#fandom migration

I know people are fighting back but I can't help but feel like we have to be submissive (thanks doomers). Because all this and the reactions have nearly made me doomerist.

Anyways I hope this leads to riots.

There are still forums out there, and people still use them! Check out the spacebattles.com forum for one of the biggest out there!

Honestly, part of this is a *scale* problem. There are so many more people online nowdays than there were in the days of forums and personal websites. And a lot of those new people are, well, normies. People who don't really have either the know-how or a good reason to run their own forum or website. So they gravitate toward the big sites where everyone else is.

There ARE barriers to creating your own site or forum, we can't pretend there aren't.

If you use free hosting, you have to abide by the terms of use and community guidelines of whoever is giving you that free hosting. Often, that includes content guidelines about what can and can't be discussed on the platform. Sometimes it even includes giving up the rights to whatever you post there.

The other option is of course to pay to host your own forum or website (like I do). Then no one can tell you what to do, but it does cost money.

And the "normies" like I mentioned above, who don't have a good reason to host their own stuff, certainly don't want to pay to do it. So they just, again, circle whereever everybody else is.

Back in the livejournal days, I wrote a lot more posts that were long and involved, more thought out, and more personal.

I think all of us-- fandom and nerds and geeks specifically, but along with us everyone in the world-- I think we have been immeasurably harmed by corporate social media.

We have been harmed by conforming to an arbitrary word count, by the pressure to post short, “content” multiple times a day, for that content to be “relatable”, tepidly ‘family (advertiser) friendly’, and in the service of getting as much shallow ‘like/share/reblog’ attention to this “content” as possible. In service to our own egos, yes, but beyond that, in service to the desires of the vast, money hungry corporations who graciously allow us to provide free “content” for their vast, money hungry machines of social media.

We have been harmed, too, by the social pressures these corporate machines of mass communication create. The pressure not to be too cringey, too weird, too arrogant; the anti-intellectual pressure never to be “pretentious”.

Well fuck that my posts are not “content” and they are not created for the money hungry corporate machine, and they are not for it to drip feed to a mass audience like baby birds with their mother’s heavily digested pap.

My posts are weird, they are pretentious, and they are not fucking advertiser friendly.

They have contorted our minds to demand constant attention of the mass-communication money making machine they’ve created, and I don’t want to be part of it any more.

Back on Livejournal we were thrilled if a post made it to a few dozen comments.

And you know what? A few comments is leagues and lightyears better than hundreds of nothing-interactions. “Likes” and “reblogs”.

Shallow interaction for the machine to fill a few more milliseconds of scrolling for a few more people.

My posts are worth more than that.

YOUR posts are worth more than that.

I’m in the middle of a vast self-exodus to my own hosting-- as twitter is destroyed from within, and reddit eats itself, and AO3 is the victim of mass campaign of canibalization by fucking normies who are the front of useful idiots for conservative christians, and for terfs-- I am leaving.

Social media is a corpse on the ground, and we “””content creators””” are the soul of it. That soul will not die, we will simply all find new bodies to inhabit and infuse. 

But until that corpse is gone, I intend to be one damned annoying poltergeist for the scavengers to deal with while they rip apart the corpse of social media.

Fuck corporate interests. Fuck the money machine. Fuck the christian conservatives and the TERFs and everyone else who wants to hold you down and make you conform and lay still while they eat your corpse.

I’m pretentious. I’m long winded. And I’m not safe for advertisers.

Rattle those chains, baby. Rattle those chains.

appendix beneath the cut

I have!

 So, I’ve been poking around Danny Phantom for a few years, haven’t published anything other than a cute little crossover fic but I have a whole folder dedicated to them - I like the vibes, the way it can be played to horror or trauma or just for sillies. And I like playing with dead things! The cast is fun too; everyone has their little things but they’re still a team.

 I’m most active currently in Harry Potter as far as writing goes, but reading wise I’ve been on a huge DC kick - mostly batman, but it’s fun to branch out when I get the chance.

 I also stumbled onto the Winx corner of Ao3 a month or so ago; specifically DragonflyxParodies’ A Fable, Agreed Upon series - I’m feral over them. Go read it, it’s lovely. And there are so many cool winx rewrites and redesigns floating around tumblr, it’s so much fun.

  Let’s see, what else; I periodically check in to minecraft smp fandoms; there’s so many options and so much lore to catch up on that it scares me, but it all looks so cool and I really want to catch up and know all the little references I keep seeing.

 I’ve been a Scooby-Doo Gremlin since I was two, and it’s hard to find SD fics that scratch the itch but there’s loads of lovely fanart.

 I can be caught periodically getting very excited about The Coldest Girl In Coldtown by Holly Black; it’s a vampire novel with a lot of really cool worldbuilding and a cast I’d die for.

 Let’s see, what other new fandoms... Megamind’s not new, but it’s been a while since I checked in; once again I think it’s really fun to see the worldbuilding opportunities, and the character dynamics are glorious. 

I know I don’t tumble very well, but I’m still around an still like space shows. How’s it going?

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