friends and lj-friends, monologue and dialogue, filters and f-lock
This is going to be a rather complex and long post, I'm afraid. I've been thinking about it for some time: about how my own approach to lj, my own posting habits, and my "reading list"/friendslist/lj-friends has changed, and how others' has apparently changed as well. This is not so much a "my views on friending" screed as it is a musing about why I have these views, and how and why they have changed. Through the magic of lj-cuts, there are two versions - the quickie bullet-point version, and the fully-expanded and tedious version.
Reading list -> interaction list
I originally held to the belief that my "friendslist" was not a list of friends, but a list of the journals I wanted to read: a reading list. And functionally, that's what an lj-flist is, because it aggregates the journals on it into one page, for easy reading. I guess it still is, in a purely literal sense. But the nature of "what I want to read on my flist" has evolved over the 3+ years I've been on lj, for several reasons:
1. The rise of newsletters and announcement communities. I don't need to friend someone to read her fic (unless it's flocked, about which, more later); if it's in a fandom I follow, I'll see a pointer somewhere. So a journal needs to have more than just fic to interest me. (And ditto interesting meta, due to metafandom, although as a compiler for that newsletter I'm partly responsible for finding posts to link there.) This has two results: I am likely to not friend an lj that has interesting fic (or meta) but personal stuff which I'm not interested, and I am more likely to friend an lj that has interesting personal stuff in addition to interesting fic or meta.
2. I have grown to value many of my fandom friends as real friends. And if you're a real friend, I care about your nonfandom life. Originally, I intended Isis to be a "personality fragment" with no personal details or interests. But as I interacted with people for whom fandom was just one facet of their personalities, people I liked, I felt that I wanted to become real friends with them, and the only way to do that was through reciprocation. This means sharing more of who I am, becoming a real person in their eyes. And it also means appreciating the views of them as real people - i.e. their personal posts.
Incidentally, one of the motivators for this post is that many of my lj-friends have recently posted asking people if they want to be on their "real-life" filters. I may have missed a few (especially if you instituted such a filter before I friended you) but my general rule is: if you're comfortable having me read about your real life, I want to be on your real life filter. Always. (And if I'm comfortable with having you on mine, you're on it.)
3. I value dialogue over monologue. I've never been a lurker (in anything! I'm the original Big Mouth Fan!) so I'm not shy about commenting in others' journals, whether I have them friended or not. If I friend someone and that person doesn't friend me back, I feel like the dialogue's turned to a monologue, so unless their journal is so interesting to me that I don't want to miss anything posted there, I will defriend. Yeah, I'm a big hypocrite, because I don't friend everyone back. But I am far more likely to friend people who comment in my lj (and defriend people who don't, if I don't find their journals riveting). (And if you are feeling pouty because you comment a lot, and I don't friend you, you can drop me an email. Because maybe I just overlooked you, or have an image in my head of what you post based on an old look at your journal. But see points 1, 2, and 5.)
4. Ability to read via friendsfriends and community flists. I like to read around fandom this way because that way I can read a bunch of ljs as though on a flist, without the implicit weight of friending. (Although I read via a series of filters, I read all my filters, and I would rather be defriended than filtered entirely out.) I feel a sort of obligation in friending, in that I am saying that I read your journal, and it's reasonable for you to expect that if I have you friended, I read your journal. So if I read via other lists, I can kind of float along, reading as I choose, ignoring as I choose. And of course, if I find someone consistently interesting that way, I'm likely to friend that lj. (But see point 6.)
5. My fandom interests have shifted. When I started my fandom lj, I was strictly into Harry Potter. Now I read, write, and rec in a bunch of fandoms, none of which are Harry Potter. I still have a lot of my old HP lj-friends on my flist, but they're mostly the ones that interact with me in other ways. Some of them I had dropped, and then re-added when they started getting interested in some of my new fandoms. Some of them are just historical holdovers that I no longer have much in common with. I've also added a whole lot of new lj-friends from my new fandoms.
