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silveradeptChallenge #7 wants us to help each other find things that are useful to us, because the things we use often are usually better and more tailored than algorithmic suggestions.
With the understanding that lists can be as short or expansive, specific or general as someone wants.
First, an anti-reommendation, even though I still use sites that are hosted on that space for quick lookups, because sometimes that's the only place where the data is. I anti-recommend the site that was wikispaces that then rebranded itself to fandom dot com. The renaming is pretty typical of the hubris that sometimes infects fandom in general, but there have been several unfriendly practices instituted on places, mostly related to ads and forced monetization and other decisions that are about the business of hosting large amounts of popular data and leveraging the sunk costs of fans who have put extensive amounts of data and organization into what were good wikispaces by forcing them to accept awful decisions imposed on them.
The process of Fandom's choices follows a process that a WIRED article by Cory Doctorow called "enshittification", where
Anyway, let's go on to things that I do recommend for fans and others. This first section is going to be tech-heavy, so you can skip forward until you see something that doesn't make your eyes glaze over.
Okay, that's the technical stuff recommendations. Let's move on toward recommendations for fans who want to find things that will be useful for them.
That's probably enough for digestion purposes, and most of those links are TARDISes rather than discrete items, so beware.
Make a list of fannish and/or creative resources.
With the understanding that lists can be as short or expansive, specific or general as someone wants.
First, an anti-reommendation, even though I still use sites that are hosted on that space for quick lookups, because sometimes that's the only place where the data is. I anti-recommend the site that was wikispaces that then rebranded itself to fandom dot com. The renaming is pretty typical of the hubris that sometimes infects fandom in general, but there have been several unfriendly practices instituted on places, mostly related to ads and forced monetization and other decisions that are about the business of hosting large amounts of popular data and leveraging the sunk costs of fans who have put extensive amounts of data and organization into what were good wikispaces by forcing them to accept awful decisions imposed on them.
The process of Fandom's choices follows a process that a WIRED article by Cory Doctorow called "enshittification", where
First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.For whatever you think about Doctorow, the term he's coined seems to have been accepted as the moniker for this process, and the company that owns fandom dot com has been following the process to a tee, having allowed wikispaces to first be good and accumulate all of that loving data and then when they became fandom dot com, engaging in the user abuse. Soon enough, they'll get to the business customer abuse, and then the dying, and there will be a major scramble for all of the data on those wikis to find somewhere else to be that can be stable enough and stand up enough for all the people who consult it on a regular basis for their fanworks or their barstool arguments. Most likely, there will be a loss of information at that point. If we're lucky, some archiving entity or another outgrowth of the Organization for Transformative Works will stand up something that will be able to absorb that information and provide easy import for all the pages and data that's present. (And, probably, all of the sources that those entities have referenced in their data-gathering.) This is the danger of having a single centralized source for data or interactions, but I also have a significant amount of caustic words about the ways in which search engines are becoming less and less about returning relevant results to a query and more and more about returning the greatest amount of ads to a searcher, regardless of whether they are relevant to the query. This makes discovery of sites that are better in all ways than the big centralized one much harder, and encourages those sites to engage in trickery to improve their results rather than being an authoritative site that eventually will organically find the people who are the best for creating the community and rising to the top of the results list because they're actually good.
Anyway, let's go on to things that I do recommend for fans and others. This first section is going to be tech-heavy, so you can skip forward until you see something that doesn't make your eyes glaze over.
- Get Firefox. And then install the uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Multi-Account Containers extensions to start with. That's an ad-blocker, a tracker protector, and a way of making sure your accounts stay within the boundaries of what they're supposed to, instead of being tracked across the web based on what you are logged in to. Since Google Chrome and all Chromium-based browsers will severely limit the effectiveness of ad blockers when they roll out version 3 of their manifest, now is the time to start migrating to a browser that will still allow you to be safe on the web, instead of one that wants to make you into a data point for advertisers and secondarily allow you to browse the web.
