tenlittlebullets | I miss LJ comm culture

I miss LJ comm culture

Was thinking earlier about why I read my Dreamwidth friends list regularly but never seem to participate. Part of it is that I have some notion I'm supposed to post, like, life updates and "things I accomplished this [time period]" roundups and mini-review catalogues of Things Read/Watched/Played. Which seems to be what most other people on my flist use theirs for. But Christ that sounds like homework to my brain, and also a great way to kick off a depression spiral even though RL is going fine right now, so I lurk rather than show my face without having done the homework.

I realize, rationally, and also in my gut now that I've written it out, that that is dumb. Blogging is freeform. I could hit-and-run with random shower thoughts every two weeks, say nary a word about life or activity roundups, and pass it off as ~maintaining my mystique~ if anyone says anything, which they won't. But the other thing I'm realizing as I haunt various platforms in the wake of the Tumblrpocalypse is that the culture of a platform matters. You can post whatever the hell you want, but you get more out of the space if you use it in dialogue with what the existing userbase is doing there.

Back when the Tumblr exodus was still actively underway, I found myself in various Discord servers trying to Explain Dreamwidth to stressed-out Tumblr users. These were smart people who were happy to explore the features, but unsure how those features translated into norms of interaction, content discovery, and what-to-post-where. And I remember being baffled by how intimidated many of them were about posting to communities. To them, friending individual blogs was the natural first step, but comms were A Whole Fucking Thing they were wary to intrude on, like submitting yourself for the approval of judgemental classmates. And I was going "?!?!?!" It's a complete inversion of how seriousness and intimacy worked on LJ, right? Your journal was your combination front porch/living room/blanket fort in the bedroom, a personal space with varying degrees of privacy and choosiness about audience, because it was About You. One of those degrees was "public," but a version of "public" that rude guests would still be intruding on. A "public" where introductions weren't really required, but it still wasn't uncommon for random strangers who'd stumbled across your post to preface their comments with "Hi, I found you through X, hope it's not creepy that I'm butting in," and in fact friendships were frequently made that way. Comms were where you slapped your fandom shitposts and casual discussion about topics of common interest, where random people with no prior acquaintance could interact with it on the basis of shared interest alone. Where it wasn't About You, it was about the thing everyone was there to talk about.

But then the shitposts, and memes, and shower thoughts, and reactions to newly-released canon, and casual discussion threads... moved to Tumblr. And the people who were attached to LJ-style fandoming moved to Dreamwidth. And trickled away by attrition as more and more fans sucked it up and moved to where the center of gravity was, no matter how hatefully obtuse Tumblr-as-a-platform was for their (okay, our) purposes. The more this happened, the more overwhelmingly DW got skewed towards people and activities that relied heavily on the LJ features Tumblr lacked. And the more that happened, the less DW actually resembled old-school LJ in the ways it was functionally used. Which I didn't notice, or didn't see the full implications of, even as it happened under my nose.

So those stressed-out Tumblr refugees were reading the room way better than I was. If all the low-friction, casual fan activity has migrated to Tumblr, what's left in Dreamwidth communities? Mostly things that Dreamwidth has the infrastructure to support and Tumblr is iffy for:
- Events with lots of logistics and participant-wrangling: fests, bangs, exchanges, etc.
- Structured mod-run activities like weekly prompt challenges and roundup newsletters.
- "Submit stuff on a particular theme in a specified format" communities like

fandomsecrets and

scans_daily that had built their momentum in the LJ days.
- (Kinkmemes and anon memes, which depend on unorthodox use of a very specific set of comment features. And also need to be checked on their own rather than having their activity integrated into your feed, so even though they're major activity hubs, they don't really function as comms.)
- And promos. Promos for comms, for events, for fic and fanart and graphics, for friending memes, always for ways to find and produce content somewhere else than the comm they're posted to.

Dreamwidth comms are a communal noticeboard and sign-up sheet for structured, supervised activities. Of course Tumblr-native fans were intimidated and clocked them as a formal, official Thing. I missed it, because LiveJournal comms skewed more towards rowdy after-school sci-fi clubs. But the culture of a platform resides in how it's used.

I don't know where I'm going with this, except that I miss LJ comm culture and it doesn't exist on DW. The features exist, but the critical mass of people using them that way doesn't. And the old LJ norms of public/private, intimacy, openness to public comment, what to post where, and where to look for what... just don't apply anymore. They haven't for a long time, thanks to modern social media. It's seductive to assume DW is a holdover version of oldschool LJ culture because it looks and sounds familiar, but the surface continuity masks huge changes in the norms of everyday usage.

My point here is not that any particular group of fans--Tumblr natives, DW holdouts, LJ-to-Tumblr migrants, Tumblr-to-DW migrants--is "to blame" for the most off-putting differences between the various platform cultures. People went where they went, and usage was most heavily shaped by platform features in combination with what kind of activity was concentrated there. I guess it's more... wistfulness, that LJ along with forums were my native mode of fandoming, to the point where following the center of fan activity over to Tumblr and adapting to its alien methods of interaction was extremely painful and frustrating. And now the DW mode of fandoming that evolved away from the center of activity turns out to be just as alien to me.

