![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptChallenge #3 asks us to promote communities, festivals, challenges, and other things that bring us together in fandom.
Here's the extra text:
Several of the things that help keep me in a brain state that doesn't spiral downward into feeling like no progress has been nor ever will be made are communities and ideas that have low requirements to what they do.
I also participate in a significant number of fanworks exchanges and challenges. To the point where someone has said that they are impressed by the number and quantity involved.
Those are all of my recommendations for communities on Dreamwidth (and one community that moves places).
Going farther into the meta weeds, community in the Dreamwidth and LiveJournal models follows more the idea of bulletin board systems, news readers, and forums than it does the agora of most modern social media spaces. Rather than each of us being Comicus, the stand-up philosopher, with our small plot of space to shout into the air with, and hope there are enough followers that we might influence someone (or possibly get them to drop some coins on our blanket), the community is structured a lot more like a convention meetup.
The fusion of blogging and BBS makes Dreamwidth and DW-style interaction somewhat unique, in that each user has their own personal space to orate, scribble, art, flail, squee, and curate exactly how they wish. (The controls on that are stellar, really, and the access / subscription separation is so helpful in this.) And then there are the communities, where users come together on shared interests, shows, desires, or other things and there are some moderators of the community that try to keep it true to the founding and to curate what they want in it.
When people around me have said they miss the communities of LiveJournal, they mostly miss that there was a connected tissue between users and communities that was user-user, user-community, and perhaps most crucially, community-community, where if a person could find their way to at least one part of the web, they would soon be able to traverse that web to the spot where they wanted to be and would have plenty of similar people around. It was a little bit like webrings in that regard, just more of a hub-and-spoke model repeated fractally rather than the ring that could only be traversed around the outer edge. When LiveJournal's community got shattered (especially after both instances where accounts were suspended and content deleted, which Tumblr is now feeling the pain of), the that web of connections was lost as people shifted to new platforms and could no longer easily talk among themselves. Regrettably, that piece is not easily recoverable, even as people try, in their new homes, to set up ways of making it easy for people to find their fandoms when they're just getting started. The increasing fragmentation of the Web makes it harder for people across sites to find each other and to talk with each other.
The increasing fragmentation of the Web goes along with walled gardens and corporitization and the carving out of a place built on interoperability into fiefdoms of capitalism and profit. It also turns out that ease of discoverability and ease of curation have been set against each other in this new media landscape. Our advertising overlords, perennially interested in making money by letting companies target us with temptations based on the content we post, want to make it very easy for us to find our friends and not-yet-friends up that we will use the site more, which means more ads and more revenue. They want our content to be easily amplified, as well, for the same reasons - hot content draws eyes from both inside and outside the site, and that means more ads. While each ad might only be sold for cents USD (or fractions thereof), in the aggregate, you can make enough money to keep a site going.
What they are most decidedly not interested in is someone using their site, having a small group of friends who do so as well, and that group just happily having private conversations among themselves without needing to care or worry about the greater world at large. There's no money in that, because there's no incentive for them to keep engaged with the site as long as possible. But when their content is never really private, even if there are privacy options that can be exercised, then the rest of the user group can see them and participate in their conversations. Even when they're not wanted. Especially when they're not wanted. And now you have a situation where being easily discoverable and having public anything is an easy venue for harassment and worse, but you also want to stay with a particular platform because people you genuinely do want to interact with are on it as well. And it also creates a problem that I think may have something to do with the rise of the philosophy usually referred to as the "antis" - if everything is public and there's no true privacy, then everyone is performing to an audience all the time. Studying toxic masculinity's high emphasis on performative gestures means you end up in a situation where the pressure not to be a target for being insufficient pushes people into being extra instead. There's no reason to believe the highly performative space of social media doesn't work the same way, and so you get a lot of people who really aren't sure this is their jam joining in the Two Minutes' Hate. They could just step aside to somewhere that doesn't demand that level, but they would also need to bring their friends with them. Or find new friends. And so the cycle continues until something intervenes to get them off the need to be so performance-based.
The Fediverse, and federation in general, seems to be trying to thread the needle between trying able to set up in a space where you have control and privacy and can curate your space while also making it easy for you to find and follow your friends or other people who interest you. And in a world where everyone has Internet space, the means to afford it, the ability to administer it, and the Internet space itself was not full of malicious actors using computers for their purposes, federation might very well have become the dominant method for social media and content publishing. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of hurdles to clear on both technical and non-technical grounds before federation is as easy to use (and to secure) as a single-site service like Dreamwidth is. If enough things implode in the same way that Tumblr did, to the point where things are fragmented so severely and there's no site that fen can trust to do right by them, then federation might be just the thing.
