In the wake of tumblr's NSFW ban
Friday, December 7th, 2018 01:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fallynleafHello!
It's been a long time since I've touched this journal. As you can tell, this is not the first time I've tried to use DW as at least a partial tumblr substitute. Will it stick this time? I don't know. I doubt it. As much as I prefer wordier platforms like DW, I'm aware that the time for LJ-style fandom has passed.
But this is a conversation we've been having for years. We've long known that tumblr won't last forever, and that fandom's best interests were never at heart there. Even so, to have it happen so suddenly like this is hard. I've spent eight years on tumblr, including the entirety of my adulthood up to this point, and regardless of how I feel about the website on any given day, like it or not, it's been incredibly influential in shaping the person that I've become. Tumblr has been there for nearly every major milestone in my life.
I didn't set out to make this post just to wax nostalgic about tumblr. But maybe that's inevitable.
The thing is, the aspect of tumblr that has always been the most vital to me is the connections that I've made there with other people. I have friends that have stopped using tumblr over the years, and I still miss them every single day. And as much as the librarian in me is worried about losing that archive of content reflecting that period of my life, the thing I'm most worried about when tumblr does eventually die is drifting even further apart from all of the amazing folks I've met and befriended there.
I think the emotion that most describes what I'm feeling right now is lost.
I know that I am going to stay on tumblr as long as my friends are still there, but I also know that fandom cannot stay on tumblr under the NSFW ban. Fandom cannot stay there, and there is no defined place for everyone to go. None of our options quite fulfill everything that tumblr was to us.
I've been spending a lot of time lately reflecting back on fandom history, and trying to take heart in it.
When Lucasfilm told fanzine editors they couldn't write explicit Star Wars fics, it was a major blow to the fandom, but we got an amazing fanzine archive out of the fallout from that.
When LJ deleted and purged fan content without warning, we got AO3 (and the OTW) out of it.
And you know what? Without the OTW, I wouldn't be in grad school. The sole reason I applied to the program that I'm in is because of my school's fanzine collections, which are here because of a direct partnership with the OTW, and many of which were preserved directly as a response to the open letters to Star Wars zine publishers.
Fandom purges have built our history.
They've forced us to carve out our own spaces and save our own artifacts and communications and history.
Living through those purges is hard. It's full of uncertainty and loss and bitterness. Connections get lost; history evaporates. It happens both too suddenly and not fast enough, communities migrating slowly and with a lot of unevenness along the way, as their original host becomes more and more hostile to them.
But we've done it before, and we'll survive it again. We'll come out of it stronger for having gone through it.
I remember the first time I really sat down and flipped through print zines from the 70's and 80's, and how comforting it was to realize that had I lived in a different time, I still would've been able to find my people, because our communities and subcultures existed before the internet, and would still exist without the internet. We're adaptable and resilient. When the mainstream establishment would not allow us a platform, we made our own.
And I'm not just talking about media fans alone. I'm talking about feminists, and Pagans, and LGBTQ folks, and radical leftists, and so many other subcultures that have historically been denied a platform by the establishment, and who responded by creating their own platforms and self-publishing their content. There has always been overlap between those other subcultures and media fans. It's never been just about fandom.
When I think about the different subcultures that tumblr has hosted alongside fandom, I remember that history. So many communities with deep cultural roots in print zines, and we all ended up in the same place.
But I don't think tumblr could ever really replace print zines. It certainly surpassed zines in terms of distribution and reach, not to mention lack of cost to publish your content, but as a corporate-owned website that's constantly inclined to sell out its users to the highest bidder, it can never match the freedom of being able to self-publish whatever you wanted in your zine. LiveJournal couldn't, either. And neither can twitter, or facebook, or any other social media site that serves up its users as a product for advertisers.
I'm starting to think that the only real solution is to do what we did with AO3 and create a social network of our own. It would need to be run as a nonprofit, operating on donations and volunteer labor, with zero advertising. I think AO3 is proof enough that we could do it and fund it and keep it going.
I also think the parallel rise of tumblr alongside AO3 demonstrates that as amazing and wonderful as AO3 is, it alone cannot support all of fandom's needs. We need a place to build and nurture our communities and personal connections alongside a stable space to archive our works.
I'm also aware that whatever the solution is, it's going to take years. We're going to be in for a long period of uncertainty and loss. Tumblr's decline is going to be a sad and bitter time for many of us, but we will get through it, and we will come out of it stronger than we were before.
Fandom will do what it has always done, and it will adapt, and it will survive.
