1 month ago, I’m late!” “The tag hasn’t been active all week is the fandom dead?” “I only got a hundred shares the first hour no one cares about my art”

Slow down

Take a deep breath and slow down

Fandom is YOU. And me and everyone. If we doodle stick figures for a show that ended 30 years ago we aren’t “late” or “doing too little”, we’re playing dolls in our own time and having fun with works of art that mean a lot to us

You can literally watch and engage with something that aired in 2004 as if it aired yesterday

If the tag hasn’t been active for 14 months guess what? If YOU post there, it isn’t dead. Literally you can talk about anything you want whenever you want there is no weird law against watching things that people aren’t actively talk about

Let’s be deranged about stories together

Source: copyspaghetti.tumblr.com (archive) / Noted: 2025 March 17 / Discuss: On Dreamwidth

* all posts are public, leading to epic levels of wank
* people reply at different points in the conversation, also leading to wank but more importantly, obscuring parts of the conversation and also making the full conversation only viewable to the initial poster
* sharing anything automatically shares it with everyone you know on that platform because you can't have subgroups for your content unless you make multiple accounts
* real fucking names
* constantly changing usernames (looking at you tumblr) makes it impossible to know who you're even following/who's following you. it also makes it hard to keep track of friends
* platforms are maximized for “engagement” not for community, so it's all about getting the likes and shares and who cares about deep diving anything
* priority is mostly given to short form content which makes nuance difficult
* everything moves so fast that it's difficult to have a follow up conversation on anything you post because people can't find the initial thought
* everything is presented without the context of the posts that came before and after them - especially on sites that don't give you a date/timestamp
* tags are communal rather than personal, so you never really know what you'll find in there. Everyone wants to organize their own space, but the items they put in their containers might be something you're allergic to (to stretch a metaphor)
I can't do twitter. Tumblr makes me feel more like either a spectator or a performer. Tiktok is every social media experience I've ever had, played through at 100x speed. No option is perfect, but some are way less perfect than others. At least for me.

Source: memorizingthedigitsofpi's Dreamwidth Journal (2021) / Noted: 2025 February 27

(..) I think twitter and tumblr and the modern social media platforms are inherently forcing people to be performative? Because you're never in your own space, you're always speaking in a big courtyard full of people where someone else might hear you and answer, and there's fun in finding new people like that but it's also exhausting in that you always have to be on. Unless you hide something carefully in a post with no tags on tumblr, I guess, which is like whispering into the void because it will be lost in two minutes since that's just the way the platform works, pushing new content on top all the time.

Like, in theory just as many people could be reading and listening here on DW… but I think that comes with more awareness that you are lurking, this isn't your space. And there's nothing for you to “win” here - you can't make yourself look good by reblogging/retweeting interesting content or by disagreeing outrageously with a Bad Take (which may be genuinely bad, or maybe just too easy to take in bad faith.)

And there's nothing to “win” in terms of engagement here either. There's no like or anything. If people want to interact, they have to pause and write some thoughts - and there's no internet points to win there either, just a quality connection.

how does the structure of web 2.0 socmed harm fandom?

in aggregate: it forces fandom[$], a diverse space where people go to indulge niche interests and specific tastes, into overexposure to outsiders and to one another, and exacerbates the situation by removing all semi-private interaction spaces, all moderation tools, all content-limiting tools, and all abuse protection.

The result is that fandom on web 2.0 - tumblr in particular - is overrun with widespread misinformation, black & white reasoning obliterating nuanced debates, mob rule and shame culture as substitutes for moderation features, fear of dissent and oversensitivity to disagreement, hatedoms and anti- communities, and large/expanding pockets of extremist echo chambers that have no reality check to protect those trapped inside.

