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The exodus approaches...
First, before I type anything else - I just realized that I never thanked the people who nominated me for Stargate fan awards. So ... THANK YOU, wonderful people! I'm so sorry it took me so long to say so! *bows in your general direction*
Anyway, moving on ... Dreamwidth (new fandom-friendly journaling platform) has announced their open beta dates (accounts will be available April 30).
[Poll #1374680]
I've been watching my f'list abuzz with this, and feeling ... mildly conflicted.
Since 1995, a significant amount of my social life has been online. In that time, I can think of three different online "places" off the top of my head (a mailing list, a message board, and LJ) that I've thought of as "home" at the time. In all three cases, I spent years there, made enduring friendships and business contacts, shared major developments in my life ... and (except for LJ, yet) eventually moved on, as the group splintered and scattered.
I've also participated in, and sometimes run, dozens of mailing lists, message boards and blogs; I've had at least a half-dozen different message boards and blogs on my own webspace (none of which really took off, though some were pretty active for a short while).
So the thought never occurred to me that LJ would be permanent, any more than I expect the house I live in now to be the house I live in until I die. At the same time, though, I don't particularly want to move. I'm comfy, I have everything set up the way I like it, and most of my currently active online social circle is here. But I can feel the winds of change blowing; whether I stay or go or straddle both sites, I suspect that fandom (at least the corner of fandom where I "live") is about to split and reshape itself again. I've certainly been around long enough to know that this is normal and inevitable; fandom changes and reshapes all the time. I was kinda behind the curve on LJ fandom; I didn't really get active here until it was already going full-bore, so there was a (deceptive) sense of permanence to LJ fandom for me -- in Internet terms, it was ancient and rock-solid when I first jumped in, not to mention that I got in on the new, hot fandom (SGA) while it was on a popularity upswing. Compared to the Internet at large, it seemed monumentally stable and permanent. There were very few dead links, and lots of lively, active journals and discussions -- it felt like you could link to a story on an LJ journal and expect to still be there several years later, which is a sort of permanence that didn't really exist back in the days of personal Geocities homepages and mailing list archives.
Now I'm starting to notice growing numbers of blogs that are struckthrough in older comment threads; dead links leading to posts that have been privatized and journals that no longer exist; communities with tons of posts in their archives but not much activity now. I don't really get the feeling that LJ fandom is winding down, exactly, but it's starting to feel ... impermanent, in a way that it didn't before.
So ... I'm conflicted. Right now I'm leaning towards some combination of "maintain a Dreamwidth journal for reading purposes" and "let's see where fandom goes". I'm pretty much in it for the social life; all I really want is a journaling platform that'll basically leave me alone to do my thing -- and I know that LJ isn't perfect, but my own experiences with it have been good, despite some of the stories I've heard. I don't mind leaving -- like I said, I'm not wedded to the place -- but I'm in no great hurry to leave, either. I basically just want to be where the interesting discussions and the people I care about can be found.
Anyway, moving on ... Dreamwidth (new fandom-friendly journaling platform) has announced their open beta dates (accounts will be available April 30).
[Poll #1374680]
I've been watching my f'list abuzz with this, and feeling ... mildly conflicted.
Since 1995, a significant amount of my social life has been online. In that time, I can think of three different online "places" off the top of my head (a mailing list, a message board, and LJ) that I've thought of as "home" at the time. In all three cases, I spent years there, made enduring friendships and business contacts, shared major developments in my life ... and (except for LJ, yet) eventually moved on, as the group splintered and scattered.
I've also participated in, and sometimes run, dozens of mailing lists, message boards and blogs; I've had at least a half-dozen different message boards and blogs on my own webspace (none of which really took off, though some were pretty active for a short while).