Because the cycle of getting big and then getting betrayed when the advertisers demand the porn stop is not going to stop until we all either migrate to places without ads and support them with our money or we seize control of the publishing infrastructure for ourselves and learn all of the attendant skills that come with that. Some of us will do the first, others the second, and it will all still essentially rely on people not being jerks and being willing to do the difficult administrative work and giving their users enough notice to migrate when they no longer are able to keep their node alive.
On a more local level, though, the issue of "nobody participates on Dreamwidth communities any more" might be usefully blamed on the runaway success of the Archive of Our Own, since it, like Dreamwidth, was formed with a very specific "fuck you" in mind regarding the lack of places where fans could have their content, regardless of what the advertisers thought about it. It doesn't have a robust community space, because its primary purpose is to be an archive, rather than a social network. It has enough of those things, however, in comments and kudos and bookmarks, to do the main fannish interaction that communities would facilitate: sharing works, collecting feedback, and performing recommendations as well as a "to read later" list. AO3 also does collection curation, has the most robust tagging system it can, and can manage just about every aspect of an exchange or challenge where the end goal is to have a collection of works available for people to peruse and interact with. So there's a lot of things that the community space used to do that AO3 can do and do well. It's not a complete solution, as there are still some functions that communities handle with regard to exchanges and challenges, like organizing, rules decisions, tag nomination clarification, and other sorts of things that AO3 doesn't have the capacity for. And for in-between communication or things like the land communities or other rolling and ongoing matters that don't fit well into the discrete tings available on AO3, even if AO3 gets used to store and host things that might be used in challenges and communities elsewhere. Between AO3 and the fragmentation of LiveJournal, it's a smaller unit that went to Dreamwidth, and maybe the communities aren't quite as well in contact with each other as they might have been before. (And also, the proliferation of media and fandoms associated means there's not always as many people making the bridges across fandoms, because there's not enough time to watch everything any more.
Of course, I could be entirely wrong about all of this, and maybe some of the Tumblr influx will help with that, or will help rebuild some of the communities in use in a quest to help rebuild some of the functions that were lost in the exodus. We'll have to see how it all shakes out.
Here's the extra text:
We all have our favorite places to spend our fandom time, but the world is so huge and there’s so much going on that sometimes it’s hard to find the thing you’re looking for. Maybe you don’t even know where to look. Tell us about your favorite places to get inspired, get involved and get you pushing forward.The recommendations will come first, the philosophy about community and such afterward, so that you don't have to wade through me waxing in long-form if all you want is the recs.
What makes fandom more fun is when more people get involved. Tell us where the party is. Or, if you’re stuck in a rut yourself and looking for things to get you out of it, peruse your fellow participant’s posts and see where they go. You never know where you might find your next fandom squee play place!
Several of the things that help keep me in a brain state that doesn't spiral downward into feeling like no progress has been nor ever will be made are communities and ideas that have low requirements to what they do.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
awesomeers asks us to think of a single thing that we can be proud of for the day. There are some days where there are more than one, and sometimes there's only one. There's no requirement on how complex the thing is, either - if you are proud because you got out of bed today, that qualifies.- [There was a thing here, but by request, it's been removed.]
- snowflake_challenge and sunshine_challenge are both really good at getting me into a self-reflective mood and keeping track of knowing where I am and where I've been, so that when I say the view in front of me still looks the same, I can see that there's still been a lot of journey already covered.
I also participate in a significant number of fanworks exchanges and challenges. To the point where someone has said that they are impressed by the number and quantity involved.
- Many of the exchanges I participate in announce themselves either on fandomcalendar or fandom_on_dw.
- Both chocolateboxcomm and trickortreatex run with very small word counts, in the 300-500 range, so if you don't want the 1,000 word minimum, you can make and give a lot of smaller-sized gifts as they come to mind. If you want something that's a bit longer, fandom5k starts at a 5,000 word minimum.
- In addition to exchanges that focus on crossovers, alternate universes, specific pairings, rare or otherwise, or fandoms and canons, rare or otherwise, (they all advertise on the communities above) there are a few ideas that I want to highlight specifically as neat and that use interesting prompts. fic_corner is a fic focused on written works whose canons are intended for teenagers and younger. intoabar is specifically about creating works where Character Z from one canon walks into a bar and meets or has business with Character Q fro a different canon. fortune_favors just started, and uses Tarot cards (each round focused on a different deck) as the prompts to create works with. poetry_fiction uses lines of poetry from a featured poet as the prompts for works to happen. All of these are worthwhile, if you are so inclined to writing exchange fic.
