Fandom migration meta

[allheadybooks]

Relearning LJ-style social media interactions over the last few days has been very strange!  I've been searching for and collecting animated gif icons, 2007-style, but they're of Thor: Ragnarok, which came out in 2017, so uh--it feels a bit like copying Carly Rae Jepsen lyrics onto a papyrus scroll.

To refresh my memory, I've been reading a lot of the Dreamwidth-for-newbies guides that have been popping up this week (many of which are collected here).  It's really driving home how much was different about the internet a decade ago.  I used to expect to use some basic HTML basically everywhere--you couldn't take a rich text editor for granted!--but it's super rusty now, it's been years since I had to manually HTML code anything or, god forbid, make a CSS style sheet.  On the other hand, the tag system here has a completely different logic to it than Tumblr's or Twitter's, so my 2010s tag searching skills are now useless.

Reading through the friending memes is interesting too--you can absolutely tell fannish generation, not just by what fandoms people are into, but also by what language they use--"problematic" vs. "kinkmeme," whether they have a thought-through access policy or seem confused by the privacy controls, the use of the term "meta" to mean "cultural/critical commentary" (and anybody who says flist/friendslist is definitely an old!).

Anyway, I don't have any concrete thoughts about this, I'm just really hoping that this infrastructural shakeup generates a lot of discussion & meta about different ways of organizing fandom and how they create different community structures and norms.  Early Web 2.0 sites (like this one) nudge users toward different kinds of interactions and different levels of agency--and the fact that they're primarily text based makes them less hospitable to unwanted advertising.  I.e., here I expect to know all the people I subscribe to and I expect them to frame their content with personal, socially contextual material: "hey guys I did a thing," "remember when we had this fic challenge," "so in last night's episode..."  Versus Tumblr or Instagram, where ideally every post is as visual and socially uncontextual as possible, so the ads don't look as jarring by contrast.  If your social network is a bunch of strangers yelling, then it's hard to tell right away if one of those strangers is trying to make you buy stuff.

(Relatedly, here's a transcript of a talk that Maciej the Pinboard Guy gave a while back about how he adapted his website to fandom's needs and conventions.  Near the bottom of the page he has a section called "Don't Make It Too Easy" where he speculates that opacity, difficulty, and bugginess actually serve a protective function in some online communities by raising the barrier of entry and preventing bad actors from jumping into conversations without an investment in the overall health of the community.  Worth reading and thinking about.)

Welcome everyone--please share your thoughts in the comments--since, you know, we can do that now.

Comments

[hebethen]

Oh, wait, what, is "meta" a dated/newfangled term??

[allheadybooks]

Dated, I think! At least using it to refer to things like episode reaction posts, commentary on fan culture, etc.--any 'nonfiction' conversations which take place alongside fanfiction. I remember this as a common usage back in the LJ days and haven't seen it much on Tumblr or amongst The Kids. But I welcome corrections, if I've just missed it!

[hebethen]

I do see it in use even on the ole Tumbles, but this... would certainly explain why I see so much less of it than I expect/hope, hah.

I also wonder how much of it is related to the image-centric format of Tumblr, and Tumblr/Twitter not being socially or technically encouraging of long text posts.

[yalumesse]

I'd call it old but not dated exactly? It's still used a lot in my circles to mean talking about the show/characters/whatever - nonfiction, al allheadybooks says in the other comment. It covers/ed speculation and thoughts and theories, character analysis, discussing what show writers will do for whatever resons, but not "what do you think characters/plot will do next" or "this was so sad, it made me cry". It... is really hard to define, now that I think about it.

[allheadybooks]

Huh you're right, 'meta' implies 'with attention to creators rather than characters.' Taking that kind of zoomed out critical perspective where you consider stuff like showrunner changeover, box office, fan reception, etc. That's why I've always liked these kinds of conversations. So much fannish speculation is conducted within the fictive situation, where we imagine the characters are real people making real decisions, and that's fun and all but I'm also a nerd who likes the more media analysis approach.

