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Time to be totally honest: I haven’t been one of those people mourning the loss of LJ. Back in the old days, catching up on my f-list used to take so much time that I was amazed I was able to do it. If it went back to that now, I think, I wouldn’t be able to keep up, and I’d have to give up something else, and I love Twitter and I love Tumblr and I don’t want to give them up.
So I figured things had happened the way they were supposed to happen and I just moved on.
And posting to AO3 is so incredibly easy that I’m now amazed how many years I spent painstakingly linking chapters back to each other and making fic masterposts and tracking down fics I could read, etc., etc., etc. AO3 is, I think, a much superior place for fic, so I was okay with all of this.
I like AO3 and I like Twitter and I like Tumblr and I feel like I’m still friendly with people and have fun fannish conversations and, I don’t know, I wasn’t feeling the loss of LJ.
But this weekend I read a commentfic. I was never a commentfic person. I was never one of those people hovering around the kinkmeme and stuff. I always waited for fics to be posted on LJ properly. But, whatever, I am coming to the end of the Inceptionfic on every single rec list I have and beggars can’t be choosers when you’re reading in a four-year-old fandom whose heyday has passed, so I read the commentfic. And what fascinated me was how much time I spent *just reading the comments.* It was like this weird little archeological exercise I was engaged in, this frozen moment of fannish squee that just went into overflow, and the comments were brilliant and hilarious and insightful and they played off of each other and the comments inspired new fics, new little commentfics, little snippets of ideas, and then someone else would play off that, and then suddenly there was all of this collaboratively written stuff at the end of it
and suddenly just like that I missed LJ.
Because I’m not sure there is any place exactly like *that* in the replacement websites. I don’t know, I feel like AO3 isn’t like that? It doesn’t seem to be a comment-ficcy place. In fact, it’s not really a place where people seem to have a lot of discussions in the comments. Is that just my comments? And sometimes you get into good conversations on Tumblr but you have to go out and get xkit to really accomplish that and even then it’s still confusing and even worse, it isn’t really archived well. Like, all of that Inception squee I sat and read this weekend happened years ago and how would I ever find that on Tumblr or Twitter? I might be able to find it on AO3, but, as I said, AO3 doesn’t seem to inspire the same sort of fannish debate and dissection and thinky-thoughts. (I think some people have tried to use it that way, tried to stick the meta there and stuff, but I never seem to turn to it for that.)
I have no real conclusion on any of this. Just that I saw people lamenting LJ earlier this year and I am late to the party but I’m telling you I get it. AO3 and Twitter and Tumblr all do really well a bunch of things LJ was terrible at, but I don’t think they’ve totally replaced some of the other things that LJ was brilliant for when it was really working, and I didn’t think about how much I missed that until this weekend.
And, at the same time, I don’t even think I have time for all of the stuff I want to do online, anyway!
Anyway, that’s it. Just musing.
So I figured things had happened the way they were supposed to happen and I just moved on.
And posting to AO3 is so incredibly easy that I’m now amazed how many years I spent painstakingly linking chapters back to each other and making fic masterposts and tracking down fics I could read, etc., etc., etc. AO3 is, I think, a much superior place for fic, so I was okay with all of this.
I like AO3 and I like Twitter and I like Tumblr and I feel like I’m still friendly with people and have fun fannish conversations and, I don’t know, I wasn’t feeling the loss of LJ.
But this weekend I read a commentfic. I was never a commentfic person. I was never one of those people hovering around the kinkmeme and stuff. I always waited for fics to be posted on LJ properly. But, whatever, I am coming to the end of the Inceptionfic on every single rec list I have and beggars can’t be choosers when you’re reading in a four-year-old fandom whose heyday has passed, so I read the commentfic. And what fascinated me was how much time I spent *just reading the comments.* It was like this weird little archeological exercise I was engaged in, this frozen moment of fannish squee that just went into overflow, and the comments were brilliant and hilarious and insightful and they played off of each other and the comments inspired new fics, new little commentfics, little snippets of ideas, and then someone else would play off that, and then suddenly there was all of this collaboratively written stuff at the end of it
and suddenly just like that I missed LJ.
Because I’m not sure there is any place exactly like *that* in the replacement websites. I don’t know, I feel like AO3 isn’t like that? It doesn’t seem to be a comment-ficcy place. In fact, it’s not really a place where people seem to have a lot of discussions in the comments. Is that just my comments? And sometimes you get into good conversations on Tumblr but you have to go out and get xkit to really accomplish that and even then it’s still confusing and even worse, it isn’t really archived well. Like, all of that Inception squee I sat and read this weekend happened years ago and how would I ever find that on Tumblr or Twitter? I might be able to find it on AO3, but, as I said, AO3 doesn’t seem to inspire the same sort of fannish debate and dissection and thinky-thoughts. (I think some people have tried to use it that way, tried to stick the meta there and stuff, but I never seem to turn to it for that.)
I have no real conclusion on any of this. Just that I saw people lamenting LJ earlier this year and I am late to the party but I’m telling you I get it. AO3 and Twitter and Tumblr all do really well a bunch of things LJ was terrible at, but I don’t think they’ve totally replaced some of the other things that LJ was brilliant for when it was really working, and I didn’t think about how much I missed that until this weekend.
And, at the same time, I don’t even think I have time for all of the stuff I want to do online, anyway!
Anyway, that’s it. Just musing.
