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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2023-01-29 11:32 pm (UTC)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.