I just have to hold that in my heart.
It's been a long time since I've touched this journal. As you can tell, this is not the first time I've tried to use DW as at least a partial tumblr substitute. Will it stick this time? I don't know. I doubt it. As much as I prefer wordier platforms like DW, I'm aware that the time for LJ-style fandom has passed.
But this is a conversation we've been having for years. We've long known that tumblr won't last forever, and that fandom's best interests were never at heart there. Even so, to have it happen so suddenly like this is hard. I've spent eight years on tumblr, including the entirety of my adulthood up to this point, and regardless of how I feel about the website on any given day, like it or not, it's been incredibly influential in shaping the person that I've become. Tumblr has been there for nearly every major milestone in my life.
I didn't set out to make this post just to wax nostalgic about tumblr. But maybe that's inevitable.
The thing is, the aspect of tumblr that has always been the most vital to me is the connections that I've made there with other people. I have friends that have stopped using tumblr over the years, and I still miss them every single day. And as much as the librarian in me is worried about losing that archive of content reflecting that period of my life, the thing I'm most worried about when tumblr does eventually die is drifting even further apart from all of the amazing folks I've met and befriended there.
I think the emotion that most describes what I'm feeling right now is lost.
I know that I am going to stay on tumblr as long as my friends are still there, but I also know that fandom cannot stay on tumblr under the NSFW ban. Fandom cannot stay there, and there is no defined place for everyone to go. None of our options quite fulfill everything that tumblr was to us.
I've been spending a lot of time lately reflecting back on fandom history, and trying to take heart in it.
When Lucasfilm told fanzine editors they couldn't write explicit Star Wars fics, it was a major blow to the fandom, but we got an amazing fanzine archive out of the fallout from that.
When LJ deleted and purged fan content without warning, we got AO3 (and the OTW) out of it.
And you know what? Without the OTW, I wouldn't be in grad school. The sole reason I applied to the program that I'm in is because of my school's fanzine collections, which are here because of a direct partnership with the OTW, and many of which were preserved directly as a response to the open letters to Star Wars zine publishers.
Fandom purges have built our history.
They've forced us to carve out our own spaces and save our own artifacts and communications and history.
Living through those purges is hard. It's full of uncertainty and loss and bitterness. Connections get lost; history evaporates. It happens both too suddenly and not fast enough, communities migrating slowly and with a lot of unevenness along the way, as their original host becomes more and more hostile to them.
But we've done it before, and we'll survive it again. We'll come out of it stronger for having gone through it.
I remember the first time I really sat down and flipped through print zines from the 70's and 80's, and how comforting it was to realize that had I lived in a different time, I still would've been able to find my people, because our communities and subcultures existed before the internet, and would still exist without the internet. We're adaptable and resilient. When the mainstream establishment would not allow us a platform, we made our own.
And I'm not just talking about media fans alone. I'm talking about feminists, and Pagans, and LGBTQ folks, and radical leftists, and so many other subcultures that have historically been denied a platform by the establishment, and who responded by creating their own platforms and self-publishing their content. There has always been overlap between those other subcultures and media fans. It's never been just about fandom.
When I think about the different subcultures that tumblr has hosted alongside fandom, I remember that history. So many communities with deep cultural roots in print zines, and we all ended up in the same place.
But I don't think tumblr could ever really replace print zines. It certainly surpassed zines in terms of distribution and reach, not to mention lack of cost to publish your content, but as a corporate-owned website that's constantly inclined to sell out its users to the highest bidder, it can never match the freedom of being able to self-publish whatever you wanted in your zine. LiveJournal couldn't, either. And neither can twitter, or facebook, or any other social media site that serves up its users as a product for advertisers.
I'm starting to think that the only real solution is to do what we did with AO3 and create a social network of our own. It would need to be run as a nonprofit, operating on donations and volunteer labor, with zero advertising. I think AO3 is proof enough that we could do it and fund it and keep it going.
I also think the parallel rise of tumblr alongside AO3 demonstrates that as amazing and wonderful as AO3 is, it alone cannot support all of fandom's needs. We need a place to build and nurture our communities and personal connections alongside a stable space to archive our works.
I'm also aware that whatever the solution is, it's going to take years. We're going to be in for a long period of uncertainty and loss. Tumblr's decline is going to be a sad and bitter time for many of us, but we will get through it, and we will come out of it stronger than we were before.
Fandom will do what it has always done, and it will adapt, and it will survive.
I just have to hold that in my heart.