I can't do activity round-ups and regular mini-reviews of my Recently Read/Watched list. I'm not up for RL updates that are actually meant to keep anyone up-to-date. I can't do structured fanwork exchanges. I'm not wired for it--it's the most efficient way to turn what I do for fun into one massive stress/guilt/inferiority complex. Yeah, blogging is freeform, be the change you want to see, etc, and believe me if I end up with a project burning a hole in my head that's suited for Dreamwidth, I'll be delighted to post it here. If half a dozen other people want to make a DW comm just for fandom shitposting and casual discussion, I'll give it a go.

But I'm starting to accept that there's a reason I don't post here anymore. I don't like that that's so--I want a fandom home. Discord as the emerging hub of casual discussion is an ephemeral, undiscoverable nightmare, even though it's a really good chat system. Dreamwidth is open-source, self-funded, somewhat interoperable with other sites, has both personal and moderated-communal spaces, balances discoverability with privacy controls, is fantastic for durable threaded discussion... but I can't do fandom the way it seems to be done here right now. And I'm not sure how hard I want to swim against the tide.

(Comments welcome, you are not butting in, etc. But bear in mind that this is more personal musing than any kind of coherent declaration about fandom cultures. If it gets linked to as meta, so be it, but indignant attempts to rebut whatever axe you imagine I'm grinding will be accorded exactly as much patience as they deserve.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Don't really have much to say, but I'm happy to hear from you and glad that RL is mostly going fine, please don't feel obliged to contribute other than how is natural!

Thanks! Although you may reconsider if I ever start dumping shitposts on Dreamwidth, haha.

I might! I also might feel more empowered to post my own nonsense, who knows?! :D

It's very frustrating all round, really. But the main thing is mobile access via phones and tablets - before we were all sitting at keyboards, one way or another, and it took a certain type of person to do that in the first place. That's the fundamental shift, and we can't go back. Alas.

Dreamwidth comms are a communal noticeboard and sign-up sheet for structured, supervised activities.

To be fair, I was thinking about this, and actually pretty much all of the LJ comms I was involved with were too - they were just busier and livelier! And see above, us being sat at our keyboards, more keen to make those kinds of posts. Much harder on your phone.

I suppose anon comms and kinkmemes still seem pretty laid back and they seem to do comparatively well?

I don't suppose there is an answer, though, either. I'll just be trying to make the comms I have work till we all finish. I know a handful of tumblr people, though, who came across, went effectively, oh thank goodness, and adapted, but they're in the minority. I suppose other people who would also like those things are already out of fandom, because where is there for them on tumblr?

Yeah, the LJ comms served that purpose too, but it was all intermingled with the rest. Now the noticeboard function is the only thing left, in most cases.

I just hope some sort of answer emerges before large chunks of fandom history get eaten by the black hole that is the Discord backscroll. It's where I'm enjoying myself most at the moment, but it's glorified IRC, and the lack of anything more permanent to refer back to is already starting to drive me bonkers.

Kinkmemes are hit-or-miss, I think; all the Marvel ones except hydratrashmeme keep dying, and even that's slowed down considerably. FFA is still going strong, I think. But that format--everything living in threaded comments, buried in a post that's already been bumped off your flist--anecdotally gets the strongest "what. the. fuck. this is impenetrable." reactions from Tumblr people. (Which... understandable! It's a clever hack to allow anons to open topics, but an organizational nightmare.)

Now I'm wondering what fandom would look like if Dreamwidth didn't suck on mobile...

Yeah, it's not easy. I mean, you need a busy comm with people to show people how it works, but if you can't show how it works, how do you ever get the people? And while I've dipped my toe in other waters, I can't do chat things as an alternative - I could only do little bits of tumblr, so I just carry on here. The tumblr exodus influx has at least brought a few new souls, and the icon-making circles seem to have picked up, and I'll take what I can get in the meantime.

meme things are baffling, but they do seem to be pretty lively compared to a lot of the other things, and they're more casual. But, yeah, this whole pre-Web.2 way of interacting is just baffling to people. Which is sad. It's different, but it's not actually all that complicated. There just isn't enough going on here for a lot of people to feel it's worth the effort that would be required, understandably.

I don't know, the tide of fandom has gone out here, but I'm beached anyway, what can you do?

ETA: Oh,

fic_rush is having a round this weekend and that's a chatty sort of thing (although within a set time period) - catch

fic_rush_48 for the hourly posts. (It's just a sort of writerly get together that happens monthly.)

Edited 2019-04-21 16:51 (UTC)

Yep. And even some people who are LJers from way back find it FFA utterly impenetrable - it's very hard to get people past the idea that the content is in the comment threads, because what's in the main post body looks like double Dutch until you've been there for a while. In its own way, it's as much of a workaround built on a workaround as Tumblr meta.

