I'd have to say - from personal experience, at least - that fandom seems to have migrated to Tumblr and Twitter, although the sense of "community" is far less than what it used to be on LJ. It feels like fandom now (or at least it feels more apparent/concentrated) revolves around the individual rather than the community. This is probably due to the rise of tags as a means of gathering people's attention. So individual users (as content providers) become more prominent, since Tumblr and Twitter both seem to be "shout into the void and see who shouts loudest" models. So unless you track the tags, you don't see the "fandom," but that method doesn't represent the users who don't tag or don't appear in the tags.
As for Twitter, the emphasis on the individual is even greater. Communities slowly build as new users follow and become friends with other users - I think this is due to the nature of Twitter, where people will jump in on conversation threads, but if you don't follow some of the users listed in the Tweets, you'll only get a portion of the full conversation. So it encourages/forces you to expand your "circle" if you want to capture the entire view of the conversations taking place. So naturally, communities form around preexisting circles and established/prominent "voices" in fandom.
On a side note, Tumblr seems to have changed its tag search... In my fandom, at least, there's a lot of uproar about ship/character hate appearing in the tags, but the people posting the hate claim not to have tagged their posts. So it seems like maybe the tag search is also pulling keywords from the post content?
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Date: 10 Mar 2015 03:25 pm (UTC)I'd have to say - from personal experience, at least - that fandom seems to have migrated to Tumblr and Twitter, although the sense of "community" is far less than what it used to be on LJ. It feels like fandom now (or at least it feels more apparent/concentrated) revolves around the individual rather than the community. This is probably due to the rise of tags as a means of gathering people's attention. So individual users (as content providers) become more prominent, since Tumblr and Twitter both seem to be "shout into the void and see who shouts loudest" models. So unless you track the tags, you don't see the "fandom," but that method doesn't represent the users who don't tag or don't appear in the tags.
As for Twitter, the emphasis on the individual is even greater. Communities slowly build as new users follow and become friends with other users - I think this is due to the nature of Twitter, where people will jump in on conversation threads, but if you don't follow some of the users listed in the Tweets, you'll only get a portion of the full conversation. So it encourages/forces you to expand your "circle" if you want to capture the entire view of the conversations taking place. So naturally, communities form around preexisting circles and established/prominent "voices" in fandom.
On a side note, Tumblr seems to have changed its tag search... In my fandom, at least, there's a lot of uproar about ship/character hate appearing in the tags, but the people posting the hate claim not to have tagged their posts. So it seems like maybe the tag search is also pulling keywords from the post content?