response to greywash's "state of the migration"

[adiprose]

I had some thoughts on greywash's excellent post on the tumblrpocalypse and The Great Migration - go read it if you have time. It's VERY long, but really thorough, and very smart and thoughtful in the way that all their fannish posts are.

In thinking about how I'd like to respond to that post, because I would like to, I've been noticing (over the last five minutes, heh) that my brain feels like it's - stretching, for lack of a better word. I'm using muscles that I haven't used in a long time by trying to articulate my response. I'm sure if I went back through my own tumblr (which I need to back up) that I'd find evidence of my participation in = large-scale fandom discussions, but I certainly haven't participated in those conversations in a long time. And as I've been thinking about the fact that my brain feels as though it's been asked to do push ups when it hasn't done anything but sit on a couch for nine years, I've also been thinking about the ways greywash's post brought up questions of what the fan community is.

Because that post got it absolutely bang-on; there is no one-size-fits-all convenient solution for Tumblr's demise, the same way that Tumblr in the end wasn't a 100% effective replacement for the communities LJ built. Tumblr's ease of use and low barrier to entry made it easy for new fans to find content, but I never felt that it was great at making it easy to find new people; plenty of people post about things I'm interested in but I don't want to follow all of them, because I find them as posters annoying or uninteresting. But LJ, bless its heart, had issues with ease of access to fan spaces as well. I think the concept of the BNF as we know it exists today because of LJ, and the way that certain people would take up all the oxygen in a fannish space. So it'd be nice to see something that is a melding of the best of both LJ and Tumblr in the future.

I'm also thinking about what I want for myself, and apart from what the fan space we all move to looks like, that's been something that has been hard for me to answer. I have been a lurker for years. I haven't written fic in *checks AO3* five years, and I was pretty inactive before that as well. Why have I lurked, when it's not as though I've stopped being a fan? I've been in and out of different fandoms, but it's not as though the people active in those fandoms would have known it, because other than occasionally commenting on fic, I haven't engaged in any discussions or made new fannish friends as a result.

And I think for me, when I think about what I want my fannish life to look like, what I want more than anything is not to passively observe anymore. I want to engage with the community, whatever that looks like; I want to get into conversations (in THREADED COMMENTS, dammit) and give feedback and kudos and comments. I want to feel the way I felt in the early days of the Tumblr Girl Detectives Reading Club (which I just realized has a dreamwidth we never posted anything in!). I want to be a part of something again. And I look forward to seeing what that looks like.

Oh, and also being able to do tagfic. That'd be cool.

EDITED TO ADD: I think it's VERY interesting that there has been little to no mention of Slack as a fandom alternative. I like to think that it's because everyone recognizes that Slack is a tool of our corporate overlords and though it may be fun in certain ways it's an awful platform that eats your life. /rant

Comments

[greywash]

gosh, all of this. I know exactly what you mean by 'stretching a muscle'—I feel like I'm trying to look at a problem in a whole new way but doing that is like a two-week silent yoga retreat and I'm at that stage where I still can't do headstands without falling over. /o\

[adiprose]

I've been looking at pretty moving pictures in a vacuum and am being asked to form words??? What?? this is INJUSTICE! I haven't written anything longer than an edit letter in six years, probably.

[breathedout]

I have serious nostalgia for the Tumblr Girl Detectives Reading Club, both for itself and also for the state of the Sherlock fandom in those days. I'm sure my glasses are rose-hued, but gosh it was so open and welcoming and thinking back it's hard to believe (though not really, since: humans) that it could have degenerated into the toxic sludge pile it became.

I second the desire for active engagement (in threaded comments). And I'm just now realizing, and should add this in a comment on greywash's post, that the ability to blacklist is something that totally made Tumblr usable for me, since it meant I could follow a ton of people whose brains I liked, but mute all their posts about stuff I didn't care about. Of which there was a lot. It let me engage with the people without needing to be super into exactly the same things they were into.

Anyway, good post!

[adiprose]

That was a fucking awesome community, wasn't it? I feel like I follow most of y'all on other platforms but it's not the same. And I wonder if the toxic sludge pile of the Sherlock fandom was the harbinger of the anti/purity brigade that Tumblr has become; I feel like a lot of the really terrible wank happening in latter-day Sherlock was very similar in its kind of appeal to purity culture that I'm seeing now.

Re: people having interests I don't follow; that wasn't quite what I meant, but I do take your point. What I meant was more that I could find someone who posted all the gifs of the particular hot person I am into at the moment, but if all their commentary on said hot person is annoying (or they post other opinions on hot other hot people that I disagree with) then I don't necessarily feel like I've found a person I want to follow. Does that make sense? it's more about "can I find a person who likes the thing I like or who talks about the things they like in a way that resonates with me."

I 100% blame my current hockey obsession on the people having really interesting conversations about it on Tumblr and Twitter. To the point where I looked up during a bar outing at my cousin's wedding and saw Alex Ovechkin on a screen, thought "Oh, that's Alex Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals," and then realized that I only know who he is because of tumblr. And this was before I called myself a fan. So in some sense I do want to kind of go along with whatever weird fandom people get into, because then I find new interests, but I can't follow them if I can't get with their tone.

Not sure if any of that made sense! Like I said, I'm very rusty.

[swingandswirl]

Hi! Here from the Latest Posts page; I hope me just jumping in like this is okay.

And I think for me, when I think about what I want my fannish life to look like, what I want more than anything is not to passively observe anymore. I want to engage with the community, whatever that looks like; I want to get into conversations (in THREADED COMMENTS, dammit) and give feedback and kudos and comments. I want to feel the way I felt in the early days of the Tumblr Girl Detectives Reading Club (which I just realized has a dreamwidth we never posted anything in!). I want to be a part of something again. And I look forward to seeing what that looks like.

OMG YES THIS. Like, I loved the ease of reblogging; it was perfect for my no-spoon grad student self. But as sad as I am at all we're losing with the Tumblrpocalypse, I'm really excited to be able to get back to a more community-focused way of doing fandom.

[adiprose]

Of course! It's exciting to be back in a place where "latest posts" is a thing and not a constantly refreshing feed of nightmares, lol.

I do think that there is a lot of pressure put on people to Create and Participate and stuff in the more DW/LJ esque system, so I hope we can find a happy medium between "hoarding posts I've liked and never posting" and "having to talk All The Time."