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wembleyI'm digging Mastodon. I think federation could be a good thing for fandom -- or, at least, it could be good for fans like me.
In the mid-1990s, the internet was a place I could go as a safe haven to escape from IRL bullies and whatnot. Now, everybody is on the internet. Everybody. And we've got a lot more people in fandom who are, I guess, less weird? So I think it makes sense to split off into areas that serve as escapes again, and I'm really enjoying Discord, but I'm glad there's a non-chatroom option as well. I do miss "a bunch of fans discussing panfandom issues in a longform way" ala mailing lists or LJ comms or usenet (the only place that's really happening is FFA or I guess Reddit), and I hope more people come back to Dreamwidth for that, but I like the Mastodon model so far.
It definitely isn't a replacement for Tumblr, just in terms of activity; I think there is one other CBS Ghosts fan on my instance besides me, lol. But I don't like the "it's all public or it's all private" issue with Tumblr, or the lack of threaded comments (although I guess you can add those with Disqus or something but no one does, including me). Obviously, Tumblr, since it's owned by a corporation, along with Discord, are way better for image hosting. On Mastodon, the person running your instance has to pay for that shit -- posting images is easy, but it's going to add up for the one person running your instance, not for profit, kept afloat by donations or tips.
I do think there's an inherent tension in like... wanting to be where the action is, wanting to have actual people to talk to and art to look at and fic to read about your fandom, but also not wanting to interact with people being jerks. That has always been a thing since the dawn of humanity and hobby spaces, but there's just so much more people online now.
Also, like... so when I was just becoming a teenager, it was the 1994-5 internet. I had no adult supervision. There wasn't that much on the internet, comparatively, even though "not much" was still an overwhelming amount. If I wanted to do fandom, I went to AOL message boards or Usenet. If I wanted to seek out other interests, I searched for websites. And it was a website/proto-blog about sex influenced by sex-positive feminists, and Scarleteen, that shaped my ideas about sex. It was sharing space with openly gay (and openly kinky) women whose writing skill I admired that made me go from homophobic and sex-negative to strongly the opposite, especially re: gay rights.
When I visited Mouth Organ (no idea if the ideas there would hold up in 2022, but at the time it was a positive thing for me to read), they would name-drop Susie Bright. I could search for her site or her writing.
If you're a kid on the internet now, you absolutely have to be monitored by your parents in some way, and the first thing you're gonna find is TikTok. If you get into fandom there or on large Discord servers or Twitter or Tumblr, you're going to see feminist ideas like "fetishization" and "sexualization" completely divorced from and distorted from the thinkers that originally came up with them and no one will know who came up with the ideas and no one is going to do the research on what's shaping their values. Same thing with "heteronormativity" and jillions of other liberal and left ideas that are super important but have gotten completely distorted.
Obviously, this is silly and trivial compared to things like your kid getting into QAnon or white supremacy or some MLM scam that is actually a cult or getting some kind of ED from feeling they have to look a certain way on video or all the things that can go wrong.
I really don't know what you do about this. I wonder how young people are navigating all this. I honestly don't know. How do they stay safe, how do they keep their sanity?
In the mid-1990s, the internet was a place I could go as a safe haven to escape from IRL bullies and whatnot. Now, everybody is on the internet. Everybody. And we've got a lot more people in fandom who are, I guess, less weird? So I think it makes sense to split off into areas that serve as escapes again, and I'm really enjoying Discord, but I'm glad there's a non-chatroom option as well. I do miss "a bunch of fans discussing panfandom issues in a longform way" ala mailing lists or LJ comms or usenet (the only place that's really happening is FFA or I guess Reddit), and I hope more people come back to Dreamwidth for that, but I like the Mastodon model so far.
It definitely isn't a replacement for Tumblr, just in terms of activity; I think there is one other CBS Ghosts fan on my instance besides me, lol. But I don't like the "it's all public or it's all private" issue with Tumblr, or the lack of threaded comments (although I guess you can add those with Disqus or something but no one does, including me). Obviously, Tumblr, since it's owned by a corporation, along with Discord, are way better for image hosting. On Mastodon, the person running your instance has to pay for that shit -- posting images is easy, but it's going to add up for the one person running your instance, not for profit, kept afloat by donations or tips.
I do think there's an inherent tension in like... wanting to be where the action is, wanting to have actual people to talk to and art to look at and fic to read about your fandom, but also not wanting to interact with people being jerks. That has always been a thing since the dawn of humanity and hobby spaces, but there's just so much more people online now.
Also, like... so when I was just becoming a teenager, it was the 1994-5 internet. I had no adult supervision. There wasn't that much on the internet, comparatively, even though "not much" was still an overwhelming amount. If I wanted to do fandom, I went to AOL message boards or Usenet. If I wanted to seek out other interests, I searched for websites. And it was a website/proto-blog about sex influenced by sex-positive feminists, and Scarleteen, that shaped my ideas about sex. It was sharing space with openly gay (and openly kinky) women whose writing skill I admired that made me go from homophobic and sex-negative to strongly the opposite, especially re: gay rights.
When I visited Mouth Organ (no idea if the ideas there would hold up in 2022, but at the time it was a positive thing for me to read), they would name-drop Susie Bright. I could search for her site or her writing.
If you're a kid on the internet now, you absolutely have to be monitored by your parents in some way, and the first thing you're gonna find is TikTok. If you get into fandom there or on large Discord servers or Twitter or Tumblr, you're going to see feminist ideas like "fetishization" and "sexualization" completely divorced from and distorted from the thinkers that originally came up with them and no one will know who came up with the ideas and no one is going to do the research on what's shaping their values. Same thing with "heteronormativity" and jillions of other liberal and left ideas that are super important but have gotten completely distorted.
Obviously, this is silly and trivial compared to things like your kid getting into QAnon or white supremacy or some MLM scam that is actually a cult or getting some kind of ED from feeling they have to look a certain way on video or all the things that can go wrong.
I really don't know what you do about this. I wonder how young people are navigating all this. I honestly don't know. How do they stay safe, how do they keep their sanity?
