Just wanted to say thank you for the message of Not Without You. The thought of trying to migrate elsewhere is stressful as all get out. I remember the end days of LJ, when people were finally so sick of the place and enough people had finally moved over to Tumblr that following after felt relatively easy. Right now I feel like we're looking at the end days of Tumblr but I'm not really sure what comes next, and knowing that I'm not going to be left behind helps a lot.
Well, I don’t think we’re at the end days yet, but we’re definitely in the “it would be worth investigating what a next good move would look like” phase of things.
I tell you, I have had the advantage of my life of being the technically stupidest person in a lot of rooms, and so I totally understand the feelings of helplessness and terror. But this helps me a lot in teaching because I don’t automatically assume that the person I’m talking to understands what I mean at all!
The tl;dr is that I am learning that there are a lot of new tools that can be deployed to connect networks of people just like ours - what lim was saying in her post is that our network, fandom, is itself a huge resource that we have, because networks themselves have power in distributed systems! However the question of which tools and in what order to deploy them and how to use them and to what result has to be evaluated, but you know–don’t worry, we can do this! I reblogged lim’s post because she’s like, 100 miles ahead of me on this stuff and there are other people who 100 miles ahead of me too, out on the frontiers, but I wanted to say that I will always straggle behind and try to figure out where we’re going and leave signs and wave my arms around a lot. xo
Having been there too, I am confident that we are in the anxiety and procrastination phase.
There were years on LJ where we knew it was dying, and some people went to IJ and some to DW, but nothing was really working. People felt abandoned both because of others giving up on LJ too fast and, conversely, because of people not giving these other hosts a chance early enough, in sufficient numbers.
We have a chance to handle the inevitable change better this time.