How do you feel about the twitter clone mastodon? Do you feel like it can help fix the issues in fandom? I think it could provide a bit of a solution but I don’t see a lot of instances for it, at least in English
I’m not sure Mastodon’s gonna be the next big thing, although I have one and I’ve set up a script for it to mirror my Twitter account.
Honestly, at this point, I think we’re going to see a period of contraction and splintering in fandom, as people retreat into smaller, more closed-off communities. It’s happened before, in the wake of major purges and shakeups in fandom (or in any large community, really.) So in the short term, it’s kind of hard to say - I think Discord and locked Twitters are going to keep being big.
In the long term, new social media platforms are really, really, really hard to harness momentum on. I think that whatever comes next isn’t going to be a clone of anything, but something that fulfills a niche that none of the current options fill. Honestly, I’ve been waiting for the next Livejournal to take off - something that really allows both public and private interactions individually and with groups, but perhaps with better viral sharing capability (since viral sharing is what’s going to drive traffic to a platform). TBQH, Google+ has a lot of those hallmarks, and it’d be hilarious if they came from behind as a dark horse to take over the social media scene (I mean, everybody already has a google+ account, if you’ve ever signed in to youtube or gmail. I think they could harness those numbers if they played their cards right.)
If it is Google+, though, anonymity in fandom is going to keep getting harder and harder. That….. makes me nervous, but I guess there’s not really anything we can do except wait and see.
Thinking about the big fandom migrations I know about, yeah, we’ll hang on either till our current sites die or until something radically different comes along.
- zines -> internet: Less time lag, less gatekeeping, more affordable for some, easier to find for some
- Usenet -> mailing lists: Better ability to ban trolls, more privacy, better ability to create new groups quickly
- mailing lists -> LJ: This was a switch from following topics to following people. Great for the multifannish and people leaving their first big fandom!
- FFN -> LJ: FFN changed policies and deleted/banned fic.
- FFN -> AO3: To the extent that people have made this switch, it’s because their entire fandom is content FFN bans (e.g. chatlogs).
- forums -> anywhere else: Usually happened when the forum was deleted.
- LJ -> DW: LJ became too broken to use. DW had its old features for RPing, anonmemes, etc. Generally a mandated move where a community mod announced that everyone was going whether they liked it or not.
- LJ -> Tumblr: Pretty pictures!
We lost things in all of those moves. The big driving forces were the old thing becoming unusable and the new thing having one key feature people were ready for at the time.
The other big force is the new thing having more general audience: Tumblr already had an established fandom community by the time the LJ migration really kicked off. LJ, as a website in general, was already old news, while lots of new people were hearing about Tumblr for non-fandom reasons. This force has as much to do with the marketing team behind a new thing as it does fandom’s interest.
For fandom to move to Mastodon, Twitter (and possibly Tumblr) would need to become unusable. Twitter is constantly annoying its users, but it’s not unusable. LJ made a billion boneheaded moves over the years, and we didn’t budge.
We also tend to go to places where anyone can make an account or to small groups made up of people who were already friends. Last time someone sent me a link to check out Mastodon, I couldn’t make an account on that instance because it was too popular: the worst of both worlds.