Another motivating reason for this post is that I'd like to update my flist to reflect what I want to read and who I feel close to. So I'm going to be removing those journals that belong to people with whom I used to share HP fandom, (and some of the SGA fandom people, as my focus has changed a bit there) but who never comment on my journal, and whose journals don't have a lot of interest to me. If you're one of those people, I certainly won't feel offended if you defriend me (even pre-emptively!). (And as a reminder, every day is defriending amnesty day, blah blah blah.) If you think you're one of those people but don't want to be defriended, drop me a line. Or comment occasionally.
6. Trend towards (mostly) f-locked journals. When I look at my flist, perhaps half the entries are flocked. I'm sure it hasn't always been this way, and it makes me a little sad. I mean, I'm happy that those of you who are uncomfortable letting the world see your ramblings have a way of keeping them among a group of people you (think you) know. [ETA, because maybe I wasn't clear: I don't object to people locking posts - I know there are good reasons for it, and it would be rather rude of me to tell you what you can do with your journal! And of course if you have me friended, I can read them anyway! :-)] But because of points 1 and 2, this means that I am less likely to friend journals which keep the interesting (to me) posts locked away, because I won't know you're interesting until you friend me, and I won't friend you if you're not interesting.
Because of point 5, I'm seeing a lot of people I don't have friended commenting in other journals. And sometimes they seem like they might be interesting...but I don't know, because their journals are flocked or mostly flocked! And it seems the height of rudeness to friend them, request to be friended back, and then decide, oh, you're boring after all, bye-bye! So I dither a lot about friending new people first, especially if they say outright that their journal is largely or entirely flocked. [ETA, because I forgot to say this earlier: Since we "know" each other through our interactions elsewhere, and they haven't friended me first, then I assume they don't want to friend me, right? So if I friend them, they'll friend me only to give me access to their posts, not because they want to read my lj, and I don't want that - I want friends to want to read what I write, not feel obliged to read it (and certainly I don't want to be filtered out!)] In a way it seems "safer" to occasionally run into their open posts via 4.
See, I told you this was long. And there's no real conclusion, other than that livejournal fandom is a confusing morass full of pitfalls of potential misunderstanding. Some of us want to treat our flist as a reading list. Some of us consider our flist a list of friends. And some of us (like me, I guess) want to have it both ways.
Reading list -> interaction list
I originally held to the belief that my "friendslist" was not a list of friends, but a list of the journals I wanted to read: a reading list. And functionally, that's what an lj-flist is, because it aggregates the journals on it into one page, for easy reading. I guess it still is, in a purely literal sense. But the nature of "what I want to read on my flist" has evolved over the 3+ years I've been on lj, for several reasons:
1. The rise of newsletters and announcement communities. I don't need to friend someone to read her fic (unless it's flocked, about which, more later); if it's in a fandom I follow, I'll see a pointer somewhere. So a journal needs to have more than just fic to interest me. (And ditto interesting meta, due to metafandom, although as a compiler for that newsletter I'm partly responsible for finding posts to link there.) This has two results: I am likely to not friend an lj that has interesting fic (or meta) but personal stuff which I'm not interested, and I am more likely to friend an lj that has interesting personal stuff in addition to interesting fic or meta.
2. I have grown to value many of my fandom friends as real friends. And if you're a real friend, I care about your nonfandom life. Originally, I intended Isis to be a "personality fragment" with no personal details or interests. But as I interacted with people for whom fandom was just one facet of their personalities, people I liked, I felt that I wanted to become real friends with them, and the only way to do that was through reciprocation. This means sharing more of who I am, becoming a real person in their eyes. And it also means appreciating the views of them as real people - i.e. their personal posts.
Incidentally, one of the motivators for this post is that many of my lj-friends have recently posted asking people if they want to be on their "real-life" filters. I may have missed a few (especially if you instituted such a filter before I friended you) but my general rule is: if you're comfortable having me read about your real life, I want to be on your real life filter. Always. (And if I'm comfortable with having you on mine, you're on it.)
