Snowflake day 15

[obstinatecondolement]

Challenge #15

In your own space, opine on the future of fandom.

This is an interesting one, because I feel like my ability to guess at future fandom migrations has never really been amazing. I bet against AO3, I bet against Tumblr, I bet so hard against Twitter that I never conceded and started being fannish there. I bet on Pillowfort, at least insofar as paying them the necessary $5 to create an account, and then never posted a single thing on it. But, as much as my guesses are any good, I think that the next phase of fandom will be/may already be primarily based on Discord, which I guess is kind of a return to form for me in the sense that when I arrived on the scene a lot of what went down happened in Livejournal communities.

I think that there are plusses and minuses to Discord as a platform for fandom. On the one hand, you have to know someone to know where to go, so it can be inaccessible in that way. But that can also be a positive, because it is possible to be have more private moderated spaces than is possible on Tumblr (or, as far as I know, Twitter). The big drawback for me is the difficulty of archiving things for fandom posterity. There are reams of thoughtful and insightful meta that will never be posted outside a Discord server and will probably die with that server. There is art that is never posted anywhere else. Some people are linking people to Google Docs to share their fic rather than archive it on AO3 (or elsewhere). And that's, like, obviously well within the rights of the people doing this, if that's what they want, but I think that many people who particpate in fandom through Discord would like for certain conversations and fanworks to be able to survive past one single, ephemeral fandom space.

My perspective on this is pretty limited, because there are so many pockets of fandom I have never gotten into and I have no idea what the people who hang out there are likely to want out of a future fandom home. But this is what my current thoughts are. Tumblr seems to have a near death experience every 3-5 years, so it's easy to simultaneously think of it as being incredibly precarious and also invulnerable to harm, so it is hard to say if and how long that will last as a fandom hub. Dreamwidth, as far as I can tell, has a dedicated base, but not a broad one and I don't necessarily see that changing in the near future, despite it being (from my mid-2000s to early 2010s Livejournal-reared perspective) a much better platform for fandom than Tumblr, Discord or Twitter. But I guess something being well built for fandom has never been a good predictor of where we flock to. Give us enough time and we'll probably start a fandom presence on LinkedIn.

Comments

[scribblemoose]

A fandom presence on LinkedIn would be kind of hilarious. 'Managing Director of Massive Corp Ltd, fandoms: Star Trek, Supernatural and Var. anime'. I think I'd like that!

Thanks for your reflections, it is always hard to predict, I agree.

[obstinatecondolement]

I mean maybe that would finally get me on LinkedIn! XD

It's definitely hard to predict, but it's kind of fun to guess, if only so you can look back on your predictions in a few years and be like, "Wow, I sure didn't call that one!" Or maybe this time, for the very first time, "Wow, I was bang on the money there."

[kavyina]

So I can say, as someone who is part of a fandom that was primarily on Discord, the ephemeral nature is...hard. The most prolific writer (and one of the only ones who wrote stuff that I liked) decided to delete all the links to their works and posted only one out of...oh, 15, maybe? on AO3. Some of the art got posted to other places, but most of it was right there in that server. All the headcanons and meta written was in the assigned channels, just pages and pages of discussion about the characters and the setting. The server still exists, but it's now a barren, dead landscape populated mostly by the occasional spambot, so I don't have high hopes it'll stick around much longer.

And like you said, artists are well within their rights to delete links to their art, or only share it privately, but ugh, it sure does suck for fandom history and engagement when a writer has a nervous breakdown and deletes all their posts and suddenly you can't read the only fanfic you actually liked anymore. (This is not a dig at said writer; they were going through a lot.)

Relatedly, the lack of the ability to delete yourself is also hard? It's this strange thing where nothing sticks around if the server goes down but also you can't really mass-delete messages if something does happen and you want to be able to GTFO for any reason. I wanted to delete my presence from a different server because of my own nervous breakdown, and had to go through and delete all my messages by hand, one by one. It was tedious and stressful and I think it probably contributed to my carpal tunnel, lol.

Hope this makes sense, this got kinda rambly. But I have extensive experience with Discord fandom, and it definitely has its pros and cons. Dreamwidth is a refreshing change of pace.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah and like I think that a lot of people would share their work more widely in a way that was archivable if they could! People have a right to privacy, but they also have a right to tools to preserve their work if they want them, which we don't always have. Especially, I feel, non-text based fanworks, because stable hosting for them can be very difficult.