But the main thing is mobile access via phones and tablets - before we were all sitting at keyboards, one way or another, and it took a certain type of person to do that in the first place.

Holy guacamole, you are SO right! The mobile accessibility is a true and ongoing obstacle for DW to be embraced by the Tumblr ppl. Because, yeah, like you mention elsewhere in your comment, there's no way of pretending to go back to pre-mobile devices era. :(

Yes. It's not just fandom that's changed - it's the nature of the internet. And I can't even wish it otherwise, as unhappy as it makes me sometimes, because it opened the 'net for pleasure up to a majority rather than a minority.

Things tend to circle round, though, in life, so we might find ourselves eventually in something that, while almost certainly not the same, might have the same layers of public/private access. I hope so. Although probably it'll all end up audiovisual and I'll just have to leave the internet...

this is a really interesting post - i've read loads about he migration of platform, etc, but i can't remember anyone pointing out that DW isn't LJ... not just because people aren't here, but because we use it in a different way. that's a really good point, and well made.

it's also really interesting what you say about people not wanting to intrude into the DW space - again, hadn't thought about it in that sense at all. but this is exactly it "Hi, I found you through X, hope it's not creepy that I'm butting in," exactly what LJ friendship starting was like, but it's the complete opposite of tumblr, where i follow people and have no idea who they are.

interesting, anyway. although sad.

glad you're ok!

Thanks--and yeah, it took a long time for the clue-by-four to hit me. That the people looking with fresh eyes were right about Dreamwidth comms being the more formal space, the space one hesitates to intrude upon, because they're really only used for events, promos, and presenting finished fanworks to a wider audience.

And, maybe more invisibly to Tumblr natives, they were also right to start with friending memes and finding users to subscribe to. It's a very Tumblr/Twitter approach, treating individual blogs and subscriptions as the fundamental unit of the public sphere, rather than LJ where they're spokes plugged into the hubs of communities. But it matches the current shape of Dreamwidth, where most of the freeform interaction takes place on individual blogs. Even though, yeah, as you said, Tumblr follows are impersonal, and Tumblr blogs are where drive-by public interactions take place, while Dreamwidth at least somewhat retains the norm that user journals are semi-private space.

Reblogging/retweeting is what enables that "individual blog as fundamental unit" approach, I think. It allows any account to be the vector for discovering posts from outside your immediate network, for boosting your work to a wider audience, and for curating and aggregating on a particular theme. But there's much more off-topic noise that way (more room to serve you ads as you scroll for what you really want) and it plays merry hell with audience and context (more engagement via outrage clickbait). I'm still not sure how I feel about it: yes, one-click curation and the potential for your work to reach a viral audience. On the other hand, curation replacing interaction, low signal-to-noise ratio, and the potential for your work to get dogpiled by a viral audience. :P

Oh man.

:(

I mean, on Tumblr I eventually shied away from shitposting altogether (I jumped ship from LJ to Tumblr pretty early, and that was back when people would actually send you mean anons for putting "unrelated" stuff in the fandom tags) and my amount of posting has been dropping steadily ever since. On DW, I got told "yeah, communities are just like communities on LJ, just get yourself acquainted" but I see barely any community activity in my feed that isn't... announcements. There's like one good shitposting community I know of, and it's for a fandom I'm not in.

It's weird how the most socially broad and shortest social distance site ended up p much wrecking our ability to casually engage with each other? I also feel like I'm in a weird floaty middle-space where I mostly comment on personal posts from other people but don't really engage the linkdumps or check-in posts.

Aah, deets on the one good shitposting community? I don't care if it's my fandom or not, I want the nostalgia blast.

There are so many structural reasons why Tumblr spawned the kinds of interaction it did, it's hard to know where to start. Maybe "lack of a usable comment system," "lack of locally-moderated communal spaces," and "abysmal signal-to-noise ratio with no filtering tools." We've all got Content Exhaustion and maybe there's some "I just want to talk to a human? who I like???" in there. It would help explain why Discord is where so much of the activity's at right now.

It's the Final Fantasy XIV comm run by zenolalia. I bet they'll enjoy the company. I feel like I should maybe hit up my One Robot Friend on this site and make our own Transformers Shitposting Community. I have like three different tags for fandom shitposting on my journal but I'm also allergic to self-promotion >,>)

I'm one of those people who was at first kind of... relieved and excited about the freeform, big tent approach Tumblr had (before usability properly went to hell) because I'd been caught in cycles of BNF drama and outside forces raiding niche communities (ah, to be a wrestling fan in the early oughts again /s) but in hindsight, a lot of what I praised as good, useful features really did have the logical endpoint of... this. And it's a shame. I agree with you on Discord, like, I know IRC never really went anywhere, it just got progressively more polarised and various rooms more and more isolated, and Discord really fills that immediate low-commitment niche that used to fill for me. I'm also really bad at keeping up consistent longform posting, I write 7k every five months, so maybe low-commitment, low-archivability posting is where fandom just... is at, atm.

Cool post is cool.

