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[elyusion]

Did you know that Women of the Internet webring is transphobic?
Free Site Hosting Resources
Notes on Migrating an Online Community
How to Make Discussion Happen on Dreamwidth
Zuck's anti-antitrust argument is that he ruined the Internet

You know, there's multiple online "communities" I'm in where there's only conversation once every blue moon. I have ideas on how to revive them, but I'm not a mod in any of them, so it'd be weird if I randomly started doing mod or admin things like QOTDs or Weekly Topics or whatever. So I just sit and look at these quiet groups I'm subscribed to/following/part of, wanting to talk with fellow fans but having nothing in particular I want to say, and wish I was online during a more chatty time in internet history. So it goes...

Comments

[paperghost]

> but I'm not a mod in any of them, so it'd be weird if I randomly started doing mod or admin things like QOTDs or Weekly Topics or whatever.

If the mod is still online, but it won't hurt to ask if you can post it anyway. Or even then, mods don't have a monopoly on just asking questions to whoever is still on a DW community.

> So I just sit and look at these quiet groups I'm subscribed to/following/part of, wanting to talk with fellow fans but having nothing in particular I want to say, and wish I was online during a more chatty time in internet history. So it goes...

Same...

[malymin]

If the mod is still online, but it won't hurt to ask if you can post it anyway. Or even then, mods don't have a monopoly on just asking questions to whoever is still on a DW community.

Not OP, but I keep running into situations where communities relevant to mine or my friends' interests haven't been active in years, and all their moderators are either deleted or haven't touched the site since 2015, so there's no way to contact them. So, for example, if I want to discuss the 2002 anime Princess Tutu with people... what do I do about the fact that all the extant communities, functionally, have no moderators? At the best of times, you don't need moderators...

But if a community with no active moderators became active again, and someone started posting inflamatory material, or there became some kind of heated disagreement about what kind of nsfw material should be allowed, what does one even do? The LJ/DW comm model is better than the Tumblr/Twitter/etc sitewide-tag model for community interaction because comms can be moderated and tags can't, but if there's no moderators on deck... I fear a converging towards modern social media's vigiliante-moderation-through-harassment behaviors, the very things I came back to Dreamwidth to escape.

Or do I just glut the site with yet another DW community for what was always a more niche interest, that will become yet another ungoverned empty field if I and any other moderators I select leave the site for whatever reason?

When LJ was a bustling site, you could easily sustain, for example, both fandom communities that were sfw and fandom communities that were nsfw for the same media; if one person wanted to see noncon student/teacher fanfic and the other didn't want to be reminded of its existence, they didn't have to share the same space to engage in fandom. If one person wanted to read only yugioh meta, and another only wanted to read only yugioh shitposts, active comms existed for both. But right now, DW feels like it can barely even sustain one comm per interest, much less a diversity of comms....

[elyusion]

I have no idea why all communities are dead but the ones for fanfic (and other fanworks), but at the very least: Please share your Princess Tutu thoughts to anime_manga. More people have seen it than you think. I have, but it's been a long time so I can say nothing intelligent about it... Not everyone is like me though! Maybe eventually there will be so many Princess Tutu and Precure and Sailor Moon posts that there needs to be a magical girl comm, and then that further needs to be divided into individual series...... Yea, you could call me optimistic.

I know all that probably won't happen... but we have to start (restart?) somewhere. It's unrealistic, but I don't want to give up on Dreamwidth. I hope that if people post to fandom comms with more than just links to fanfic, it'll encourage others to do the same. Maybe it'll never be as bustling as before ~2012/5 or so, but it'd be nice to aim for "pretty active"! (I'm being so unnecessarily optimistic 😅😅)

[malymin]

I did write a few posts that I submitted to anime_manga! And there is a magical girl comm that isn't completely dead at frillsofjustice. But sometimes I get nervous when I want to talk about some really hyper-niche aspect of a specific show in a general comm. Like... if I want to talk about disabiltiy theory in relation to Mytho. I feel like I'm "supposed" to prioritize the characters who are magical girls in a general magical girl genre community, not the less popular of the series' two male love interests. Even though there's no longer the infrastructure to support it, I keep feeling like "posts with broad appeal can go in multi-fandom comms, but a post about a less popular character or ship, or that's getting into really obscure details, should only be posted into a series-specific community"...

My friend tresfoyle has talked a lot with me in DMs about how a lot of online communities could really benefit from Dreamwidth's general structure - and yet the only aspect of fandom, or even nerd culture in the broader sense, that has any sort of presence is fanfic writing. In particular, I think a lot about how she (and stepnix, another TTRPG enthusiast I know) said this site would probably be a more conducive medium for tabletop RPG players and devs to talk shop than, uh... Twitter. (and Bluesky, which has the same fundamental issues in format.)

[elyusion]

I get what you mean about talking about hyper-niche stuff entirely; even I hesitate to speak in communities just because I think so-and-so is too obscure, so niche topics about not-so-popular stuff can feel too risky, right? Putting your vulnerability on the line for little gain...

And I agree that communities on here are great and many groups need them! But DW, for obvious reasons, doesn't really do marketing. And I think its users are limited in how much advertising they can do too, since many are kind of the "fuck most other social media" type? So they don't have the following it takes to drag a lot of new blood in. Just a sad situation, but I hope one day a lot of the people whose needs suit DW find it...