Source: freedom-of-fanfic's Tumblr (2018) / Noted: 2025 February 27

When you pour your community-building efforts into Tumblr or try to instigate anything more than empty positivity and aesthetics, you are trying to extract meaningful discussion and nuance out of a platform that is working against you. It's possible, sure, it's not that you can't, but it's like trying to chop down a tree with a steak knife. It's not a tool suited to the job. The community spaces (i.e. the tag search) cannot be moderated. The reblog system is structurally geared toward boosting hostility. You cannot disable reblogs or additions on your posts, leaving you constantly exposed to the whims of other people. There is no room for making mistakes, since anything you post (once reblogged) becomes impossible to take back. The ask-advice blog culture is completely lopsided. You are constantly operating in the short-term immediacy of the Now, you are discouraged from using a web building block as basic as the link, and you can't even block people in a way that keeps them off your dash.

I can't tell you the number of people who I've seen refer to the Tumblr experience as “screaming into the void,” and these are only some of the reasons for that. Take stock of your options and consider redirecting some of your community's time & energy into something other than Tumblr.

Source: osteophage (originally posted to Pillowfort 2019, reposted to Dreamwidth 2021) / Noted: 2025 February 27

Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I could not believe what I was seeing.

It was like a mirror world to YouTube comments, where several dozen anonymous people had come together in love and harmony to write a complex, logically coherent document, based on a single tweet.

All I could think was–who ARE these people?

Source: Idle Words (archive) / Noted: 2018 December

• Pinboard entry at Fanlore.org
• Pinboard Dreamwidth community (not active)

Notes from discussions about moving fandom spaces into the fediverse (or not).

I'm now thinking about .dat or p2p for hosting and serving art and video fanworks (for me, that network would have to be about fanworks, I'm not seeding non fanworks or risking hosting non fanworks; I'm willing to stand behind a broad array of fanworks as the AO3 does but NOT, say, pirated movies or porn that has nothing to do with fandom) and federated social networking (hubzilla, mastedon, any social media site that gives you a nomadic identity and is interoperable with other systems) for engagement. In my dream of dreams this would be backed up by something like an OTW-run deposit library that stored but didn't serve fanworks.

Most of this is beyond my current understanding BUT I do wonder if having all three systems (archiving/hosting/social networking) in one thing would be a good idea (or possible)– surely that would take a lot of computing power? Internet power? Plus then building the whole system itself seems like an enormous task. I do look forward to seeing what people come up with, though!

I guess technically we could cobble some of this together right now while we wait for The Big One. Like, a seedbox or two (or more) for hosting fanvids and art, maybe, plus Mastodon plus (archive). Or using IRC again, THAT would be a throwback. Of course, we don't own those servers, etc.

Source: cesperanza's Dreamwidth Journal / Noted: 2018 December (Pinboard)

Fandom is, once again, in flux. Anyone who's been around for more than a few years knows the signs have been building: deleted accounts and new terms of service, followed by talk of moving elsewhere, fracturing communities over multiple platforms, sometimes breaking communities entirely. It's a common pattern a lot of us have come to see as an inevitability, just something that happens every five or ten years. But of course there is a cost, archival as well as communal. That chatfic you loved gets deleted. The old homepage of your favorite vidder goes down. Entire fandoms' discussions disappear forever.

We've all been there at least once, Or we're about to be there, because again: it's happening with Tumblr. People won't all leave at once. The demise of LJ was measured in years, not days. But eventually, even if it's still up, it won't be what it was. Content will slowly degrade - image hosting, external links, even the posts themselves deleted due to inactivity or changes in management. Link rot, in other words.

So. It's happening. What can be done about it?

There have been a lot of really good discussions so far. Consensus so far appears to be some combination of the following: the new platform must allow photo/text/video sharing as well as conversations; the new platform must allow NSFW content and have robust filtering; the new platform must be resistant to the kind of profit-driven vicissitudinous behavior most tech companies embrace.

I agree with all of this. I also agree with the problem statement, which I've seen repeated again and again, that fandom should be more distributed - that no single (especially not corporate-owned) social network should be the point of failure.

So. Let's talk about server federation.

Source: impertinence's Dreamwidth Journal / Noted: 2018 December (Pinboard)