I had been one of those ppl who was v. ???? abt Tumblr ppl feeling intimidated by DW. Mostly because I hadn't stopped using DW as a platform/left the platform altogether for the next thing.

Though, after reading your post and the second comment in the replies, I do get it now. Thanks for this.

* Ironically/Funnily enough, I've become someone who rarely posts over here too. /o\ I do read my ppl pretty much everyday, however.

Edited 2019-04-21 13:38 (UTC)

Yeah it was a huge "whuuuu?" at the time. I guess the missing-link knowledge is that most DW comm admins also miss the hell out of LJ comm culture. If a horde of Tumblr exiles rolled up and started tossing memes and shitposts around in a comm not specifically reserved for Official Business, most mods would be like "hallelujah! fucking finally! someone using this place for what it's meant for!" And if I'd realized earlier how different DW actually is from LJ in practice, that probably would've been the explanation I'd've used.

I miss the LJ fandom culture, too. It was fun to have a place to go to be thrilled or bummed communally.

I never could get into Tumblr, though I had an account, because it seemed the antithesis of community.

DW is okay, and there's some communities that have started, or been here since I first arrived, that I participate in. But it seems that many don't "get" the concept of community. Community really started with the old usenet and private mail lists, then did well on Yahoo groups. It really thrived on LJ.

I got into Tumblr kicking and screaming--it was a really unnatural as a primary way to Do Fandom for me. I'm glad it's on the wane. Just wish I knew what's next. Discord is nice, but we need the Usenet or Yahoo groups to complement its IRC.

I haven't tried Discord, though I've seen the name bandied about. Usenet and Yahoo were both so user friendly, it'd be nice of we could get people to go that way.

IRC to Discord is an easy transition: you join servers via invite code, the servers have channels, etc. There's a very slick web version and clients for pretty much all platforms. They've kept a bunch of IRC commands like /me, /nick, etc.

The blessing and the curse is that it's a centralized behemoth of a service--everything lives on Discord's infrastructure--which means low latency, no downtime, no channel takeovers, and no netsplits, but does make it vulnerable to takedowns and venture-capital backers demanding aggressive monetization. So it's kind of "enjoy, but don't trust for the long-term."

Wow, this clarifies so much!

I was involved in plenty of "we just talk about this topic we love" comms on LJ, and yeah, none of them managed to make the shift to DW. Most of them were non-fannish (or at least, not "media fandom of the type that produces fic and art"): Pagan groups, language groups, venting groups - ooh, there's a category that might be revivable! I watched note_to_asshat; I used to follow customers_suck and a few things like it.

:( Stuff like that was the lifeblood of LJ. It's really sad that none of it seems to have made it over.

I know I'd be down for a comm just for shitposting and casual discussion. It's kind of sad to go looking through DW communities looking for something fun sometimes. Because it seems like every time I see a community that looks like it could be fun, it's either been dead for years or it feels overly formal. Or both. Sometimes you just want to goof around and have a good time with people, you know?

Yeah, exactly! And like, I know in my head that even most of the formal-seeming ones would be delighted to have new activity, but there's only so much you can do on your own.

Don't think I'd be up for running a panfandom chatter comm, but I did go ahead and create

mcu_shiptoasting, just to see what happens.

This feels very familiar to me! Part of it is my nostalgia for LJ is tied into my nostalgia for my earlier life (with less responsibilities and way more free time), but I agree that fandom feels differently on DW than it did on LJ/Tumblr, and I think it DOES feel more formal in comms than it used to. And I think that's just because it's part of the culture here, now?

I also liked what someone said upthread about the shift to mobile use changing how people write things. It's much harder to type out long posts on a phone, and DW isn't super mobile-friendly compared to other platforms anyway. More barriers!

This is a very good analysis and I think one of the things that might help get people over to comms is to incentivize posting there - like, kick a fandom community off with a month-long event where up to once per person per day each post gets the poster a raffle entry, your first daily comment on someone else's post is too, etc. And then post about that event on Tumblr, Twitter, etc.

I had planned to do something like that but haven't had the executive function to organize it, unfortunately. But I'm submitting the idea in case someone else does.

I miss Usenet; all the LiveJournal communities were pretty much dead by the time I arrived there, or died within the next year or two, so I only ever knew most of them as interesting archives.

I'm a member of one moderately successful community on DW (

vicomte_de_chagny), which was started off by a friend of mine and has picked up a few members besides just her and me largely by virtue of being the sole remaining marginally active community related to that fandom.
I've joined a few others mainly in order to push my own fiction, and have tried to participate in what others post because that feels only fair, but they have seen next to no traffic since they were founded. I tried to rejuvenate an old community (

classicfilm) by posting the sort of thing there that I would once have put on rec.arts.classic-film, but got zero reponse to any of my posts even though the individual members are still active on DW, so gave up.