- If your fandom or creators are still primarily on Twitter, and you don't want to support Elon's Folly by keeping the app installed or staying signed in to Twitter, if you have a link to a Twitter post, you can change out "twitter.com" in the URL for "nitter.net" and view the post, content, and commentary without having to engage with the ads or the tracking. Nitter is a way of browsing Twitter without Javascript, without ads, and without a large amount of downloaded material that comes from using the original. As far as I can tell, it only works on public posts, since it uses an API to access material. If most of your fandom uses non-public posts, then it's less useful to have nitter.
- I personally would like to plug microblogging clients and servers that are not BlueSky or Threads, since that seems to be replicating the problem of "centralized, corporate-controlled service that sees you in terms of what ads you can be shown, rather than what community you can build," but. While it's easier to get set up on various Fediverse servers and clients, it's not actually all that easy to find a place that accepts what you want to post, accepts new users, and isn't going to be seen as taking a stance on issues that you don't even know you're taking a stand on. And trying to roll your own requires sufficient familiarity and willingness to wrangle a command line, have your own hosting, and then be willing to do all the work of maintenance and being a system administrator in a place that can be terrible, indeed. (And Mastodon may not be the best microblogging client or space for you, even if it is the most popular.) Getting away from Bluesky and Threads and Twitter requires a time investment, and it currently has an assumption in place that you're going to move instances a few times before you find one (or more) that you like, you want, and that fits with your general attitude toward other places and people. The onboarding process is a mess, but the results are pretty cool for those who are patient and who miss the days of building and curating your own follow lists and such. (Which you can say "sounds like damning with faint praise" and be right.)
- More generally, there's ActivityPub stuff for most or all of the main media services, whether you want to blog, show images, do videos, share music, talk about the books you've been reading, or just shitpost in limited or unlimited character amounts. They're in greater or lesser stages of polish and done-ness, but they do exist. For fandoms and fans who have realized that owning the servers is one of the best protections against having your content purged by the diktats of advertisers, there are options out there that you can either get the technical chops to create yourself or who you can get accounts with and then support the continued server cost upkeep with. They're not polished, certainly, because they're often "I wanted to code this thing together, and it works for me" (paging Brad in his dorm room), but if they got a dedicated contingent of fans who wanted to use the services and suggest improvements (or who are able to do some coding contributions of their own), not only might they get an identity, they might get some of that polish and functionality that will make them more attractive to others and move toward that critical mass that everyone wants to have on their platforms. (Or even just be the backup platform for those who are posting primarily elsewhere, so they can quickly jump ship if it turns out their primary platform has become wholly untenable.)
- For creators, or those who want to be creators, there are some fairly polished packages of material available for free that can reduce your dependency on proprietary companies and their tendencies to make arbitrary decisions like "What was a standalone piece of software from us is now an annual subscription service, and no, you're not allowed to just keep using your old versions because we can change the license terms to prevent you from doing this." LibreOffice handles most of the basic office suite requirements, Krita is a painting program and also doesn't have a deliberately-offensive acronym to it, Open Broadcast Studio is for streamers or those who want to record video projects and screencasts, VLC is really good at capturing frames or clips if you're a vidder or want to be one. (And then you can stitch it all back together with OBS or other video editing apps.) Ocenaudio isn't bad for recording audio by itself, and there's an entire suite of digital audio workstations and their ideas available after that for editing, post-processing, and other effects. (We'd normally recommend Audacity, but they got themselves into hot water by doing things with user privacy that suggested the beginning of the squeezing cycle.) The linked things are available for desktop operating systems, and at least some of them are also available for Android. I'm not too sure about iOS. So you don't have to learn Linux to get these good programs into your toolkit and make the cost barrier to joining the legions of fans who are creating and publishing much, much less.
- But if all you really want to do is set up a fansite or a shrine to a character, or your own fic archive in case you find AO3 not to your liking, Neocities is invested, like much of the Indieweb, in bringing back all of those quirky individual pages that are labors of coding love and lovingly-crafted HTML and CSS. (And possibly a small amount of Javascript.) The free tier has plenty of space to hold text and the occasional image file, and you can support them for a small monthly amount to get way more space and more file types to host, plus a convenient way to download your entire site in a zip file if you want to move it somewhere else, and the ability to use your website like a remotely-mounted drive or remotely manage it through git commands and the like. And they have no ads, so it's a great counterpart to Dreamwidth for journaling and AO3 as a fic archive or backup space.