- Final and special mention goes to fictional_fans, which was first created as a bit of a how-to and for examples for people to see how Dreamwidth works and the things you can do with it, but one of the things that Dreamwidth does well is take examples and run with them, so in addition to being an example community, it's also become an all-fandoms place to talk and promote and otherwise provide content. You might find all sorts of interesting things there. Or provide the interesting things yourself!
Those are all of my recommendations for communities on Dreamwidth (and one community that moves places).
Going farther into the meta weeds, community in the Dreamwidth and LiveJournal models follows more the idea of bulletin board systems, news readers, and forums than it does the agora of most modern social media spaces. Rather than each of us being Comicus, the stand-up philosopher, with our small plot of space to shout into the air with, and hope there are enough followers that we might influence someone (or possibly get them to drop some coins on our blanket), the community is structured a lot more like a convention meetup.
The fusion of blogging and BBS makes Dreamwidth and DW-style interaction somewhat unique, in that each user has their own personal space to orate, scribble, art, flail, squee, and curate exactly how they wish. (The controls on that are stellar, really, and the access / subscription separation is so helpful in this.) And then there are the communities, where users come together on shared interests, shows, desires, or other things and there are some moderators of the community that try to keep it true to the founding and to curate what they want in it.
When people around me have said they miss the communities of LiveJournal, they mostly miss that there was a connected tissue between users and communities that was user-user, user-community, and perhaps most crucially, community-community, where if a person could find their way to at least one part of the web, they would soon be able to traverse that web to the spot where they wanted to be and would have plenty of similar people around. It was a little bit like webrings in that regard, just more of a hub-and-spoke model repeated fractally rather than the ring that could only be traversed around the outer edge. When LiveJournal's community got shattered (especially after both instances where accounts were suspended and content deleted, which Tumblr is now feeling the pain of), the that web of connections was lost as people shifted to new platforms and could no longer easily talk among themselves. Regrettably, that piece is not easily recoverable, even as people try, in their new homes, to set up ways of making it easy for people to find their fandoms when they're just getting started. The increasing fragmentation of the Web makes it harder for people across sites to find each other and to talk with each other.
The increasing fragmentation of the Web goes along with walled gardens and corporitization and the carving out of a place built on interoperability into fiefdoms of capitalism and profit. It also turns out that ease of discoverability and ease of curation have been set against each other in this new media landscape. Our advertising overlords, perennially interested in making money by letting companies target us with temptations based on the content we post, want to make it very easy for us to find our friends and not-yet-friends up that we will use the site more, which means more ads and more revenue. They want our content to be easily amplified, as well, for the same reasons - hot content draws eyes from both inside and outside the site, and that means more ads. While each ad might only be sold for cents USD (or fractions thereof), in the aggregate, you can make enough money to keep a site going.
What they are most decidedly not interested in is someone using their site, having a small group of friends who do so as well, and that group just happily having private conversations among themselves without needing to care or worry about the greater world at large. There's no money in that, because there's no incentive for them to keep engaged with the site as long as possible. But when their content is never really private, even if there are privacy options that can be exercised, then the rest of the user group can see them and participate in their conversations. Even when they're not wanted. Especially when they're not wanted. And now you have a situation where being easily discoverable and having public anything is an easy venue for harassment and worse, but you also want to stay with a particular platform because people you genuinely do want to interact with are on it as well. And it also creates a problem that I think may have something to do with the rise of the philosophy usually referred to as the "antis" - if everything is public and there's no true privacy, then everyone is performing to an audience all the time. Studying toxic masculinity's high emphasis on performative gestures means you end up in a situation where the pressure not to be a target for being insufficient pushes people into being extra instead. There's no reason to believe the highly performative space of social media doesn't work the same way, and so you get a lot of people who really aren't sure this is their jam joining in the Two Minutes' Hate. They could just step aside to somewhere that doesn't demand that level, but they would also need to bring their friends with them. Or find new friends. And so the cycle continues until something intervenes to get them off the need to be so performance-based.