Mainly I use Dreamwidth as a blog for talking to myself, and tend to assume that I'm unlikely to get any response to anything that I post on the grounds that it wasn't really aimed at being of interest to other people!

wow this post is like exactly what i've been feeling lately and i don't have much to say right now other than that

There was a link to this post from a comment on Pillowfort --
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/653323?page=1&comment=363478

--as a social media merger of LJ + tumblr I've been really appreciating Pillowfort. (Even if it's still more of a far-off dream than a well-established & relatively stable home-site like Dreamwidth.) Everything is still a bit of a mess so being casual & awkward (instead of polished) is the norm. . . for now.

But anyway-!
I appreciated the thought & insight in this entry. That's mostly what I wanted to say. LOL.

I was never active on LJ's communities--I'm actually not much of a "fandom" type at all. I've seen it tho. I definitely saw people use the communities as a "public" meeting space. when their main journal was largely locked away under filters.
As for tumblr, if you submit to a "community" blog your work just gets posted up for all the big group to see, but you may not be in charge of how it is presented/tagged, and have no way to respond effectively. . . Yeah.
Makes sense that people can sense a feeling of being 'exposed' (given that there's no privacy whatsoever once someone knows your tumblr URL!!!), or of trying to meet some kind of standards.

I'm glad Discord has come around to fill a gap for me (group conversation instead of awkward one-on-one).
Hoping some fun people keep coming to PF though, because I'd like that to be the "persistent representation" of my presence, where I can keep a profile, etc.

I see people trying to use twitter for all-purpose and it HURTS me--the "all or nothing" privacy of twitter accounts is miserable and the comment culture is as entitled as that of internet news articles.

And I'm still fandoming via keyboard. I wasn't on LJ long before DW opened up, having been a mailing list native.

Deeply interesting post, thank you

Hey, I came here haphazardly via your Tumblr (I follow as tealightcandles1794 but post as heartisamusclethesizeofyourfist... and sometimes as thelazarusheart; it's complicated), and this is the best explanation I've ever seen of that niggling dissatisfaction I have both with how things have worked out across these three platforms, and with how it seems to be so hard to just behave on DW exactly as I used to behave on LJ in its heyday. At some point, Tumblr (and for me even moreso, Twitter) got that shortcut between brain and keyboard fingers that used to be on LJ, and it's like... I can't undiscover fire, and maybe I don't even want to, but some days I'd like to want to.

Edited (Sorry for all the edit notifications you're probably getting; apparently typing is not my friend today) 2019-07-08 10:43 (UTC)

OH HI. So, I might've followed you from your discord intro to your ao3 to here, because DW is pretty much where I've been at since I'm actively trying to give up twitter. (Which, ha: even the language that we use to talk about platforms. Giving up twitter is like giving up cigarettes, and it seems like a melodramatic comparison but it's also really not because it's for sure bad for me and I know so many people who have tried to quit and failed.)

And I love this post for what it points out, because I don't think I had been quite able to articulate to myself before what it is that feels different about DW now vs LJ then. Because I really want it to be the same! I'm invested in this platform, I've been here for a goddamn decade, and in some ways I really do feel like DW is good for fandom in some significant ways that twitter and tumblr aren't. Or maybe just that DW is not actively harmful to fandom in some ways that t+t for sure are.

And I wish I could pitch it to t+t natives like that, just... come here! Everything will be great! But the fact is that that feels... almost dishonest? Not that I don't love DW, but it feels dishonest to not mention that this platform requires work in a way that others don't, or maybe a kind of work that we're not accustomed to, and maybe really what I'm saying with "come to DW!" is something more along the lines of "I want us to rebuild together this thing that used to exist and I think could maybe exist again, will you come help me?" Which... could be a strong pitch, maybe, and certainly DW has picked up people in each version of the fandom apocalypse, but for people who were never on LJ in the first place, and don't have that nostalgia to reach towards... it's a little unclear what the goal even is. And I think "I'm not sure how hard I want to swim against the tide" is a deeply relateable feeling both for those of us who theoretically want DW to be a primary space, and those who... don't really care what the space is, but they just want it to work out of the box.

So. I don't know. I don't have any answers, except that now that I've been off twitter for a bit (and I was never really On Tumblr recently enough for it to have a strong gravitational pull for me, especially now) I actually have been using the communities here more, and starting to appreciate having that divide between "private space where I talk to people I have added"/"public space where I talk to whoever shows up." But maintaining those communities seems to require big buy-in and effort from the mods, like, there has to be someone making a discussion post with easily accessible questions pretty much every single day. At least in the current climate.

So anyway, there are my thoughts which I guess kind of sum up to a wave and hello, may I add you on Dreamwidth? :P

"Discord as the emerging hub of casual discussion is an ephemeral, undiscoverable nightmare, even though it's a really good chat system."

THIS! SO MUCH THIS! Sorry to comment on this so much later than it was posted but, I've been doing a lot of internet wandering and going from place to place and landed here, and this whole thing was a lovely read through. But this line right here hit the nail on the head for me. I had a...really long gap in my fandom participation. Pretty much 2013 to now I just couldn't do it. When I left, tumblr was king, and, okay, it wasn't perfect, but I could reasonably expect to find other people. Now, tumblr's tags are a mess, it feels harder to stumble onto people, and it feels like everyone's moved to Discord. I cannot count the number of times I've managed to dig up a discord link only to find that it's expired.

