forwarding addresses + current mess
For starters, other places to find me:
Dreamwidth: sophia-helix I haven’t posted much here in years, but subject to change I suppose.
AO3: sophiahelix Fic still goes here. I lock RPF, either immediately or after a couple of days, so you’ll need an account to read that.
Twitter: My fandom twitter, locked due to RPF, is sophiahelixfic, and I add back. My main twitter, where I think of “myself” as being located online these days, is sophiahelix, but it’s mostly a general personal account with a little fandom content.
The rest:
What can I even say? I’ve lived through three fandom platform migrations, but never motivated solely by a TOS change, so this is new territory for me as well.
I got into fandom fall of 1998, when online discussion was mainly hosted on Usenet or individual message boards. I started noticing references to mailing list names in fic headers, and joined a couple in 1999, which is where I met all my friendships. Mailing lists were closest to Discord, minus the subcategory channels — fandom specific, and a place where a limited number of subscribers could talk in a general forum, without being on the open internet.
My friend and I started what I think was the first multifandom mailing list not solely focused on slash, which is about when the walls between fandoms started coming down. In 2001 everyone started getting a Livejournal, and within a year the mailing list were deserted in the face of what LJ offered: individual blogs with threaded comments, and a way to subscribe and read other people’s posts on a feed, essentially curating your fandom experience. (I always think Brad Fitz of LJ doesn’t get any credit for essentially creating the RSS/feed format all social media is built in now.)
If mailing lists were like large parties or conferences, LJ was like a series of small salons you could hop between. It lasted for a long while, because when DW came online in 2009 you could cross post between and a lot of people like me didn’t make the jump. (AO3 came about shortly after, because there was a big push for fans to own the servers precisely due to this kind of bullshit.) I did finally make DW my main platform in 2011 when I couldn’t accept LJ’s shitty ownership anymore (Russia bought it basically to suppress Russian dissident blogging).
When I got a new fandom in early 2012, I headed to Tumblr. People had been migrating over there for a year or more, drawn first by image hosting and then, more emphatically, by the reblog function. Other platforms require content (post, comment, fanwork) for participation, but on Tumblr you can have an account entirely full of reblogs, and I’m guessing 95% of fannish activity on here is just that.
Given my history, I’ve always, always had reservations about the Tumblr format. I used to write meta posts like this one all the time on LJ, but quickly learned over here that reblogs can put your posts in front of readers with no context, and that discussion through chains of reblogs or short unthreaded replies is almost impossible. On the other hand, I’ve embraced the reblogging life and am so thankful for all the image/gif-makers, and I like that tags can function like mailing lists with a much broader reach. There are good things and bad things about this site, but enough of a balance I’ve stuck around for nearly 7 years.
The problem now is there’s no siren call of another platform. Twitter has its own issues, and nowhere is prepared to host the volume of image content, explicit and otherwise, that fandom is now accustomed to. AO3 still functions as a main hub, but only a tiny fraction of fans write or even comment on fic. Facebook doesn’t want us and won’t allow us to use pseudonyms, and no other growing platform (Pillowfort, Mastodon) is ready for us.
My guess is people stay unhappily put for now, and start bleeding off into Discord servers until the next thing comes along. Which is a shame, because it means back to the walled gardens of single-fandom mailing list days, and less ease of movement and permeability between fandoms. I hope people keep their usernames, because I’ve lost many people between moves. Fandom is just so big and varied now, it’s hard to conceptualize it and still harder to dream up the perfect platform for it, which is why one doesn’t exist yet. Fandom is also shaped by its platforms, though, so I have no doubt in the coming months and years it’ll take a new form I can’t even guess at now.