I hadn't even thought about the difficulty with deleting your presence on a server! And, yeah, that absolutely would be an issue for a lot of people. Maybe even more so with Discord servers than on other platforms, because Discord can get a bit insulated and, Idk, dynamics can go sour a lot more easily than on, say, Tumblr, because everything is always happening at such a fast pace. I'm sorry that you had that experience! I can't imagine how difficult it would be to have to manually delete all your messages when you were already in a difficult headspace and wanted to get out of a server.

[kavyina]

Totally. I deal almost exclusively in written media, so I don't have a lot of experience with visual art, but you're right...there's not really an archival place to put it the way that AO3 functions for writers. I mean, a person could put art on AO3, but most people don't, and they still have to find a place to host it in the first place. Otherwise, they're relegated to...instagram? Tumblr? Neither are great options.

Of course, image hosting is expensive, so I'm not entirely surprised. It still sucks, though.

[obstinatecondolement]

I was discussing this with another friend from the perspective of vidding recently and she was saying that most people she knew didn't really use AO3 as a place to find vids outside of exchanges and conventions, but that it could be helpful to have vids uploaded as an AO3 work so that if one hosting option went bust that you had a stable "home" for the vid where you could just change out the embed code, which was an advantage of AO3 for non-fic fanworks that I hadn't considered before.

[silveradept]

Discord is very much that double-edged sword, in that it provides a lot of the good told for a fandom space and for moderating a fandom space, but it is also equally as ephemeral as many of the fan sites and presences in the early Web that were not, for the most part, archived or preserved. It's a difficult thing to square, respecting someone's desire to no longer be associated with their work with the reality that the work has most likely been important to more than the creator while it's been out in the world.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah and I do feel that a lot of people would welcome having the tools and the platform to archive things if they could! Obviously some people are sharing things privately because harassment is such a huge problem in fandom and it's not always safe to share things publicly, but sometimes I think it doesn't occur to people in the moment that someone might want to look back on their work in ten years, as opposed to ten minutes after it was uploaded. I think there's been this shift in fandom where everything is about constantly producing new work and it almost borders on, like, hustle culture where you rise and grind and things are irrelevant the day after they're uploaded, so the longeivity of fanworks is not always a consideration.

[silveradept]

The long term preservation of fanworks seems like a weird thing to do because it seems like very few entities in the creator world seem interested in preserving canonical works for very long, unless they're still profitable to run and rerun. The hustle part of it is for people who want to try and stay at the top of the new works page for audience exposure and possibly to try and get some monetization of of their fanwork.

Honestly, it's a recipe for burnout, and I think that's the point where archiving is most needed and least likely to happen.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yes, 1000% agreed.

[justanorthernlight]

>>On the one hand, you have to know someone to know where to go, so it can be inaccessible in that way.

It's funny, this was kind of what made me bounce off of LJ back in the mid/late '00s. It mostly wasn't locked/private like a lot of Discord is (afaik, I'm not actually on Discord), but if you didn't know the active communities or active users, it was very hard to find fannish content via the search or tags functions.

Your thoughts on the ephemeral nature of Discord spaces are very interesting.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, it could be difficult finding communities that were relevant to your interests if you were a complete n00b with no friends in the fandom in those days! And it is kind of getting to be that way again, on Discord at least.

Thank you! I'm glad that you found it an interesting read.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> The big drawback for me is the difficulty of archiving things for fandom posterity. There are reams of thoughtful and insightful meta that will never be posted outside a Discord server and will probably die with that server.<<

I have been doing more with archiving things to the Wayback Machine and Archive.fo. I'm hearing that AO3 is hostile to meta, so I think we would benefit from creating a separate archive for meta.

>>Tumblr seems to have a near death experience every 3-5 years<<

I've come to view every exodus as an opportunity. Wherever you are, look at why people are complaining, then check that against your favorite venues. Which one(s) will best solve the problems people are complaining about? Then tell your friends about that. I've put a lot of effort into twitter_refugees and made a good handful of new friends this time. That's good, because when people make friends on a new site, they're more likely to stick around and stay active.