Musings on LJ and platforms for fandom
Helloooo, LJ. I have been so neglectful of you. This is not because I have nothing to say, more that I do not have much to say that's conducive to regular LJ updates; real life is largely boring, and my fandom engagement is split between quick bite-size hits (i.e. Tumblr, black hole of the internet) and fucking gigantic undertakings like DW season 6 fixit fic and Curse of Fenric meta. The gigantic things will make it to LJ, eventually, they are just in draft form at the moment.
I don't think I'm the only one with this problem--sometimes it feels like fandom is drifting away and I don't know where the fuck it is anymore. I mean yes, there is Tumblr, and fic still lives on LJ + various archives, but what about random-ass medium-length discussion and squee? I don't see as much of it lately. These thoughts are of course prompted by LJ's fucking stupid overhaul of the comment system, which is only going to disperse fandom even further. Oh, LJ, all of fandom's righteous outrage over your various fuck-ups wasn't enough to drive us away completely, but lack of functionality might just do the trick; how ignominious would it be if a comment page redesign succeeded where the Summer of Strikethrough failed? Not with a bang but a whimper, etc. And where would we go from there? Tumblr is fun but it is just does not support discussion or conversations well, and fandom couldn't move there completely without amputating half of what makes it what it is. Mailing lists are dead, private archives and personal webpages aren't sufficient. Dreamwidth is a possibility, but I have this sneaking suspicion that there's been a gradual, unintentional leakage of fannish participation from LJ-based platforms in general due to their limitations: decentralized, not easily searchable, and time-based in a way that makes content inexorably drift into the ether after a while. (Another strike against Tumblr: it has all of those problems, on steroids.)
I wish forums were more in vogue--I might be biased because Les Mis fandom has been primarily forum-based for a while, and because when I got online fandom was primarily based around the trifecta of forums (for discussion and ephemera), fic archives (for... fic), and personal sites (for more durable content). I suppose the problem, in the age of polyfannish community and big user-content-driven platforms, is the lack of a central clearinghouse--a big site where you can use one account and one identity to participate in a bunch of groups with different interests. There was a brief period circa 2002 where fanfiction.net had pretty awesome forums, thus fulfilling two roles of the pre-web-2.0 trifecta, but then came the Great Porn Ban and general deterioration, which coincided (though not coincidentally, I'll bet) with the rise of LJ as a pan-fandom hub.
So I suppose what I really, really want is some sort of One Platform to Rule Them All: a site with LJ's approach of individual and community accounts, with cross-posting and sitewide tag search capabilities à la Tumblr, where an account maintainer can set whether to sort posts by recently-posted (like blogs/LJ) or recently-commented (like forums). While I'm dreaming, it would be awesome if each account could have sub-pages with different sort/update settings--e.g. a community with a forum (recently-commented first) and a fic archive (recently-posted first), or a forum with sub-forums, or an individual blog with a fic journal and an icon journal attached. If you really wanted it to take over the world you could allow maintainers to (a) enable a dropdown box to sort the display by author/post title/most commented/etc, (b) create de-facto categories/directories by requiring posters to choose one or more of a selection of tags, (c) let community members edit any post in a particular sub-section, thus enabling limited wiki-style behavior, and (d) add unmoving/static posts such as stickies, or even a whole page of manually-sorted posts that would somewhat resemble a personal website, without recourse to backdating.
And you know, on the face of it it doesn't look that much harder to implement than LJ or AO3. Except sitewide search, which will always and forever be a pain in the ass. There would be issues balancing customizability (of display, journal structure, posting/commenting/editing access) with ease of use, but you could lay down templates ("I want this bit to behave like a blog/forum/wiki/archive...") and let users decide how much they want to fiddle. The other bugbear would be flists/subscriptions... making it easy for the user to separate blog-style subscriptions from forum-style ones if desired, to subscribe to a sub-journal but not the whole account, to show/hide cross-posts and reblogs that come up multiple times, etc. In practice there would probably be all sorts of unexpected implementation nightmares, but it's fun to dream about.
I don't think I'm the only one with this problem--sometimes it feels like fandom is drifting away and I don't know where the fuck it is anymore. I mean yes, there is Tumblr, and fic still lives on LJ + various archives, but what about random-ass medium-length discussion and squee? I don't see as much of it lately. These thoughts are of course prompted by LJ's fucking stupid overhaul of the comment system, which is only going to disperse fandom even further. Oh, LJ, all of fandom's righteous outrage over your various fuck-ups wasn't enough to drive us away completely, but lack of functionality might just do the trick; how ignominious would it be if a comment page redesign succeeded where the Summer of Strikethrough failed? Not with a bang but a whimper, etc. And where would we go from there? Tumblr is fun but it is just does not support discussion or conversations well, and fandom couldn't move there completely without amputating half of what makes it what it is. Mailing lists are dead, private archives and personal webpages aren't sufficient. Dreamwidth is a possibility, but I have this sneaking suspicion that there's been a gradual, unintentional leakage of fannish participation from LJ-based platforms in general due to their limitations: decentralized, not easily searchable, and time-based in a way that makes content inexorably drift into the ether after a while. (Another strike against Tumblr: it has all of those problems, on steroids.)
I wish forums were more in vogue--I might be biased because Les Mis fandom has been primarily forum-based for a while, and because when I got online fandom was primarily based around the trifecta of forums (for discussion and ephemera), fic archives (for... fic), and personal sites (for more durable content). I suppose the problem, in the age of polyfannish community and big user-content-driven platforms, is the lack of a central clearinghouse--a big site where you can use one account and one identity to participate in a bunch of groups with different interests. There was a brief period circa 2002 where fanfiction.net had pretty awesome forums, thus fulfilling two roles of the pre-web-2.0 trifecta, but then came the Great Porn Ban and general deterioration, which coincided (though not coincidentally, I'll bet) with the rise of LJ as a pan-fandom hub.
So I suppose what I really, really want is some sort of One Platform to Rule Them All: a site with LJ's approach of individual and community accounts, with cross-posting and sitewide tag search capabilities à la Tumblr, where an account maintainer can set whether to sort posts by recently-posted (like blogs/LJ) or recently-commented (like forums). While I'm dreaming, it would be awesome if each account could have sub-pages with different sort/update settings--e.g. a community with a forum (recently-commented first) and a fic archive (recently-posted first), or a forum with sub-forums, or an individual blog with a fic journal and an icon journal attached. If you really wanted it to take over the world you could allow maintainers to (a) enable a dropdown box to sort the display by author/post title/most commented/etc, (b) create de-facto categories/directories by requiring posters to choose one or more of a selection of tags, (c) let community members edit any post in a particular sub-section, thus enabling limited wiki-style behavior, and (d) add unmoving/static posts such as stickies, or even a whole page of manually-sorted posts that would somewhat resemble a personal website, without recourse to backdating.
And you know, on the face of it it doesn't look that much harder to implement than LJ or AO3. Except sitewide search, which will always and forever be a pain in the ass. There would be issues balancing customizability (of display, journal structure, posting/commenting/editing access) with ease of use, but you could lay down templates ("I want this bit to behave like a blog/forum/wiki/archive...") and let users decide how much they want to fiddle. The other bugbear would be flists/subscriptions... making it easy for the user to separate blog-style subscriptions from forum-style ones if desired, to subscribe to a sub-journal but not the whole account, to show/hide cross-posts and reblogs that come up multiple times, etc. In practice there would probably be all sorts of unexpected implementation nightmares, but it's fun to dream about.