Ugh, that feels significantly more ranty than I meant it, and I should mention I'm relatively young! I left fandom around when I went to college, so I didn't even really know a time before the tumblr based fandom experience. But I definitely feel you on the desire for a fandom home. At least pre-Discord based fandom, you could reasonably stumble across a community with enough searching and digging. Now, you need a direct invite. Ah, anyway, I'll just end with: Thank you for sharing your thoughts <3

Fascinating!! I know this is an old post post; I saw

muccamukk linking to your post on archiving LJ comms and ended up clicking around because I'm hm nosy but I really like these thoughts around the culture!! (I collect Dreamwidth tips on my journal and would like to link to this post though I'm not sure if that's okay because of the parenthesis at the end, so I'll refrain!)

I'm not the only person who's become extremely tired of Tumblr and Twitter for fandom after spending 2 years deep in it during the pandemic, and I've managed to bring a couple of curious souls over with me to Dreamwidth - but it's definitely a culture shock! And it's not just the comms that are intimidating, people are stressed out about posting on their own journals because it's a big text box that seems like it's made for big thoughts (perhaps the kinda homework feeling you describe, too!). Posting on a comm is next to impossible.

However!! Perhaps in a similar vein to the casual liveliness of FFA that was mentioned, people are very happy to post in comments if given half a chance. Although it's not the same kind of culture from the LJ days (...that I recall. I was a huge lurker and mostly looking for fic at the time), it seems really good to create a casual environment where people are happy to chat. I've seen it work for

c_ent,

journalsandplanners,

bnha_fans, accidentally on

anime_manga when I asked people what they were watching haha. It feels like people are eager to chat with each others in spaces like that. Even if creating a new post is beyond many people, even if it's a rec for something they love.

It's a bunch of work on the admins, but maybe that can be spread out if people take turns posting the 'check-ins/chitchat' posts (seen it done for

writethisfanfic), but it's also really nice... I'm hopeful!!

(I collect Dreamwidth tips on my journal and would like to link to this post though I'm not sure if that's okay because of the parenthesis at the end, so I'll refrain!)

Oh, go ahead! At this point I don't even remember what simmering Tumblr vs DW vs ex-LJ tensions prompted that parenthesis. Except a vague omnidirectional sense of "so help me god if this post does the equivalent of, like, getting picked up on metafandom as a screed about how the Dreamwidth old guard are Doing It Wrong And Being Unwelcoming (or how the LJ diaspora's Failure To Be The Change They Wanted To See was the cancer that killed fandom, or whatever), I am NOT going to complete the homework assignment of painstakingly responding to whatever defensive mess ensues." Linking from a collection of site tips or musings about platform usage, OTOH, is totally in the spirit of the post.

Thank you for taking the time to reply to that bit!! I shared the link and some musings :D Sorry to hear the tensions got so unpleasant around that time.

A couple years ago I put forward a theory that one of the reasons that comms haven't survived past the event part is that we don't need to use them to find fanfic anymore (since we have AO3), and that combined with people leaving for tumblr was enough to get us down below critical momentum. Now no one wants to be the first penguin in the water when no one except the mod is posting.

Thanks for such a thoughtful post! I don’t really have much to add, just lots to think about, but what struck me as funny is that Tumblr is a place where I only post on my laptop (which I am rarely on) because I must (laughing at myself) have control over the post in HTML. Dreamwidth would work great for me on mobile except I get way too complicated with what I want to post, which is entirely my fault. Also, the real stumbling block is posting images on Dreamwidth on mobile.

(Saw this post bc

vriddy linked to it in their own journal post with expanding thoughts)

As someone who "joined fandom" less than a decade ago on tumblr, and only joined DreamWidth this year, I relate to a lot of the phenomenons/differences you described, though not in the LJ comparison sense! When I first moved to DreamWidth, my first instinct was to find people rather than communities, as that's how it works on tumblr. I searched up some of my interests and just looked for journals that had the same interests.... or in some cases hit "random journal" until I saw something interesting.

I was lucky that one of the first blogs I followed had some guidance and regularly recced different comms in their personal posts... Gave me the opportunity to explore and learn a bit about them. I'm still somewhat intimidated by posting on comms, but getting better at it!

With tumblr, for meeting strangers/discovery, there's the tag system (in cases where you follow a particular tag and see any post tagged that pop up on your dashboard) and the reblogging system (where as long as someone you follow liked enough to reblog, you'll see it), which is what I've grown accustomed to. It's a very informal and low-stakes way to have your blog and thoughts appear on other people's dashboards. The "communities" of dreamwidth feel a lot more formal/deliberate/(intimate?) in comparison, but if folks used those comms in a similar way (like if someone writing a squeal about a hot bnha character would normally tag it "bnha" on tumblr, then on dreamwidth did an "equivalent" by posting it to

bnha_fans) I feel like it'd capture more of that casual shit-posty energy.

