What’s happened with the fandom? I’m so lost!

sineala:

Oh, boy, anon, it has been A Week!

So, uh, a couple days ago Tumblr announced that starting on December 17, no NSFW visual content will be allowed on Tumblr anymore. This is a problem for a lot of different groups of people who like to use Tumblr, and it’s a problem for fandom because, y’know, sometimes fandom likes to create art of their favorite characters getting it on.

Tumblr is currently in the process of auto-flagging existing adult content, sometimes with hilariously wrong results.

So, basically, a lot of fandom is backing their stuff up, saving all their favorite dirty pictures, and leaving Tumblr en masse for greener, more porn-filled pastures.

There’s no consensus yet exactly on where people are going, because there never is when these things happen to fandom. People seem to be making more of an effort to put their stuff on AO3. Some people who do fandom on Twitter already are staying on Twitter. A bunch of people are joining various fannish Discord servers; if you like Steve/Tony, the 18+ 616 server is here for you, as is the 18+ MCU server and the all-ages server.

If you’re trying to find people, Copperbadge has a directory post going and there are similar directories for Captain America fandom and for Steve/Tony fandom specifically. Add yourself! Find your friends!

The two primary sites of refuge so far seem to be Pillowfort and Dreamwidth, both of which have pros and cons.

Pillowfort is currently in beta, and a key to create an account costs $5, although they are planning on being free at some point and monetizing via selling paid features later. If you’re coming from Tumblr, they are probably going to look more similar to it than any of your other options are. They have reblogging, global tags, blacklisting, and a lot of neat features. They say that they “plan to allow NSFW content with very few restrictions” which does sound better than Tumblr. The downside is that they clearly weren’t prepared to have this happen to them at this point; their site is very laggy and they haven’t even let in the next batch of users yet. There are also a bunch of things summed up in this Twitter thread that are kind of concerning – they need to change their domain name soon because their registrar technically won’t let them host NSFW works, they are not GDPR-compliant (which as I understand it means that they should legally not be operating in Europe), they don’t have a clear policy for when they will TOS you off the site, should it come to that, and they take money via PayPal which is gonna be a problem if PayPal ever finds out they host adult content. Basically, they have promise, but they are definitely a work in progress.

(Also I find their site design really hard to read.)

Dreamwidth is a fandom-created code fork of LiveJournal that’s been running for about a decade, since the time when LiveJournal started kicking fandom off because they posted adult content. (This is not a new problem for fandom.) They are very fandom-friendly, and they are very clear about what is allowed there, and they say that basically everything allowed under US law is legal, and your NSFW content is absolutely okay. (An account is free, but you can pay for more features, and they use a payment processor that does accept adult sites, so they’re cool there.) The downside is that, well, it’s a LJ clone, and if you’re coming from Tumblr it’s not the same paradigm of interaction as Tumblr – there are no global tags, no reblogging, and their imagehosting is very basic (but it does exist). Essentially you interact with people by reading their posts and commenting on them, and if you’re used to a site where you can just reblog stuff you like… that’s not DW. Having said that, I still really like DW, and I’m still there, posting frequently, and if you want to do Steve/Tony fandom the Cap/Iron Man community is there.

This is not the first time this has happened to fandom! We’re all gonna be out there somewhere! Just probably not here. It’s gonna be okay. We’ll find each other somehow.