silveradept | Snowflake Challenge 02026 #4: Page File (Reply)

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.