Okay, that's the technical stuff recommendations. Let's move on toward recommendations for fans who want to find things that will be useful for them.
- I am given to understand that people who are looking for things to podfic, remix, or otherwise create different interpretations or works of works are looking for a permissions statement in a nice public place, like an AO3 profile, or a blog post linked prominently, so that going in they can know whether you would welcome such things with enthusiasm, ask for a consultation before proceeding, or don't want any such thing done to your works at all. So, even if the answer is no, having that statement somewhere prominent and easily findable when someone comes across your work and goes "Oooh, I have some ideas about this!" will make things easier on everyone's part.
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little_details is a community for those odd knowledge questions that might not easily turn up in a reference search, but that someone who is a knowledgeable practitioner, or someone who lived through the appropriate era, will be able to answer in a snap.- fictional_fans was intended as a demonstration community, for people who were coming to Dreamwidth from other social platforms, to demonstrate how communities work and the difference between them and individual journal accounts, but it's also kind of become a place where people who are fans of fictional properties and characters hang out and talk about things, making the demonstration community also into an actual community.
- onesongaday is a community for music and music videos, often from artists outside the U.S. pop industry and in languages other than English
- fandomcalendar is a general purpose community advertising fests, exchanges, other communities, and other events that may or may not be of interest to you, depending on your fandoms and your specific ways of doing fandom.
- If you're looking to build a shared vocabulary around storytelling devices and their implementations, TVTropes has one of the most developed pop culture wikis and languages for it. There are accusations that thinking and talking in tropes is reductionist, but there's at least an attempt to try and point out that a trope can be implemented in many different ways, some of them brilliant, some of them less so. (TVTropes is also big enough at this point that I would hope they have mirrors or they consider some very permissive licensing of the content so backups can be built and synchronized in case of a terrible thing happening to the original.)
- For acafans, the Organization for Transformative Works, the parent organization of the Archive of Our Own, produces an open access journal about fandom called Transformative Works and Cultures. The way that it's structured, with the line numbers present and bracketed and paragraph breaks between each line, can make it difficult to read sometimes, honestly, but it's one of the places where academic fan studies will be welcome to print. (And they publish in HTML, so you can probably copy the text and then remove the odd formatting decisions for reading, if you so desire.)
- OTW also maintains the Archive of Our Own, which is intended mostly as an archive for fanworks that may also be posted elsewhere, and through their Open Doors Initiative, they attempt to capture works that are hosted on other archives that are shutting down or otherwise ceasing operations, allowing those collections and their works to live on, rather than be lost to the ravages of bit rot, a site being shut down entirely, or a maintainer who no longer has the resources to keep the site going.
- The OTW is currently in the position of being the only player in town for a lot of the things they are doing, which makes their faults and problems magnify, and often leaves people who have well-founded and serious philosophical differences with the OTW's mission statements and Board actions (or who have been harmed by those same things) without a currently viable alternative they can decamp to. (See above about the problems that can develop when you are the only place in town and you start making bad decisions, or at least unpopular ones.) The otwarchive software is available for others to set up and use on their own hosting, and I believe SquidgeWorld Archive runs the code itself, so there's at least one other instance of that code in a running state with different ideas about what belongs there than what the OTW has.
- While The Internet Archive is best known for the Wayback Machine that allows you to see previous versions of various websites over time, its actual mission is much broader, and it has a big collection of materials uploaded to it. There's a good chance that something on there violates someone's copyright, honestly, but a fair number of those uploads are intended to preserve something that has gone out of commercial viability or has only previously been available in fragments and someone has collected enough of them to stitch it together in one place, under the idea first popularized in Mystery Science Theater 3000: Keep Circulating the Tapes. They have an extensive software archive, often including old games playable in the browser and downloadable collections of software for operating systems that are no longer being commercially sold. They have conference presentation videos, very old television shows, and other such things that might have source material for you (even if not in particularly great formats or resolutions) if you need to do a canon review in a hurry.
