The sky isn’t falling, Tumblr isn’t deleting all the dirty fan art on purpose, and fandom isn’t going to leave Tumblr tomorrow.
However…
Once a site starts using bots to delete content willy-nilly, it has a serious problem and is not a safe home for fandom. In this case, the aim was to get rid of child pornography. (Actual child pornography.) The problem was already so out of control that they hit a bunch of innocent blogs by accident.
If this happened once, it’s going to happen again. It’s going to keep happening until Tumblr’s limited staff is so overstretched that they stop even a vague pretense of caring about false positives and accidental deletions of other content.
I’ve already seen several posts going around telling people to “calm down” and assuring us that Tumblr isn’t out to get us. Tumblr is not out to get us, but they’re not out to help fandom either, and you should definitely not calm down.
Make your other accounts now.
Have somewhere to go when Tumblr finishes imploding.
Two bits of advice:
-back up your stuff. make copies of your important text posts. save your media elsewhere. tumblr has a built in backup tool. use that.
-let your friends know where else to find you. fannish exodus works best when we end up the same places. (may I suggest dreamwidth?)
Last I heard dreamwidth was not a great option because it’s servers are in Russia. Many of us think of the internet as something that lives “in the cloud, up there somewhere” but much of it’s infrastructure is hosted in rooms full of servers around the world. The server’s physical locations are subject to the laws of those areas/countries.
That’s Livejournal, dude, notDreamwidth.
Dreamwidth is a similar-looking site that started off as a code fork of LJ. It is run by a tiny team in the US and is explicitly fandom-friendly. They’ve already been attacked by having people tattle to paypal and get their paypal suspended. They had to find a (more expensive for them) credit card processor that wouldn’t hold them hostage, demanding they change their content policies.
From the ‘open expression’ part of their about us page:
“We believe in sustainability, not profiteering. We want to grow our business slowly and steadily, in a way that can support the community instead of exploiting it. We don’t own you or your content – we hope that you’ll empower us to be your hands and trust us to build a community that can last.
We will remain third-party-advertising-free. We believe it’s possible to run a sustainable hosted service without resorting to third-party advertising or third-party sponsorship – and we’re committed to showing you what we’re taking in, what we’re spending, and where the money’s going.”
The problem with Dreamwidth is that it looks old-fashioned and doesn’t have all of the features fandom likes: The image hosting is minimal, and there’s no reblogging.
What it’s great for is text discussion with threaded comments (for which we use reblogs here, but for which reblogs frankly suck).
The people and policies behind the site are all great.
As someone who’s moved with fandom from BBBoards and Yahoo groups to Livejournal to Dreamwidth and AO3 and Tumblr and most recently to Pillowfort – it seems to be par of the course for sites that are NOT fandom-made to sooner or later become unfriendly or less usable to fandom.
Dreamwidth may be quiet, but it’s made by fen, and I will keep supporting it with my money and looking in now and then to see old friends. I will keep supporting AO3 that was born out of that same needs for the fandom to own the servers. I would suggest people not forget fanlore.org – it’s your fandom lore wiki, and you can create an user page for yourself to direct anyone how to find you in case one of your main non-fandom-maintained fannish-community sites goes boom (a lot of us did when LJ purges and Delicious blowout and other stuff like that happened, here’s mine with my fannish contact info – https://fanlore.org/wiki/User:Calime ).
We will no doubt be ousted from many a wide world web pasture in the future like we were in the past, but fandom network is resilient and stays around. Also, please, don’t forget your history and keep supporting the sites and organisations that fandom has made for the fandom, like AO3 and OTW, or the ones that like-minded people have created to be fandom-friendly, like Dreamwidth.
oppression isn’t generational and trying to frame politics as “the old people are wrong and the young people are right” erases the fact that there are old people who have been fighting the good fight for decades and the fact that there are young people who are literally nazis
Plus while there might be less old people fighting the good fight it’s usually because they were killed or were part of the minorities that have poor living conditions that kill you early
I am allo as fuck. I experience lots of romantic attraction. I get crushes all the ding dang time, of all sorts. (Side note, I didn’t really understand the concept of a ‘squish’ for a long time, because I had never had a crush that didn’t have some sort of I MIGHT LIKE TO DO A SEXY THING component. And then I realized I totally have a squish on Reggie Watts from the Late Late Show. I just want to snuggle and talk about Westworld? But I’m like super crushing on him in a snuggly friend way?)
Anyway. Here’s the thing. Like. I can choose to either be an inclusive person who stretches out my arms and says, “come on up, bring that bit of wood you’ve been clinging to, and add it to our raft so that our raft is bigger, and we will all weather the storm together. I can see that you are hurt and tired, and I, too, am hurt and tired. And together we have a better chance of surviving.”
Or.
I can shove people off the raft, have a smaller raft because people aren’t bringing me their life jackets and bits of flotsam they’ve been clinging to, have a shittier crew on that raft because we’re all focused on who should and shouldn’t be on the raft rather than how we can get the raft to a safe harbor and take care of everybody on it until we get there.