TBH though... the reason I moved to DW was because I wasn't satisfied with the setup of tumblr (and discord. And twitter). I love these longer textposts, the lack of "likes", and generally slower pace forums. So the difference might continue to perpetuate as people gravitate towards either platform... though personally I'm still on both tumblr and DW, I'm definitely personally chattier on DW.

>> I miss LJ comm culture <<

I miss that too, and also, how lively and welcoming DW comms used to be.

>> Was thinking earlier about why I read my Dreamwidth friends list regularly but never seem to participate.<<

I make a point of commenting on friends' blogs because it encourages connections. In particular, most writers run on feedback, so that gets me more of content I love. If you need low-effort interactions, look for people who say things like, "Comments with Like or +1 are welcome!" because some of us use the amount of feedback to decide which things to make more of. I have at least a couple of folks who just post emojis. Also fine.

>> Part of it is that I have some notion I'm supposed to post, like, life updates and "things I accomplished this [time period]" roundups and mini-review catalogues of Things Read/Watched/Played. Which seems to be what most other people on my flist use theirs for. But Christ that sounds like homework to my brain, and also a great way to kick off a depression spiral even though RL is going fine right now, so I lurk rather than show my face without having done the homework.<<

Sure, those are fine things to include, but a blog can be anything you want it to be. I know folks who do Three Things Make a post, or quote-a-day, or picture-a-day, or other quick things. I also know people who post fiction, poetry, long essays, etc. It takes all kinds.

I made an entry on Recurring Posts, because many of these are very easy ways to make content. My Monday Update is definitely work, but I have two others -- currently Philosophical Questions and Coping Skills -- where I literally just copy and paste one item from a list. They start interesting discussions.

>>I realize, rationally, and also in my gut now that I've written it out, that that is dumb. <<

It's not dumb. Feelings matter; especially, time and energy matter. I have recurring posts precisely because there are weeks when I'm too busy or tired to do long posts -- or conversely, people have bought a boatload of poetry that I need to post. Fast, easy, interesting tidbits maintain activity for minimum effort.

>>But the other thing I'm realizing as I haunt various platforms in the wake of the Tumblrpocalypse is that the culture of a platform matters. You can post whatever the hell you want, but you get more out of the space if you use it in dialogue with what the existing userbase is doing there.<<

That depends a lot on your goals. If you want to attract attention and be liked, mimicking the context is helpful. But that can turn into "more of the same," then people get bored and leave, so the platform dies down. Novelty is important too.

If you have something you want to make and share, you can just do that. Start with a few like-minded friends, and probably new folks will drift in too. Just because there's a norm doesn't mean that's all anyone wants. However, you do need a more coherent concept of what you want to accomplish if you do your own thing than if you just follow other people.

>> Back when the Tumblr exodus was still actively underway, I found myself in various Discord servers trying to Explain Dreamwidth to stressed-out Tumblr users. <<

I'm a writer. About the second or third time I find myself saying the same thing to different people, I write it up. Then I can just point to that post or webpage whenever I need it. Other people can stumble across it in searches. I get a steady trickle of people thanking me for things like the Nonsexual Intimacies set. Anchor posts like that add up over time and make your blog more interesting. And yes, I've done a handful of them inspired by this or that exodus, too.

>> These were smart people who were happy to explore the features, but unsure how those features translated into norms of interaction, content discovery, and what-to-post-where. And I remember being baffled by how intimidated many of them were about posting to communities. To them, friending individual blogs was the natural first step, but comms were A Whole Fucking Thing they were wary to intrude on, like submitting yourself for the approval of judgemental classmates. <<

Considering how hostile a lot of communities have become, I can't say I blame them. However, I do invite people to the communities I host, which are designed to be easygoing and welcoming with activities that are straightforward to join. Or hey, you can just lurk and read the things that other folks post; that's fine too.

>> And I was going "?!?!?!" It's a complete inversion of how seriousness and intimacy worked on LJ, right? Your journal was your combination front porch/living room/blanket fort in the bedroom, a personal space with varying degrees of privacy and choosiness about audience, because it was About You. One of those degrees was "public," but a version of "public" that rude guests would still be intruding on. A "public" where introductions weren't really required, but it still wasn't uncommon for random strangers who'd stumbled across your post to preface their comments with "Hi, I found you through X, hope it's not creepy that I'm butting in," and in fact friendships were frequently made that way. <<

Blogs have a wide range of privacy. It's now common for them to be completely friendslocked, which wasn't all that common some time ago. Some are partially locked. Some are public. Mine has always been public (unless I have to lock it temporarily to shut out spam) because I'm a writer; it's a connection with my fanbase and crowdfunding patrons. A blog can be a diary, an art gallery, a cookbook, a classroom -- the metaphor defines how public it is and what kind of behavior is expected. Though it helps if you actually put your expectations in your profile. It can be About You, or it can be about anything else you please.

