Snowflake Challenge 02026 #4: Page File

[silveradept]

snowflake_challenge posted their fourth prompt, and I had to look at it a couple times before I started getting close to an understanding of what was being asked for.

On many of the fannish websites we use, our history is easily compileable into "pages". When we look back through those pages, sometimes we stumble upon things that we think are rather cool.

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

So, as someone who is mostly a text-based person, who appreciates the other forms of fannish creation and has been gifted some lovely things from it, I don't have all that many presences on other websites that aren't my professional self. So a profile page on me probably wouldn't have all that much on there, and I'm pretty sure I'm not sufficiently Big Name Fan in any fandom that I've shown up in that there would be a Fanlore page on me or anything notable or quotable that I've done or said. You could look at my Archive page and see everything there that I've put on the Archive, or check out Slacktiverse to see my current book club offerings.

When I'm writing things, and I want to check details on things in a canon, I would love for there to be more independent wikis and curation resources, but it seems that the company that rebranded itself from Wikia is the place where people put in most of their effort and did not then decide to go somewhere else. (It makes sense. After all, I started on Geocities because it was free and available, and I still use free e-mail services, even though the "more moral" thing to do at this point would be to find hosting, buy my own domain, and set up these services so that they all run through my own domain and services, so that I can have a backup of my blog on my own domain, a nice space for my professional self to live on, and run e-mail services and the like. Because, theoretically, as someone who has the skills to run other people's software, it's incumbent upon me to break up the corporate monopolies and data harvesting and run my own stuff. And then to do it for other people as well, because in theory, I'm supposed to want to do this for my friends and family, and take on that burden (and have someone to pass that burden on to should I decide to stop or end up winning the lottery so I no longer have to do it all myself.)) So there's some of that going on, and consultation of TVTropes if there are things that I'm trying to remember happened or to see if I'm remembering my tropes right.

One of the things that I did when I was younger, but haven't done recently, because time and because the communities scattered from the forums and the LiveJournal communities, was the roleplay aspects of various properties. I know that Dreamwidth has an extremely healthy roleplaying community here, so it's not that I lack opportunities to rejoin, if I so desire, but there's also been a fair amount of not having fandoms where I'm in for the role-playing aspects as opposed to the fic aspects or the analysis aspects or other parts of fandom. It has been a certain amount of having to choose which things to throw energy and time at, and roleplay is not where I am currently putting my time. (Forums were also pretty normally attached to webcomics, as the usual way of getting interaction between fans, and I spent a lot of time in forums when I was younger, learning and absorbing and being very fannish about things.)

Now that I am older, and I have gone through seeing some boom and busts for fandoms and media properties, and can appreciate the cyclical nature of some things, it's interesting to see how much of the fannish world is pushing harder in more Luddite directions, with text editors, against plagiarism machines, and toward putting their materials on simple websites and possibly cross-posting to AO3. And building shrine sites and small archives on places that are about giving you a little bit of space and letting you just build whatever it is that tickles your fancy, then sharing and letting other fans know about it through link exchanges and webrings. As the technology does its best to obscure the interesting and herd us all in the direction that will make the advertisers happy, fans and others are pushing back against this and using less algorithmic methods to find their people and introduce their people to more entities that will become part of their people. And they're going to places that give them better controls over who gets to see their efforts and how widely they get shared. There's a certain amount of worry that breaking things up like this will mean that people don't get to find their people as easily as they have before, but the benefits of not chasing clout, SEO, or an algorithm that seems tuned to put works in front of people who are least likely to appreciate it are definitely better than having to deal with the drawbacks. Because someone who gets burnt out or hounded off contributing to their fandom is a great loss for everyone.

To answer the question that's been asked, after meandering so much around it, and talking about things from my own past and present, I think the things that I want to highlight are some of those spots where things are more old-school, indieweb, people talking to people rather than trying to get Friend Computer (or Computer-senpai?) to notice them. Obviously, if you're here on Dreamwidth, then you already know that it's based on the code that was Livejournal, but that is in a continuous state of improvement and modernization to try and make it easier for people who are not Brad in his dorm room to both use and contribute to the site. DW can always use more hackers to make the underlying code better, but half the fun of having your own spot is also the ability to decorate it exactly the way you want it to go, and that means building styles and sharing them with others. The style code and CSS are at least cousins with each other, so that's good, or you could decide that the perfect touch you need is a custom mood theme that fits in with your desired aesthetic. style_system is a community for getting help and assistance for people who are interested in tweaking styles to perfection, and possibly for rustling up ideas on how to get started with customization, if you are so inclined. For people who want to make their own mood themes, moodthemeinayear is a community toward making your own theme in a year. You'll have to do some amount of creation in that regard, but as with so many of these things in fandom, much of the fun is in making it your own and showing off the things you've made.