- For things that aren't present in the Internet Archive, or projects dedicated to the collection and preservation of public domain works, if you have access to a public library, and one of their cards (which are often free to residents of their service area, and sometimes free to people in other service areas they have made agreements with), that gives you access to their physical collections of works, their subscription database collections (often containing full text of scholarly articles, newspaper pieces, or magazine archives,), their electronic lending collections of books, current magazines, movies, and/or digital audio (your library may vary, this is why it's good to get multiple cards, to see what else is available from other libraries), and, perhaps most critical to this juncture, the trained staff. Library workers are very good at what they do, and they talk with each other plenty in the spirit of professionals who are all in on the idea of getting information and material to a person making a request. If there's an article that I don't have access to, I have more than happily poked my colleagues with more resources or more academic affiliations to see if they haev access to it and if they can send me the article for my user. Or if I can't come up with some useful resources for a user question, sometimes I kick it up to my academic colleagues and tell the user that if they can make the trek to an affiliated campus, then the library staff there can help them find what they're looking for as they sift through the resources available to a major university (and who probably have subject specialists on hand who can put together amazing resource lists for someone who really wants to get into the wickets of a subject.) Many of the academic institutions in the United States still have parts of their collection or all of their resources available to those who physcially come into the library to ask for that access, and again, having trained staff there also makes it easier for you to get to the thing you would like faster and more comprehensively than you might be able to do on your own. It's not always the fastest process if we have to ask another library to send us something of theirs, but for the most part, if there's something you need, it's worth making a request of it, either to get loaned or to get bought by the library you made the request from. This is a service that most people in the United States have already paid for through their local taxation plans, or through the state's taxation plans, and therefore you may as well get as much use as you can out of it.
That's probably enough for digestion purposes, and most of those links are TARDISes rather than discrete items, so beware.
Thoughts
Date: 2024-02-04 08:28 pm (UTC)I recommend that you repost this for
>>Okay, that's the technical stuff recommendations.<<
I support the FujoVerse for empowering people to create their own venues.
>> There are accusations that thinking and talking in tropes is reductionist <<
*laaaaauuuuugh* I'm guessing those people don't know about the Stith Thompson Index.
>> For things that aren't present in the Internet Archive <<
Archive.fo is another great archive site. Interestingly, it and Wayback are good at saving different kinds of material.
>>This is a service that most people in the United States have already paid for through their local taxation plans, or through the state's taxation plans, and therefore you may as well get as much use as you can out of it.<<
That is true if and only if you live in town, within a specific library's service area. If you live anywhere else, you are not considered a taxpaying supporter and have to pay ruinously high fees to access the materials if they are available to you at all.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2024-02-04 09:13 pm (UTC)You're wrong about libraries being restrictive, however. Some library systems may limit who has access to their materials, but my library system has forged agreements with at least half a dozen other systems where, so long as the person is in a place that supports their local library system, they have access to our materials and can get a library card with us for free. The libraries of the boroughs of New York City have been working together for a significant amount of time at this point, and they were the originators of the "Books Unbanned" collections and an at least temporary call to all teenagers in the United States that they could have an electronic card and access to electronic materials from at least NYPL.
Not all libraries are going to be generous in their sharing, but neither are they universally hoarders who refuse to share with others outside of their service areas, or who charge them large fees for access. It's much more a matter of budget than of philosophy.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2024-02-04 09:24 pm (UTC)Re: Thoughts
Date: 2024-02-04 09:52 pm (UTC)I won't lie and say that $100+ for a non-resident card is easy to pull together all at once, especially for people who really need library services because they can't afford other things. Most people I would expect to be covered by some library district, whether municipal or regional, and those systems should have resource sharing options, even if they're not the fastest, and those things are already covered by the property taxes paid as a resident of the district, so getting a card with your local library district, and any others that offer free reciprocation, is getting something that's already been paid for.
(This does assume the place where you live has bought library services or maintains a library of their own. There are places that do neither of these things, and I wish they had "NO FREE LIBRARY SERVICE" put on all of their real estate listings in big red letters, so people know that going in, rather than finding out when they try to get library cards.)