silks-stuff replied to your post “hello my name is redshoes - and I’m going to be really intense about…”
Agree with the sentiment but there’s nothing on this post that tells us HOW WE CAN HELP…@silks-stuff - right now, so far as I can tell, what we have is:
1) Keep OTW funded (and they exceeded their fund drive goals this season - they fund raise 2x a year - much yay!) (it’s possible, incidentally, to make a monthly contribution of just a few dollars, which is super helpful to them and really minimal strain on us. a Patreon payment model, if you will)
and
2) Speak clearly about the real reason there’s this ‘defund AO3/OTW, they’re just pocketing your money/the archive is no good anyway/they’re a haven for child abusers’ - the real reasons are censorship, purity culture, homophobia, misogyny and other gatekeeping/bigotries.
This second point is what I’m talking about in my post specifically, since at the time I started reblogging on this situation, OTW/AO3′s fund drive had been successful.
In a turn-about of nice irony for once, it was the OTW fund drive exceeding their goal that set off even more BS posts that seem to catch a lot of attention.
It is an age old strategy of those who wish to smear the good name of a person or organization, to simply tell the same lies over and over until they are accepted as truth. This only works if we do not tell the truth, louder, longer, and with more passion.
Keep telling the truth -
about how AO3 was founded
about how it is fan-owned and fan-managed
about how you can contribute about ten bucks and be a voting member
about how it is a non-profit
about its financial transparency
about the legal protection the OTW can offer fan creatorsand
about how non-fan-owned-fandom-spaces inevitably treat fanworks - censorship - which is why owning our own archive is so fucking critical.
Hope this helpful!
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I’m ending up with a collection of posts that are *cough* rather a lot, so I’m reblogging several every day. Some are dense fact-based posts on how AO3 is run, how it works, where it came from. Others are ‘why censorship is fucked up’ posts. Others are ‘why we write what we write’ posts. Others are fandom history (LJ, DW, AO3, strikethrough etc.) posts. A couple are informative but also lighthearted (gasp).
If folks want the whole list I’m drawing on thus far it’s here:
Foz’s great ‘Straight dudes of the world’ twitter thread
‘fanfic & capitalism’ - great explanation of how fanfic teaches youth about sexuality
Foz - On depression and hurt/comfort
Big Fair-Use post - legal stuff, well explained
the masterlist for Foz’s why censorship can’t work posts
the one that has a great breakdown of stats on how HUGE AO3 actually is
an explanation of how authoritarianism is the problem in this purity gatekeeping
the same MASSIVE history post with a different final addition worth reading
How AO3 is run and how to participate
AO3 fund drive post that that then dives into why they don’t censor
‘Archive of our Own’ - ‘A Room of Our Own’
AO3’s transparent financial reporting & a good rant
someone found their old Strikethrough graphic plus a sweet story of a young fan watching it unfold
A timeline of the LJ strikethrough & boldthrough mass blog deletions, the founding of DW, OTW/AO3 and tumblr (with subsequent tumblr blog deletions in a very similar vein). (note: DW is not an OTW project - more below)
Hello, my name is redshoes post - with specific AO3 history links (drawn from the above) now including this list.
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DW wikipedia page says: Dreamwidth is an online journal service […] set up by ex-LiveJournal staff Denise Paolucci and Mark Smith, born out of a desire for a new community based on open access, transparency, freedom and respect. Dreamwidth was announced on 11 June 2008 and went into open beta on 30 April 2009.)
