lettered | Fandom migration stuff

greywash is the best post I've seen that discusses a lot of the ideas going around about fandom spaces, ideal fandom spaces, etc. In particular, I found the part about an ideal fannish platform addressed all the needs I'm seeing people discussed elsewhere, while the part about problems they foresee with such a space seemed more thoughtful and better articulated than most. Highlights include:

Mention of a "whisper space," which is (imo) a neat term for how people used tags on tumblr as a way to comment on something and have conversations without that part being reblogged. In discussions about reblogs on DW and elsewhere some of the discussion is centered around things you might not want to get reblogged, or tags you might want for you but not for universal purposes, and the complications in coding that causes.

Discussion of the OTW, how useful it would be for them to be involved and the difficulties in that. They point out that the OTW has done a whole lot to secure a legal standing for fanfic, which is great. But when you are talking a social network platform you are talking images, and images open up a much bigger can of worms. It would be nice to work with the OTW, but it remains unclear whether there are really enough resources to commit to that when they are already working on something else (namely, defense of fanfic).

Discussion of actual child porn, which frustratingly gets left out of a lot of these conversations. Basically, any time you make it easy and free to host lots of images, lots of people want to host images there, including pornographers. If you want to allow the fandom content we want but prevent actual exploitation of children, then you've got to have a way to monitor and sort, which requires time and resources.

Anyway, check it out, it's good.

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There is definitely a lot to unpack, in that post and with this whole situation. I wish DW had the capacity to be more visual and support reblogs the way Tumblr does, but the privacy and use of communities are frankly more important to me.

The nice thing about comms is that the OP can post their work to as many as they are a member of and everyone subscribed gets to see it, so you're not relying as much on building a large audience who will reblog your work.

Having the option to create privacy groups/lists to lock and limit posts to is something I've always missed about LJ and one of the reasons I didn't use Tumblr for personal posts.

The HUGE issue is for sure Actual Child Porn. I don't know how any platform, fan owned or otherwise, can really deal with it effectively without having people employed to actually view and report/ban/etc that content. How does one build/acquire an algorithm that will do that for us? How do we avoid having to hire someone to review it and make sure it's actual CP and report it to the authorities? It feels like we're stuck between a rock (CP) and a hard place (antis/purity warriors).

Comms are great, but I gotta say I could never find ones I liked on LJ or here. Not that there weren't great comms! But a lot of them felt kinda cliquish, ie still reliant on building an audience.

And yeah, I agree re CP. If your platform is small enough you just deal with reports as they come in, but once it gets large enough you've gotta have staff to do it. I just don't see a way out of that.

That's fair. Maybe this will be an opportunity to create new ones that are a bit more open? Fingers crossed...

Oh! By the way. I don't remember if I've said this yet to you, but I loved Away Childish Things.

Exactly. And I wouldn't want to have to deal with it, so it's like who do you hire for that purpose? Ugh.

Oh, thanks! Glad you liked the fic!

I bet it would be an awful job (checking for CP), but there are people who do it. Like, I think it's basically a tech support team job--those who answer all the reports when people report something. So on AO3 there's a team of volunteers who do stuff like that, but of course AO3 is bad enough for image hosting that that's not a big part of what they do.

I have plans to rec it in my next post. :)

Yeah, I can't imagine. You'd have to be a really strong person to do that kind of job. Total respect for the people that can handle it for the rest of us.

Thanks for the link, Lettered.

No problem!

See, this is when I wish dreamwidth had a “like” button, because I don’t really have anything valuable to add but this was a fascinating post to read. It’s interesting, thinking about building an international platform—there’s such diversity of laws, so what do we stick to as the model? Just assuming US-centrism seems like a bit of an issue.

Yeah. Honestly, I didn't understand the value of like buttons for a long, long time, but now that I'm back on DW after such a long time, I'm seeing things that I think are great but I don't necessarily want to engage, and there's no simple way to just say "I appreciate this!" I guess you can leave a comment saying "I appreciate this!" but then that opens a possibility of a comment back, but sometimes you really don't want a comment back; you just wanna move on.

And yeah, the whole legality issues for copyright law are difficult, though ultimately I feel like it's the law of whoever's hosting the platform that really matters, right?

(I seriously forgot how to initiate a comment for a hot second - and then I commented in the wrong thread, wow my LJ/DW skillz are rusty)

Thanks for sharing this, really fascinating stuff that I'm probably going to spend a few hours diving into.

Fandom migration stuff

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