Hey everyone?

[seabroth]

Hi, I'm completely new to the series/fandom, and I haven't finished watching it yet either... but can this comm be revived? I know people are still writing fic, and ds_slash seems to be fairly active, plus I bet there are fans on Tumblr that we can coerce into participating. It would just require some advertisement and maybe a flashier layout, but what do

Comments

[seabroth]

Thanks, I joined it!

I had a little success in another comm with enabling anonymous comments and every so often posting to the Tumblr tags to remind people the comm existed (and having the kink meme there). It seems like a lot of them want to just comment Anon and not make new entries, even if they actually are regularly commenting. And some other people who used both LJ and Tumblr but had ceased to check LJ, also joined.

Tumblr is really bad for having any kind of fandom exchange or community, in part because the messaging system is broken (it eats a lot of messages, and you can't save messages you've sent either). It's also practically impossible to find an entry you saw once because a.) the tags are always being flooded with reposts and b.) people change their usernames, reblog more stuff and delete posts so often that even when you find things in a Google search result, the search result is too old and it's not actually there anymore. I initially joined Tumblr because all the fandom stuff for a fandom I was in seemed to be there, but frankly even if there's less here on LJ it's a much better platform and community (people on Tumblr tend to not make fanstuff and only consume it instead)... Tumblr is also a lot worse with commenting, you can get a thousand "likes" and zero comments, and if you do get comments it tends to be bad ones, so it gets a bit depressing.

If we limited it to drabbles, or made it so the wordcount could be anything in general (even two-sentence stuff), it might generate a few more participants. And the challenges could be month-long (just because it's easier to remember), and we could reuse old challenges to avoid having to come up with new ones. But yeah... it's probably a long-shot.

[desireearmfeldt]

Interesting perspective on Tumblr and Tumblr/LJ interaction. We have a couple of LJ-to-Tumblr ambassadors in the fandom at the moment, which is helpful -- a lot of people also use Archive of Our Own to store fanworks and host challenges, and there have been a bunch of Tumblr folks who have joined up over there. (AO3 is not useful for communities, but is very useful as a centralized posting/reading place, and there's some sense of community/communication via comments, at least. Weirdly, I managed to enter online fandom via AO3, because people were proactive about reaching out to me in comments and pointing me at relevant LJ comms.)

By the way, for < 300-word fics, there's already ds-snippets, which is still active.

There's also the newish Due South/Canadian 6 Degrees Prompt Meme on Archive of Our Own, which has not gotten rolling as much as I'd like, but I live in hope -- that's just prompts, no specific deadlines.

[seabroth]

I'll join both of them! I didn't even know AO3 had these kinds of things (now I feel a bit pathetic, haha). I might not write anything for a while though, it's embarrassing to say but I'm currently on the last ep of the first season and I've just been going around spoiling myself by reading fic.

I can't really remember how I found online fandom. I know I was on FF.net before I was on LJ, but I was reading fanfic starting from when I was around 10-11 years old... Well, I certainly remember when AO3 popped up and I can't believe they're still in beta. It took me a while but I like AO3 more now since it's a lot easier to edit/post fics there. But I am a bit sad sometimes since I deleted all my old fic, I should have saved the very first one I ever wrote at least.