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

[staranise]

The thing is, fandom is literally so huge these days I wouldn't want to use a centralized platform that puts me in touch with Every Single Fan Ever. Not that my fandom experience was ever truly centralized, since all through the reign of LJ I was in fandoms with virtually no presence on LJ, but vibrant messageboards. But anyway, these days fans of anything at all are so easy to find I suffer from a kind of glut and have to back off to somewhere smaller and more manageable. Like living in a city with hundreds of thousands of people, and cutivating my own front stoop. One of my fandoms is a Canadian show that will absolutely break the bank if it gets a million viewers, and I can find fandom for it.

On Tumblr, I tend to post about a fandom and include it in that fandom's tag, then follow the replies and retags to my post and find people to follow that way. If I want to find something (like fandom-specific icons, which are scarce as hen's teeth thanks to the lack of a standard platform icon size for people to specifically create for, the one thing I really miss LJ about) I'll use the site search to find fandom-specific curated blogs that basically wade through the fandom tag and reblog the good stuff, like garbage pickers going through junkyards for the gems.

[kaigou]

It seems to me that being able to tag everything -- and control the tags, if not the origin -- is really the most powerful thing. It's also possibly the only way to handle the plethora of different places you could find fandom, as well as to get around wacky pathetic search engine bs like tumblr's idiosyncratic algorithms.

iow, instead of having a central platform, just have a centralized method of tracking the decentralized platforms?

[februaryfour]

Tangentially I remember from my time on Tumblr that only the first five tags on a post are tracked in Tumblr's searches/tag trackers.

[kaigou]

Yeah, they've got a strange algorithm going on, but it's purely intentional. It's kind of like always hitting "I feel lucky" when you do a google search. It's mostly that the site's philosophy isn't geared towards archiving but towards discovery. Which is fine (and a very different/intriguing way to approach things) but it sure makes it hard to fine something from three months ago that you forgot to bookmark...