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The irrepressible (I mean it, Jesus, how do you have so much energy) tozka just started up a weekly-ish comm for collecting posts on, about, and in fandom--what we used to call "meta" back in the day. This seems to be designed as a successor to metafandom, and long may it live.

thisweekmeta posted: Recent Entries

Hello all, and welcome to the first issue of This Week in Meta! Depending on how much we find each week, this will be at LEAST a twice-weekly pan-fandom newsletter centered around fandom meta and discussions.

(While we're on the subject of fandom meta, this is what I love most about fandom--the way people think 'hey, I like this thing and want to see more of it,' and then just go do the thing themselves. It's such a community-minded and resourceful attitude.)

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.