Those are the choices. The only reason to shove someone off the raft is if they’re actively, that individual, a danger to people on the raft, because no one ends up clinging to flotsam in the middle of this metaphorical ocean unless they belong on the ding dang raft in the first place. They’re all on the big sturdy SS Cisheteroalloperipatriarchy. They don’t need our raft and they don’t want it.
Clearly, I choose the first one. And I’m glad to welcome you up onto my raft. The seas are high and choppy, and we’re not gonna make it if we have to weather these waves alone.
i hate the idea of a True Self that you Never Show To Anyone like the me by myself isn’t me partly because humans are defined imo by their social interactions as we are social creatures but mostly because that guy is a gremlin. the disgusting idiot who crawls out of my bed at 1pm and eats peanut butter from the jar isn’t me he’s the manifestation of a collection of weird impulses that all give way at once. saying that dude is Truly Me In An Objective Way, as if that exists, is such bullshit like [holds up a creature that is on the cusp of going insane because its species literally cannot be alone for any significant amount of time] behold, a True Self! give me a break
peanut butter gremlin man is exactly as True as the dude who got invited to a frat party is exactly as true as the man who goes to job interviews and doctors appointments and applies to specialized courses and it’s useless to insist that one is truer than the others. truth isn’t real and peanut butter man has a 3.5 gpa. the self is a whole even when we insist on looking at it in situational fragments
just because we only show certain parts of ourselves in certain situations doesn’t make us liars. it just makes us adaptable.
If you’re over 25 and haven’t done something remarkable, you are hunted down and killed. Some people invent things. Some make cures for diseases. Others become established members of their community. You’re pushing 30, and somehow not dead yet, even though you cant think of a single thing you’ve done thats remarkable in any way. Why aren’t you dead?
i keep coming back to this conversation. i sit on docks or in hallways or in the bright light of panels i talk in and i say: okay. yeah, i have “published books” but they’re self-published, what does that count. yeah, i have pieces in many, many magazines, but online culture isn’t real, is it. yeah, i’m working literally-not-a-joke five jobs, one volunteer position, and two student leadership positions and i’m in grad school on a full ride. but i could have been a lawyer, you know. i chose to go into writing, how selfish. i always talk about my engineer siblings with my eyes closed, because i know the look that people get: oh but you turned out like this? just, what? an internet poet?
I’m 25 and what I can make out of my life is: 45 hours on skyrim without making anybody die. i have, like, a lot of followers on the only social platform it doesn’t fucking matter on. i guess one time rihanna, unknowingly, reposted a repost of my work on her twitter, uncredited, so that was pretty interesting.
sometimes, because of what i write and who i am, i get messages that read: i think i’m going to end it. i don’t need you to help me, i just need to tell somebody. and i’m not a therapist. but i’m a good talker. better at listening. and every once in a while, i get the chance to talk people down from things. sometimes i get thanked for it. more often i talk until i hear nothing. i lie awake wondering: oh god. did they do it. was i not enough for them. lord, are you listening? can you help me? can you protect them?
i don’t do a lot. i don’t know math. i can’t knit. i am allergic to basically all things. the world at 25 feels really, really fucking bleak. look at what other people are doing with their time on earth. look at what children are capable of. god, who am i? i am crumbling to dust.
but then i remember: i have two ears and one big heart. and i can listen. and i can read. and i can be there when someone needs me. no, i don’t know math, but i know how to help when someone’s been crying. i can’t knit but i know how to hold someone’s hand when they’re too scared to admit they’re panicking. i am still allergic to everything but it’s just made me appreciate that our bodies are not cars to crash. we aren’t broken, we’re rebuilding, we’re in the process of magic; we create even in the face of all that destroys, we have been destroyed and still we tilt our heads back and look up and keep going and say, fuck no, not today, death can wait; i don’t have a bucket list because who can live that long but i still want to know what it feels like to skinny-dip and no! i didn’t think i’d make it to 25 and i’ve wasted god, so much of this divine and precious life
but today someone from four years ago finally messaged me. hey. thank you for being there all that time ago. thank you for listening.i’m alive, i’m well, and i’m finally, thank god, healing
and that’s the answer, my beloved, my angels, my dragons – no prose or poetry or lyrics about it. we weren’t put here to rot, to stagnate, to unfulfill. we weren’t put here to answer the prayers of our parents or the gifted-child prophecies or read from the book of poor-kid-doesn’t-understand-anything. our lives aren’t made from milestones, aren’t made from birth-marriage-mansion goals, we don’t survive by the starter gun. we were put here, each of us, because we have one heart big enough to fit love. to look into the yawn of space and say, that makes me curious. to put cold toes in the unknown ocean and say she is my home. to look wolves in the eye and say oh, you’re me, and you’re mine. we love, don’t we, so big and wild that our smallness feels like erupting.
i looked into myself and i said: what have i done at 25?
oh, oh, oh, i just remembered: i kept myself alive.
tumblhoard-paladinkit 