L.J. Writes

These days, when I think of a new analytical essay I want to write about fandom and other stuff, I think first about DW rather than Tumblr where I spent years. Part of it may be Tumblr's structural and management problems, such as getting burned by the Tumblr dogpile (see a post with some informational links if you want to know the completely ridiculous context) and the possibility of my posts being mislabeled as "adult." (My appeal of the flagging was successful so no harm done to me personally, unlike to sex workers and adult content creators who really did lose the spaces they cultivated and at least part of their income. Meanwhile pornbots and Nazis continue to roam free smh)

However, even without the toxic culture and the architecture that enables it, and even without Tumblr seeking profit at the expense of their userbase, Tumblr is fundamentally not an effective platform for publishing and organizing content. Its search function utterly sucks, its tags are not meant for organization, and any original content gets buried in a torrent of reblogs and miscellany.

Contrast that with DW which has an effective search function for paying users and a tag system that is nearly as good, if used well. Perhaps best of all, what you find on a person's blog is going to be their own content or at best links to off-blog content, not 30,000 popular and often image-heavy reblogged posts. After spending years almost exclusively on Tumblr, drinking from its neverending and intoxicating firehose of content, the orderliness and sanity of DW are mind-blowing to me.

It isn't necessarily easy to find the good stuff on DW, that's true, but that was true of Tumblr as well. The need for curation, recommendation, and sheer luck to find the good stuff has never gone away, Tumblr simply helped numb that need by throwing a torrent of replicated content at its users.

This is not to say there isn't good content on Tumblr, far from it. It attracted talented and creative users that have made it into an amazing place, almost in spite of itself. The problem is that the place is so disorganized you need to wade quite a bit to find it and spend way more time there than you should have needed to. And that's the point, I suppose, since all engagement is good engagement in for-profit social media.

You can say "I told you so" XD

I'm not going to delete my Tumblr, nor do I think the site is going anywhere soon. I think it's more of a pile-on effect? It wears on you, after a while, that the site so transparently does not care about its userbase and absolutely refuses/is unable to implement the most commonsense moderations to make the community safer and more inclusive. The whole thing has burned me out on the whole model of for-profit social media.

So I've been backing things up and am looking for alternatives. Pillowfort sounds promising, though it's still a baby and will take a while to be anything like Tumblr if it ever does. I look forward to trying it out, made a donation and am waiting for a key--they're getting an influx of people like me so it'll take a little time. Update 12/11/2018: I got my key and it looks nice so far, a bit slow but that's to be expected and the staff warned me about that. I'm lj-writes there if anyone's on PF.

I made a  fandom account plus a more general account on a couple of Mastodon servers. Mark took one look at my screen and said, "That's Twitter!" and in a way he's right--this is the Twitter I wanted, microblogging without the bustle and drama. In fact it's purposefully designed to cut down on that kind of thing, which I like. This also exposes just how much Twitter has been lying about being unable to cut down on harassment and abuse. It wasn't the harassment they couldn't stop, it was the engagement--and therefore profits--they didn't want to cut down on. I've already had a couple of nice conversations, which isn't bad when I've just started out. I find it useful for posting short updates and random thoughts, more than DW or Tumblr.

And of course, another place I'm looking forward to being more active on is right here back on DreamWidth. I've actually been reading DW tutorials for people moving from Tumblr, and I unexpectedly learned some things especially on how to find new people. I've been hearing reports of DW becoming more active in the wake of the Tumblr news, too, so while it'll never have Tumblr's frenetic pace--which is a good thing, it's a different platform after all--I may be able to look forward to more activity, especially if I take the effort to populate my feed. It'll be nice to make more thoughtful posts in a format that's actually conducive to commenting. I may bring some of my Tumblr essays over here, too, though some of them are rather dependent on images and image hosting still a thorny issue I have to iron out.

Disappointment and uncertainty about Tumblr have forced me to branch out and explore other options, and it's surprisingly fun. Not having my online time so super-concentrated on Tumblr may result in my content being spread out over different platforms, which is fine because they have different strengths and weaknesses. Or maybe I'll start finding one place more comfortable than the others and start concentrating there instead. We'll see.

So, through lizbee 's invitation I'm now on Dreamwidth, set up to crosspost to LJ. I expected it to feel unfamiliar, but in fact things are eerily similar, with just enough differences to feel weird. I suppose the family resemblance is only natural since DW is a code fork of LJ. Mostly it feels like an alternate-universe LJ where it's not dickish. Evidently I can set up Semagic to post to both LJ and DW, which I will try once I'm running on more than four hours of sleep. I assume I'd have to turn off crossposting first, though. So much to experiment with, I love new toys.