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

[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.