3. I value dialogue over monologue. I've never been a lurker (in anything! I'm the original Big Mouth Fan!) so I'm not shy about commenting in others' journals, whether I have them friended or not. If I friend someone and that person doesn't friend me back, I feel like the dialogue's turned to a monologue, so unless their journal is so interesting to me that I don't want to miss anything posted there, I will defriend. Yeah, I'm a big hypocrite, because I don't friend everyone back. But I am far more likely to friend people who comment in my lj (and defriend people who don't, if I don't find their journals riveting). (And if you are feeling pouty because you comment a lot, and I don't friend you, you can drop me an email. Because maybe I just overlooked you, or have an image in my head of what you post based on an old look at your journal. But see points 1, 2, and 5.)
4. Ability to read via friendsfriends and community flists. I like to read around fandom this way because that way I can read a bunch of ljs as though on a flist, without the implicit weight of friending. (Although I read via a series of filters, I read all my filters, and I would rather be defriended than filtered entirely out.) I feel a sort of obligation in friending, in that I am saying that I read your journal, and it's reasonable for you to expect that if I have you friended, I read your journal. So if I read via other lists, I can kind of float along, reading as I choose, ignoring as I choose. And of course, if I find someone consistently interesting that way, I'm likely to friend that lj. (But see point 6.)
5. My fandom interests have shifted. When I started my fandom lj, I was strictly into Harry Potter. Now I read, write, and rec in a bunch of fandoms, none of which are Harry Potter. I still have a lot of my old HP lj-friends on my flist, but they're mostly the ones that interact with me in other ways. Some of them I had dropped, and then re-added when they started getting interested in some of my new fandoms. Some of them are just historical holdovers that I no longer have much in common with. I've also added a whole lot of new lj-friends from my new fandoms.
Another motivating reason for this post is that I'd like to update my flist to reflect what I want to read and who I feel close to. So I'm going to be removing those journals that belong to people with whom I used to share HP fandom, (and some of the SGA fandom people, as my focus has changed a bit there) but who never comment on my journal, and whose journals don't have a lot of interest to me. If you're one of those people, I certainly won't feel offended if you defriend me (even pre-emptively!). (And as a reminder, every day is defriending amnesty day, blah blah blah.) If you think you're one of those people but don't want to be defriended, drop me a line. Or comment occasionally.
6. Trend towards (mostly) f-locked journals. When I look at my flist, perhaps half the entries are flocked. I'm sure it hasn't always been this way, and it makes me a little sad. I mean, I'm happy that those of you who are uncomfortable letting the world see your ramblings have a way of keeping them among a group of people you (think you) know. [ETA, because maybe I wasn't clear: I don't object to people locking posts - I know there are good reasons for it, and it would be rather rude of me to tell you what you can do with your journal! And of course if you have me friended, I can read them anyway! :-)] But because of points 1 and 2, this means that I am less likely to friend journals which keep the interesting (to me) posts locked away, because I won't know you're interesting until you friend me, and I won't friend you if you're not interesting.
Because of point 5, I'm seeing a lot of people I don't have friended commenting in other journals. And sometimes they seem like they might be interesting...but I don't know, because their journals are flocked or mostly flocked! And it seems the height of rudeness to friend them, request to be friended back, and then decide, oh, you're boring after all, bye-bye! So I dither a lot about friending new people first, especially if they say outright that their journal is largely or entirely flocked. [ETA, because I forgot to say this earlier: Since we "know" each other through our interactions elsewhere, and they haven't friended me first, then I assume they don't want to friend me, right? So if I friend them, they'll friend me only to give me access to their posts, not because they want to read my lj, and I don't want that - I want friends to want to read what I write, not feel obliged to read it (and certainly I don't want to be filtered out!)] In a way it seems "safer" to occasionally run into their open posts via 4.
See, I told you this was long. And there's no real conclusion, other than that livejournal fandom is a confusing morass full of pitfalls of potential misunderstanding. Some of us want to treat our flist as a reading list. Some of us consider our flist a list of friends. And some of us (like me, I guess) want to have it both ways.