question for fandom

[kaigou]

This is not entirely out of only curiosity, but in the wake of LJ dying its ongoing slow death, the rise of tumblr & instagram, the spammy desert of delicious, and the domination of pinterest, where does fandom mostly reside, now? Outside of behemoths like fanfiction.net and deviantart, there doesn't seem to be a central gathering place (application/site) for major active communities. Or is there, and I'm just not seeing/hearing about it?

Considering that once upon a time, one could post images, fic, vids, and whatnot to LJ, on one's own journal as well as on a community journal, is there any one place that handles all the fannish activity, now? Or is it all truly broken into pieces?

Comments

[branchandroot]

There is a whole lot on Tumblr, and I'd say Tumblr + Twitter (as a sort of aggregate, each handling a somewhat different info stream) is currently as close to the fandom happening place as LJ ever was, which was always extremely variable by fandom/fan type. Tag streams rather than comms serve as gathering points, and that means you have to be a lot more plugged in to the key terms of a fandom to find it. I suspect the cyclical nature of conversation-by-reblog+addition has front lined a lot of fancrazy that the LJ platform and platform-culture channeled into locked posts, but I see a lot of the same post-it-to-your-journal type stuff going by on my dash.

I think there was a window when AO3 could have stepped in, but at the time they didn't have coders up to designing the platform and now I think there really is too much fragmentation in how different fan sets expect their platform to operate for such a polarized project to draw more than their core constituency.

[kaigou]

Like in my reply to staranise, it really does seem to be that if one could tag, like the old delicious but on a more powerful, non-monetized, level -- that this is where the real power lies.

[kathmandu]

Oh! Did you check out Pinboard? That was the single largest migration I heard about from people whose bookmark collections were trashed by del.icio.us.