So the thought never occurred to me that LJ would be permanent, any more than I expect the house I live in now to be the house I live in until I die. At the same time, though, I don't particularly want to move. I'm comfy, I have everything set up the way I like it, and most of my currently active online social circle is here. But I can feel the winds of change blowing; whether I stay or go or straddle both sites, I suspect that fandom (at least the corner of fandom where I "live") is about to split and reshape itself again. I've certainly been around long enough to know that this is normal and inevitable; fandom changes and reshapes all the time. I was kinda behind the curve on LJ fandom; I didn't really get active here until it was already going full-bore, so there was a (deceptive) sense of permanence to LJ fandom for me -- in Internet terms, it was ancient and rock-solid when I first jumped in, not to mention that I got in on the new, hot fandom (SGA) while it was on a popularity upswing. Compared to the Internet at large, it seemed monumentally stable and permanent. There were very few dead links, and lots of lively, active journals and discussions -- it felt like you could link to a story on an LJ journal and expect to still be there several years later, which is a sort of permanence that didn't really exist back in the days of personal Geocities homepages and mailing list archives.
Now I'm starting to notice growing numbers of blogs that are struckthrough in older comment threads; dead links leading to posts that have been privatized and journals that no longer exist; communities with tons of posts in their archives but not much activity now. I don't really get the feeling that LJ fandom is winding down, exactly, but it's starting to feel ... impermanent, in a way that it didn't before.
So ... I'm conflicted. Right now I'm leaning towards some combination of "maintain a Dreamwidth journal for reading purposes" and "let's see where fandom goes". I'm pretty much in it for the social life; all I really want is a journaling platform that'll basically leave me alone to do my thing -- and I know that LJ isn't perfect, but my own experiences with it have been good, despite some of the stories I've heard. I don't mind leaving -- like I said, I'm not wedded to the place -- but I'm in no great hurry to leave, either. I basically just want to be where the interesting discussions and the people I care about can be found.
no subject
Initially, I was lukewarm about DW, because I thought, Oh, it's another LJ clone, and I wasn't very impressed by IJ or JF. But the amount of development they appear to have done -- improving the functionality of the basic LJ structure -- has really impressed me.
I've come to feel, increasingly, that we (fandom) are not LJ's core userbase. I don't think we ever were, really, we were just quite numerous. I don't know for sure, but my feeling is that LJ's marketing and growth strategy is probably focused on Russia, and I don't want to hang around on LJ until fannish journals and comms are in the minority, and the bulk of the site is aimed at a completely different market. So I like DW because it's very clearly been created for the fannish community with substantial input from the fannish community.
I like it because the structure and set up are professional, and aimed at long term stability and growth. This is my 10 year anniversary in fandom; I've come to realise that this isn't a phase or a fad, this is who I am -- I intend to be in fandom for a long time to come, and I want to feel that the architecture is in place to facilitate that. Like xparrot said upthread, between DW and the OTW archive, I feel like fandom has a good shot at establishing really a solid, permanent infrastructure on the net, and I want that for us.
I've just about been around long enough to remember usenet groups, which were replaced by mailing lists, and later LJ. The big shifts we've seen in the last 10-15 years have mirrored the huge changes which have occurred on the wider internet. The technology has developed at huge speed; maybe now we're hitting the point where the initial explosion of anarchic growth and change is about to slow down and turn into something more stable, which isn't a bad thing or a good thing, it's just a thing, a natural next step.
no subject
Your last point, though -- that's really interesting to me! I guess I've just been assuming that something would eventually take over from blogs, just as Usenet and the old listserv-style mailing lists gave way to message boards and Yahoo group-type lists, which gave way to blogs. But now that the Internet's become such an institution (it's been a generation, almost), maybe the rapid change is starting to taper off; maybe we are, if not at a steady state, then at a point where we're likely to see refinement of what's already there more than the rise of something new and different. Hmmm...
no subject
I think it's possible that's happening - although I'm no expert on technology and trends, so it's equally possible that the Next Big Thing might come along tomorrow and change the structure of how we interact all over again. But I do notice that after the wild explosion of growth that started in about 1995/98, there are now people around who've been consistently online and in fandom for 10 or 15 years. The people who were students or teens the first time they hung around on usenet are now in their thirties -- and those are the people we're seeing with the technical know-how, the real-world experience of large project management, and the connections to start setting up the really big projects which are now being implemented. Fandom's existed for a long time, but internet fandom's still pretty young, and I think the seismic changes of the last ten years -- and the current push, from a number of different directions, for stable, long-term platforms that won't go away overnight -- are indications that we're moving to a different phase. (I'm not going to say 'growing up', since we're all big kids anyway...)