I FUCKING KNEW IT.
SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.
AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.
I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.
It doesn’t matter.
Once upon a time – in the era before anyone had heard of google – if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.
GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.
And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on – it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space – but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.
Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history – a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.
(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)
And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…
Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.
And watch as the flames take everything.
Brush the ash from their hands.
Walk away.
Once upon a time – in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” – fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon – or as many years late – as you wanted to.
Because there was a tagging site – del.icio.us – that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.
They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it – many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.
It is like fandom suffered – collectively – a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.
We have never yet recovered.
Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.
I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.
I do not think Yahoo is “bad” – I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.
But they are, historically, bad for US.
And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.
…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.
Other important fandom history events:
Fanfiction dot net? Used to host all ratings of fanfic. Then some conservative anti-pr0n organization was like, “No, you can’t do that.” And FF.net was like, “You’re right, we can’t do that.” And anything explicit was taken down with extreme prejudice. Fans created Adult Fanfiction dot net, but it never really reached the same level of popularity as the original FF.net.
I’m not entirely sure on the details, but I’m pretty sure fandom central moved more-or-less to LiveJournal at that point, or possibly even slightly before. Eventually, LJ was sold to a Russian company, Sixapart (IIRC). Then came the ads, and Strikethrough, and Boldthrough, and finally a massive change to interface that caused a lot of users migraines, and fandom collectively packed up and moved again.
Some people stayed; it was their internet home, and I certainly don’t blame them for staying, but LJ was never the same after. Fandom sort-of splintered over the course of these events, with the RP related splinter largely moving to Dreamwidth (a site very similar to LJ, but started and run by fandom in much the same way AO3 is), and other groups moving to Tumblr or Plurk.
Dreamwidth isn’t nearly as active as current Tumblr, but I trust the hosts and staff not to screw fandom over, which is more than I can say about almost any site besides AO3. Dreamwidth is run entirely on user-purchases, which has almost certainly been impacted by the fact that PayPal won’t work with them – because Dreamwidth refuses to censor explicit content. That’s right: Unlike LJ before it, and quite probably FF.net as well, Dreamwidth decided it valued its users more than a possible bump in revenue.
Dreamwidth refuses to censor explicit content, and its format allows much more interaction, discussion, comment threads, communities.So, is it possible to bk tumblr to dw?
I know you’ve all heard me yell about Pillowfort before, but since this post is pre-PF I thought I’d just add it on.
Pillowfort.io is a new social networking site that’s still in private beta, that is trying to combine the best of LJ/DW and Tumblr. There are communities, threaded comments, and privacy control like LJ, with reblogging like Tumblr. Nothing explicit is against the TOS unless it’s posted repeatedly in the wrong place, but Nazi bullshit IS against the TOS. You can currently lock posts to followers only, soon they’re adding mutuals-only. If you edit or delete a post, all reblogs of it are edited or deleted, too. Lots of cool stuff!
They recently reopened their 4th beta wave signups – if you’d like an invite, sign up now, because the next wave will only be available through their crowdfunding campaign!
Now, it is definitely still in beta – there are lots of bugs, and lots of features they’re still working on adding. And since they’ve been letting in users a little at a time, there’s not a huge crowd of people there yet, but at this point it’s up to several thousand users so activity is starting to pick up.
If you’d like to see a little of what it’s like, here is a baking community I created that’s doing fairly well. Here is the Check Please community where Ngozi is cross-posting a lot of the new stuff so you can comment on it with real threaded discussions! And here is my blog, which is 90% me yakking about personal stuff because I’m keeping most (but not all) fandom stuff in comms. (Though a lot of my blog is also followers-only.)
Note related to OP: It’s not totally clear what their business model will be. They’ve done one crowdfunding campaign and will soon do another, but beyond that I’m not sure. They do NOT want to have advertising, and I’m pretty sure they’ve talked about a model much like LJ/DW, where there are paid accounts with extra features, or a la carte extras you can buy, etc. Honestly, that was a really successful model for LJ and I’d really love for another site to use it. I gladly paid $20/year to LJ for like 5-6 years and I’d rather do that again for a site I love than be inundated with ads or have it go under.
Pillowfort is amazing! It needs some more features, yes, and some more content, sure, but the developers are engaged with the users! If you were an LJ user and miss that, you’ll love pillowfort. If you’re exclusively tumblr, it’s got a lot more content control so come on over!
I’m colebaltblue over there!!!
You can’t import Tumblr to DW directly. (You can’t import Tumblr to anything directly; Tumblr is very, very different from every other blog-ish platform site.) You can import specific Tumblr entries to AO3 via their import tool, if those entries are fanworks.
Pillowfort is new and shiny and I hope it lasts longer than Imzy, but I am not expecting that – it’s not backed with serious funding, and I think the staff severely underestimates the hassles of managing fandom drama. (Currently, there is no drama. It’s tiny. But if people start using it to import their too-explicit-for-FFN works, it’ll collect the same “discourse” drama that Tumblr gets.) Also, PF hasn’t mentioned how they intend to make enough money to keep things going, nor how they’re going to cope with GDPR requirements.
So: Mildly hopeful, but there are several red flags that speak against the chances for long-term survival.
But definitely: BACK UP anything and everything on Tumblr that you care about. Make copies at the Wayback machine. Copy things out to Word docs. Save those files, because as soon as Yahoo realizes that there is no amount of ads that will bring money flowing like rivers, they will kill Tumblr like they killed Geocities and Delicious.
Yahoo reports big loss, writes down Tumblr value
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