a reply-reply!

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/3j06Tik

rhyperographer https://rhyperographer.tumblr.com/ said:

                         That really bites, but dreamwidth is not my

jam. :( If you choose to go elsewhere i get it though.

Oh, I’ve been on dreamwidth for nine or ten (eleven? 2020-2009 oh yeah that’s 11) years, I’m not going anywhere, I’m just– also there. With my old LJ handle from my baby days, dragonlady7, which I’ll have you all know was a reference to an original novel I was writing so there.

I don’t post much there; I set up a crossposter from here to there so everything I do is mirrored there, but the formatting is fucking horrible, and I keep meaning to set it up so that instead it crossposts everything from there to here, so I’ll go make my entries there, and then all the weird random reblogs in my queue that get mangled in the reposting don’t keep going over there. But it nearly killed me to figure out the IFTTT recipe (from a fantastic tutorial, it wasn’t even that I figured it out myself!) in the first place, so I don’t know how to a) undo it, and b) set up a different one, so I have not fixed that yet.

I’m not leaving Tumblr particularly, it’s just that as it’s less and less possible to use, I’ll get less and less interaction here, and it’ll meet my needs less and less. I’m also terrified of losing contact with people I care a lot about and people just– poof disappear off of Tumblr all the fucking time and then there’s no recourse. On the one hand I do love that this is like the last bastion of anonymous Internettage where you can have a fannish identity and not worry about your mom reading your furry vore or discovering your uncomfortably self-revealing erotica or whatever. cough But on the other hand, that means that when your weird little handle goes dark, the people who came to care about you as a human have no way of ever finding you or knowing what happened to you.

My DW still has a bunch of inactive feeds on it, the Livejournals of the people I lost in that migration. They’re preserved there, just a list of inactive names, who I periodically go back and mourn. A few made it over here, a few are still plugging away on DW, but most of them just went dark, and I’ve lost most of my early fannish Internet context and it’s a lonely, lonely feeling. I genuinely cry about it sometimes.

It’s been so long, and it’s gotten so dark, and I’m so afraid of losing more people. It’s hard to get old, I guess; my grandma used to say that a lot but I understand it now in a way I couldn’t when I was 20. (She died genuinely pumped at the prospect of a reunion with her beloved late husband, who’d died twenty years before. It’s not a bad way to go, whatever you believe; I’ve never known anyone else who died, in the end, as gracefully as she did, though the week preceding the actual event was pretty rough. Ha. No; she complained a lot, but she knew what was coming and she was ready. I hope I can be so graceful. In another fifty-five years, mind; she was 96 and I’ve only just turned 41. No thanks! I just miss some friends, is all.)

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I hear you.

[redstapler]

Migration Community Collapse is for fucking real and I hate it.

[krait]

*blinks* Is Tumblr the last bastion of fannish identity? I feel like there are other places one can go without sharing one's erotica with one's mother (thankfully!), from AO3 to anonmemes, but then I was never deeply into Tumblr to begin with.

I hear you on the loss of fannish context, though. I still have a few dead accounts in my reading list, too, and wonder whatever happened to so many of the people I knew in past fandoms. I hope they're still out there somewhere, fangirling away under new usernames in fandoms I'm not part of, writing fic and discussing canon and impressing noobs who are now the age I was when I discovered them. And I hope someday we have a fandom in common and reconnect!

[dragonlady7]

I don't think Tumblr's the last bastion, it's just the most active one. AO3 is fine but if you promo your writing on Tumblr you can find a lot more people to talk about it.
I don't actually know what anonmemes are? is? so maybe that joint is jumping and I just don't know.

I mean, everything in life, every time you go anywhere, you lose friends and move on from people, and it's always sad and it's not new. It's just, you know. Internet has a different flavor of it, is all.

[krait]

Well, the two anonmemes I know of are definitely chatty places! (fail_fandomanon on DW and lolmeme on LJ. FFA goes through a 6500-comment post in about two days, currently! They're just communities anonymous posting is mandatory, basically. There may even be some others on DW/LJ, for all I know, or on Pillowfort or some other new site that I keep meaning to check out and... not actually ever getting around to checking out, oops.)

I don't know what makes the Internet different, exactly, but you're right that it's a very specific flavour. Maybe it's the completeness with which people vanish? In real life people drift away or move or whatever, but you feel as if you could track them down if you really put effort into it, or you might run into them again someday ten years later at the grocery store. Online, everything is text; all you have to go by is a username. If you ran across a lost connection ten years later on a different site, you can't recognise their face; if their handle has changed, you'd never know it was your lost friend. It makes online connections seem more fragile, maybe?