>> Comms were where you slapped your fandom shitposts and casual discussion about topics of common interest, where random people with no prior acquaintance could interact with it on the basis of shared interest alone. Where it wasn't About You, it was about the thing everyone was there to talk about.<<

Yeah, I really do miss that. They're a lot more cliqueish now, and I am so not into that.

I'm going to say this as diplomatically as I can because I, too, tend to default to Fix Problem mode when someone else is venting: This was not a solicitation for advice, and you have failed to read the room--and the post itself--in a way that comes off as highly condescending.

"Your blog can be whatever you want it to be if you put in the effort" is the starting point for this post, which is actually an attempt to probe why it takes so much effort to participate in Dreamwidth as it exists today, and to what extent it's worth it to swim upstream. It says right there in the part you quoted that dutiful inventories of [thing] consumed in [interval] is not a usage pattern I have any interest or ability to participate in, because the thought of turning fandom (particularly my personal space) into homework makes my soul shrivel up and die. So in what way is it useful to respond with "Have you tried setting yourself small, regular homework assignments to motivate yourself through obligation?"

Because, to clear up a more sentence-level misread, what's dumb is not the desire not to turn fandom into homework, which my head and my gut are in full agreement on as a valid and healthy desire. What's dumb is, indeed, the assumption that you can only use a platform the way everyone else is. But then the question becomes "So what's stopping you from dumping all your drive-by casual opinions/reactions/analysis/jokes here?", and the answer is the complex dynamics described in the post about comm culture and, to distill it down, Where's The Best Place To Put Things.

I am not looking to cultivate an audience or maintain posting discipline or have a Goal To Accomplish. I'm looking for the least-bad place to yell--at irregular intervals, lengths, and degrees of formality--about Blorbo From My Shows among people who share the same brainworms as I do. That's the thing that's missing here that was present on LJ. Every platform where fans congregate has its own set of benefits and drawbacks, and right now, for me, the drawbacks of swimming upstream on a sleepy platform with no designated places to put that stuff anymore are enough to keep me on Tumblr. (But still not enough to drive me to the much worse cesspit that is Twitter.) Obviously your personal cost/benefit analysis is different. That doesn't mean I'm failing at anything and just need help doing "better," or need to be led by the hand like a child and have the basic privacy system of platforms I've been using for decades explained to me.

I do agree that regular discussion prompts are a good way for a mod to keep a community alive--I used to run weekly caption contests and regular discussion topics on the LJ comms I maintained in the mid-00s. But I cannot convey to you the depths of my lack of interest in treating my own personal space like that. The assumption that [structured obligation-posting/virtuous personal-accountability blogging/acting like a salon host with a duty to Maintain Your Audience] is THE thing to do with your personal space, and that people subliminally expect you to be doing that whether or not it's what you actually intended or committed to, is a large part of what turns my stomach every time I think about posting here.

>> But then the shitposts, and memes, and shower thoughts, and reactions to newly-released canon, and casual discussion threads... moved to Tumblr. And the people who were attached to LJ-style fandoming moved to Dreamwidth. And trickled away by attrition as more and more fans sucked it up and moved to where the center of gravity was, no matter how hatefully obtuse Tumblr-as-a-platform was for their (okay, our) purposes.<<

You get what you permit. If you let a platform mistreat you but you keep using it, then you'll get worse and worse behavior. But if people leave, either the platform will shape up to keep its remaining customers, or someone will build a better one elsewhere. I looked at Tumblr, concluded it was full of mean people with poor moderation tools, and ignored it -- except for occasionally reminding people that they don't have to put up with that shit. Not everyone is careful about where they spend their time, though. Sometimes the results are merely disappointing, other times downright toxic. I generally concentrate on making my little corner of the web a good place to be.

>>Dreamwidth comms are a communal noticeboard and sign-up sheet for structured, supervised activities. Of course Tumblr-native fans were intimidated and clocked them as a formal, official Thing. I missed it, because LiveJournal comms skewed more towards rowdy after-school sci-fi clubs. But the culture of a platform resides in how it's used.<<

It depends on the community. Some are fully structured. Some have a mix of structured and freeform activities. Some are free-for-all. However, the problems I'm seeing are very much aligned with your observation about structure -- because people will bitch about a post not being what they wanted even if the community has no "these are the allowable posts" info and/or nobody has posted anything for months. And that kills activity.

>> I don't know where I'm going with this, except that I miss LJ comm culture and it doesn't exist on DW. The features exist, but the critical mass of people using them that way doesn't. <<

Given how many people yammered about missing the community during Fandom Snowflake, I think a lot of them are still here. They just don't know how to connect anymore. A lot of things we used to do to connect have become rare, but anyone can revive those. Several of us got

followfriday going again, and that's actually what led me here.

>> And I'm not sure how hard I want to swim against the tide.<<

I don't think you're alone. Lots of people are missing the earlier connectivity and casual community interactions. What we need is a way to connect those people so they can share what common ground they have. That would make it easier for people to chip in whatever they can, whenever they can, without having to shoulder all the weight personally.

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I miss LJ comm culture

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Thoughts

Re: Thoughts

Well ...