The Fediverse, and federation in general, seems to be trying to thread the needle between trying able to set up in a space where you have control and privacy and can curate your space while also making it easy for you to find and follow your friends or other people who interest you. And in a world where everyone has Internet space, the means to afford it, the ability to administer it, and the Internet space itself was not full of malicious actors using computers for their purposes, federation might very well have become the dominant method for social media and content publishing. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of hurdles to clear on both technical and non-technical grounds before federation is as easy to use (and to secure) as a single-site service like Dreamwidth is. If enough things implode in the same way that Tumblr did, to the point where things are fragmented so severely and there's no site that fen can trust to do right by them, then federation might be just the thing.
Because the cycle of getting big and then getting betrayed when the advertisers demand the porn stop is not going to stop until we all either migrate to places without ads and support them with our money or we seize control of the publishing infrastructure for ourselves and learn all of the attendant skills that come with that. Some of us will do the first, others the second, and it will all still essentially rely on people not being jerks and being willing to do the difficult administrative work and giving their users enough notice to migrate when they no longer are able to keep their node alive.
On a more local level, though, the issue of "nobody participates on Dreamwidth communities any more" might be usefully blamed on the runaway success of the Archive of Our Own, since it, like Dreamwidth, was formed with a very specific "fuck you" in mind regarding the lack of places where fans could have their content, regardless of what the advertisers thought about it. It doesn't have a robust community space, because its primary purpose is to be an archive, rather than a social network. It has enough of those things, however, in comments and kudos and bookmarks, to do the main fannish interaction that communities would facilitate: sharing works, collecting feedback, and performing recommendations as well as a "to read later" list. AO3 also does collection curation, has the most robust tagging system it can, and can manage just about every aspect of an exchange or challenge where the end goal is to have a collection of works available for people to peruse and interact with. So there's a lot of things that the community space used to do that AO3 can do and do well. It's not a complete solution, as there are still some functions that communities handle with regard to exchanges and challenges, like organizing, rules decisions, tag nomination clarification, and other sorts of things that AO3 doesn't have the capacity for. And for in-between communication or things like the land communities or other rolling and ongoing matters that don't fit well into the discrete tings available on AO3, even if AO3 gets used to store and host things that might be used in challenges and communities elsewhere. Between AO3 and the fragmentation of LiveJournal, it's a smaller unit that went to Dreamwidth, and maybe the communities aren't quite as well in contact with each other as they might have been before. (And also, the proliferation of media and fandoms associated means there's not always as many people making the bridges across fandoms, because there's not enough time to watch everything any more.
Of course, I could be entirely wrong about all of this, and maybe some of the Tumblr influx will help with that, or will help rebuild some of the communities in use in a quest to help rebuild some of the functions that were lost in the exodus. We'll have to see how it all shakes out.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-06 03:09 am (UTC)to wit, I want to be able to lock shit to the access filter of my choice plus or minus specific users/lists without either editing the filter or creating a new one with a very similar list. like, if I want something to be available to everyone on my access list except you two, I want to be able to do that by posting it locked to either access-minus-'housemates'-filter or access-minus-
(and I wish fandom would move from everywhere else—except of course AO3—to Dreamwidth, but as that would necessarily involve Dreamwidth selling its soul for media hosting server space, no.)
no subject
Date: 2020-01-06 03:22 am (UTC)Maybe toss the idea into the suggestions hopper and see what happens?
Media hosting, of course, is one of the things presumably holding much of fandom back, but I'm pretty sure someone could put one of those together in an AO3 style and hopefully get enough donations to get it done sustainably.
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Date: 2020-01-06 11:19 am (UTC)i agree with the differences in interaction, particularly what you pointed out about user-user and community-user etc. what i enjoy about this particular structure is both having my own journal but also being able to share communal spaces for more public interaction.
facebook, twitter, tumblr etc. lack that particular combination.
are you familiar with mastodon? it's a defederated social media network. i've been there for a while and while some of the issues of social media in general remain (i mean, people will be people), there is no pressure to cater to advertisers, and this - as well as a solid mod policy by most admins - leads to a completely different culture than twitter. this depends a lot on the instance, though...
no subject
Date: 2020-01-06 03:35 pm (UTC)I'm not completely familiar with Mastodon, although I've been mentally lumping it into the Fediverse, based on the fact that it has instances and users on those instances can talk to and follow users on other instances, and I believe it's a microblogging service in the style of Twitter, but that's as much information as I have. I assume much of the Fediverse is running their instances on their own dime, and therefore can absolutely tell the advertisers to pound sand, but it comes at the cost of worrying about what happens if their instance becomes too popular and expensive to manage.
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Date: 2020-01-06 02:28 pm (UTC)I really liked what you had to say about community and the different platforms.
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Date: 2020-01-06 03:36 pm (UTC)