[thegirlnamedcove]

Definitely. I'm not going to edit it because, y'know, truth in advertising, but I finished my post in the "great tumblr purge" community, and then read some others' for comparison, and wow did I not understand half the questions. Especially "access policy".

Language shift is no joke, even when it comes to a single generation or less between us.

[allheadybooks]

Yeah, I hadn't thought about the politics of friendslists in a long time--but now I'm meeting all these new folks and going, hmm, should I give you access, are you giving me access, who posts personal stuff and HOW personal and should *I* post personal stuff--it's so nuanced! By comparison, Tumblr is very socially blunt. One setting for everybody, so you have to say everything in public or not at all.

Are you new to DW/LJ style social media?

[thegirlnamedcove]

Yep. I don't know when LiveJournal had their big content crackdown, but I graduated high school in 2009 and most of my online experience at that time was spent on Quizzilla and MySpace and Facebook. Plus webcomic communities. LiveJournal and Xanga didn't really cross my radar until college, and by then they were decently empty.

My plan so far has been: I'm not granting anyone access because I'm not posting anything personal or private which would require access. Tumblr style approach, since really the appeal of tumblr for me was being able to just shout all our thoughts into the void without any of it being attached to your irl identity.

[allheadybooks]

That makes total sense! I'm doing kind of the opposite--giving everyone access, because anything I post under friendslock would likely be only semi-personal, like references to my job or something, where I just don't want the whole internet to see it.

[yalumesse]

Now I've got the image in my head of fic being enthusiastically scribbled on a scroll with a feather quill. In hieroglyphs. It's perfect :D

And to the rest, you're so right. Context is everything and tumblr really really lacked that. I'm so optimistic about this place right now. Even if all that happens is half a dozen of us end up sticking around, we'll feed off each other and maybe make it self sustaining, and maybe even grow it with new good stuff brought in by the tumblr migrants.

[tozka]

(This is kind of a brain dump. Apologies!) I'm wondering how people who got used to Tumblr's "everyone sees everything" style will adjust to DW's more nuanced access style. Like, back in the old LJ days, a LOT of people were 100% friends-only, and all fandom stuff was put on comms or in a separate fanfic archive comm/username. Locking stuff down was standard practice.

Here on DW, I've noticed people using the access/subscription options a lot more carefully. Maybe they'll subscribe to someone, but won't open access until they know them better, etc. I've noticed less people locking everything, too.

Whereas on Tumblr, everything was open all the time, with no options for curating your friendslist/followers. And fen moving over from Tumblr ARE having problems adjusting to the DW style. Does that mean that the DW style will move more towards "open all the time" style, or will fandom readjust back down to half-open/half-closed?

[allheadybooks]

I'm also curious to see how this shakes out in practice. The whole 'LJ-style community' concept is really different from, say, the 'Steven Universe' tag on Tumblr--where you posted something to your own blog, with a tag, but it could be consumed in a community-type context by browsing the tag. Here, you can keep your personal content and your public content a lot more separate if you want to.

I have zero actual predictions about what people will do to adapt to this difference! But I'm interested to see what happens, for sure.

[tozka]

Yeah, the ease of browsing through community-wide tags will for sure be missed. It's SUCH a struggle to get used to comms again, even just trying to decide what to post! I've definitely been struggling with "should I post this on a comm?" vs "should I just post this on my own journal?" And I've only been here a week!

[fleurviolette]

I'm really late to the party on this post. As much as I miss the hq gif sets, I do like that on here, I can engage in conversations with other people instead of shouting into the void.

Also, the tags are used more for organization on dreamwidth than typing up meta or straight up keysmashing.

Although I remember lj as the fandom hub before tumblr, my blogging experience was mainly on tumblr for a while. It's an adjustment going back, but it's nostalgic yet new.