Fandom Snowflake Challenge - Day 14

Day 14

In your own space, talk about what you think the future holds for fandom. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I hope, with the migration away from Tumblr, we'll start to see a more community-based fandom experience, again. I don't think it will ever rise to the heights it had been in the days before the disasters on LJ (strikethrough/boldthrough) and the rise of insta-blogging/micro-blogging on Tumblr and Twitter, but I think that if there are a few dedicated souls in each fandom who are willing to put in the time and effort to build the necessary structures on Dreamwidth, and others who will help with the heavy lifting (promotion, signal boosting, etc.), Dreamwidth can be a centralized home for fannish activity.

tozka has been posting their thoughts about fandom and it's future on their journal, and I don't want to reiterate their ideas here (read: steal), and I urge anyone who is the least be interested in the future of fandom on a journal based platform to go read their posts (this one and this one).

Between Doctorsidrat's meta and the last three Fandom Snowflake challenges have really gotten me to think about why it was so easy for fandom to migrate to Tumblr and why it's going to be difficult to rebuild it here on Dreamwidth.

Time. (Queue up Simon and Garfunkel's Hazy Shade of Winter)

It's easy and quick to set up a blog on Tumblr. Tags don't belong to you, they are Tumblr-wide. You don't have to do much to keep people in the loop other than keep hitting the reblog button.

Creating a community on DW is a much more deliberate action. It requires a lot of thought and you need to make some pretty serious choices. Tagging is community specific and for it to be effective, the comm owner needs to set up a tagging system (my experience is that the comm owners should pre-create the tags and not allow members to create their own tags). Signal boosting means you have to reach out to other community owners and ask for permission to post the boost, you have to corral friends of the comm to boost on their journals, and if you're lucky, you'll get someone with a lot of friends who'll see those posts.

All of this effort takes time. It's not easy. Good, well-run communities have clearly spelled out rules that are easily found (it's surprising how many comms don't use their profile page at all and don't sticky-post the rules or put a link to the rules in the sidebar). Things that you think are obvious still need to be spelled out and sometimes, in great and tedious detail, especially for challenges and fanworks exchanges.

Fandom on Dreamwidth will grow again through good, well-maintained and regularly moderated communities, all of which take time and dedication and a handful of people who are able to give that.

Fic: (Top-Secret) Santa (Kingsman)

Title: (Top-Secret) Santa

Author: elrhiarhodan / elrhiarhodan / elrhiarhodan
Fandom: Kingsman
Rating: PG-13 (for excessive use of the word "fuck" in all its forms)
Characters/Pairings: Eggsy Unwin, Harry Hart, Merlin, Roxy Morton, Percival
Word Count: ~7200
Spoilers: None
Warnings/Enticements/Triggers: None
Summary: Eggsy returns from a long holiday in New Zealand, visiting with his mum and Daisy, when he gets a top-level secure message to report to Sublevel Twelve, Room Twenty-Five at HQ. Despite the lack of sleep and horrific jet lag, Eggsy has no choice but to comply. Harry meets him at the lifts and takes him to a very special room where some very special Kingsman work is done.

Author’s Note: Written for the 2018 Kingsman Stocking Stuffer event, for Anarchycox, for her prompt "Merlin running the most terrifyingly organized secret santa event ever, like everyone is sure that they will die if they spill who they have or break the rules, but his people will have a magical christmas surprise or else." This was a great jumping off point for something that went quite a bit differently, but I hope they enjoy it.

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On AO3: (Top-Secret) Santa