Outside of Dreamwidth, I recommend <https://neocities.org">Neocities as a place where you can build those fan sites of old, with free hosting and plenty of customizations available so that you can make the fan site of your dreams, or your own small archive, or your own backup archive of your work, where you can skin it exactly the way you want. And also, you can browse all the other websites that people have made and either enjoy their fannish work, or see what other kinds of hobbies other people have that they want to dedicate significant amounts of website space and time to. Neocities sites will also draw you into various webrings of other sites, Neocities or otherwise, and you can spend an entire rabbit hole's worth of time just on that site and following things around to other places, in the same kind of way that used to happen when search engines actually worked. There's other places that are IndieWeb, RetroWeb, or other kinds of places that intend to create little pockets of things the way they used to be and that try to operate on that principle of being people interacting with people because they're cool, rather than trying to grab the most attention or engagement. When you come across those pockets of cool people, whether it's one, or one person who's a portal to a whole webring or group of people who are cool, then, take the temperature of the place and see whethe they're interested in having more people drawn to their space. If they are, share with the rest of us, please! A suspect a lot of people on Dreamwidth are looking for more awesome people and sites to visit and use that are small and personal and clearly dedicated or quirky, so if you've already found some, the rest of us would also like to know about them as well.

I think this fits the challenge request. I think.

Comments

[teres]

Hmmm, looking at the way other people have filled in the challenge, you seem to interpret it in the way they have done, so if you've misinterpreted it, you're far from the only one.

and I'm pretty sure I'm not sufficiently Big Name Fan in any fandom that I've shown up in that there would be a Fanlore page on me or anything notable or quotable that I've done or said.

You indeed don't have a Fanlore page, but I see that this post by you is included in "Further Meta" on the articles for Patreon and Gift Economy, and is included in the Timeline of Fandom and Profit Meta!

(I should do a lot of other things that I have the ability to do, too; given that I can't do all of them, I feel content in leaving that to people who are actually passionate about it, and putting my efforts toward archiving and cataloguing.)

roleplay

I haven't ever roleplayed in that way, either, even though I would have the opportunity for it; I prefer to use my own characters, as I can create whoever best fits what I'm doing at that moment.

As for the return to simpler sites you mention, I'm interested to see to what extent people will actually do so... I would love it if they did so, but I can imagine that leaving the site you're on is a powerful barrier.

I don't have any special websites to recommend, unfortunately, and I don't have much interest in styles or mood themes, but I can say that I've filed several tickets for improvement and that those have been taken in consideration, and that this one has been actually fixed! So that's another way you can contribute, even if you don't know anything of code.

(On further thought, I can recommend this Neocities website, which is about the only one I'm familiar with... and I see that you are, too.)

Until next time!

[silveradept]

Oh, dear. Something I said made it on to a references page on Fanlore. That's interesting.

And yes, filing tickets and feature requests are also good ways of contributing.

There are network effects that have to be contended with when choosing to be elsewhere. Having a personal archive would be great, in case those networks implode.

I think the largest nut yet to be cracked about hosting your own sites and services is how few companies or people are trying to develop something that can achieve the end result without having to gain comfort with command lines and some amount of technical expertise. As far as I know, there's no service or site that goes from "what domain do you want?" through all the services you want to offer or route through your domain, and then lets you set them all up interactively after it's set some configuration files and things for you, so that all you have to do is upload and things are ready to go.

YUNoHost is trying these things, and so are some other applications like it, but there's still the "domain + hosting" that turns a lot of people off, because they don't have time or money for it. Or "it's hard to export a document designed in publishing software to a semantically valid HTML page and related CSS to make it look exactly like it did in your design software."

[teres]

It seems minor enough to be harmless, at least; it would be nice if it'd lead new people to your journal, but I'm not nearly familiar enough with Fanlore to tell if that'd be plausible...

And yes, filing tickets and feature requests are also good ways of contributing.

It's something that I could probably make more people in my circle aware of. The devs need to know of a problem before they can fix it, after all.

personal websites

I can also see that turning lots of people off (and even though I could do it myself, the effort required still makes it a "rather not"). It's good to hear that there are some services to provide that, though! I also think the lack of a support system (like on this website) makes it more daunting for people; you can find a community to help you out, but that's something you have to do on your own, after all.

The other considerations you name are also quite fair, and I've had enough experience with a problem adjacent to the latter to know that it can also be a turnoff. The best solution I can think of is having many people who have done the same thing around... but for that to happen, hosting your own site would need to become more popular first.

[silveradept]

It's not likely to draw people to the journal. In the same way that the Archive is supposed to be an archive, rather than a social space, Fanlore is supposed to be a reference work.

The costs of hosting and domains have gone down, and you can pay to have your host make sure all your software is updated and working, but there will still be the problem of generating the pages. That's what Movable Type and WordPress and other CMSes and static site generators are supposed to help with, but they all have their own learning curves and potential exposures. There's no getting around the learning curve, and for a lot of people, that curve is what needs to be flattened for them to participate.

[teres]

It's not likely to draw people to the journal. In the same way that the Archive is supposed to be an archive, rather than a social space, Fanlore is supposed to be a reference work.

Ah, that makes sense (though I'm personally inclined to look around on such linked websites).

Thanks for the further explanation! I can fully see why most people aren't willing to put in that much work in exchange for more autonomy over their content.

[galadhir]

I worry, with Neocities, that it might go the same way as Geocities. That was quite a traumatic crash when everyone whose site was hosted on Geocities lost their sites at once. I know that nothing on the internet is permanent, but I kind of feel like hosting your own site (as they recommend on IndieWeb) is safer.

[silveradept]

It is, and at the same time, there's still the startup knowledge that you need in how to obtain a domain and hosting, and point things in the right places, and to be relatively comfortable with a command line to get things set up and deployed. If there were a really good wizard out there to help guide everyone through these processes, I think it would drop the barriers to self-hosting significantly.