saixnipples:

First, a note: I ask that people please reblog this to spread this since the tags are kinda unusable right now, especially when a post has external links within it.

Dreamwidth has been my main active posting platform for a year and a half now, and I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers talking about jumping ship over to DW with tumblr’s uhhhhhh current state of affairs.

But DW is kinda bland and boring if you’re too young to have been of the LiveJournal generation, and therefore don’t know where to look or start in order to build your friends list and find communities, so I’m going to do some of the legwork for you.

the_great_tumblr_purge: I made a dw community specifically for people jumping ship from tumblr to reconnect with each other.

addme: a friending community where you pimp yourself out and find other people with similar interests that you might want to see on your reading page.

addme_fandom: similar to above, only with a stronger emphasis on finding people based on your fandoms.

fandomcalendar: a community where you can find fandom events, such as big bangs, exchanges, challenges, bingos, etc. and other fandom communities that might suit your interests.

questionoftheday: for when you don’t know what to post.

If anybody else has communities they want to add, go right ahead and add them in a reblog.

Please reblog this.

ugh Tumblr I just had a massive earthquake on Friday and I still have a lot of cleanup to do, plus 8 million other things, and you decide to pull this shit now

my office is still closed because of damage!! I was going to Get Things Done today! THANKS FOR MAKING MY TO-DO LIST MORE UNMANAGEABLE

A History of Fandom Purges

wrangletangle:

olderthannetfic:

captain-kiri-storm:

greywash:

elder-lemon:

cameoamalthea:

tsuki-chibi:

whitmerule:

liz-squids:

pearlmaser:

elfwreck:

olderthannetfic:

unclutterme:

olderthannetfic:

I’m curious how many related deletions we can come up with.

  • 2002 – FFN bans porn
  • 2002 – FFN bans RPF
  • 2004 – FFN bans script format
  • 2005 – FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic
  • 2007 – Strikethrough, Boldthrough
  • 2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
  • 2010 – FFN forums deleted
  • 2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
  • 2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
  • 2014 – Quizilla shuts down
  • 2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.

… they deleted Fandom Wank???

Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.

  • 2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
  • 2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
  • 2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost

I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.

I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.

Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.

Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down. 

Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.

Yahoo owns Tumblr.

1356: 50% of monks.

People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.

AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.

2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost

Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005

Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.

A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.

^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.

these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view

You missed some:

Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).

If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.

This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.

2017-2018: wattpad removes a huge host of LGBT+ Warrior Cats content at the behest of angry parenting groups. The HawkIvy pairing and TallJake pairing are almost exclusively targeted

Whoa! I hadn’t heard about that! Do you have any links to people talking about it? I’m not surprised, but I rarely hear anything about Wattpad, so I was totally unaware of this going on.

@captain-kiri-storm

Warriors fandom, you are welcome on AO3! HawkIvy tag and TallJake tag

This is why we should move our blogs to Dreamwidth. It was born out of Strikethrough, it is owned and operated by fans, it doesn’t sell ads or personal information, and it already proved it would stand up for its users even to the point of getting hit in the pocketbook. Stable > shiny

Current Dreamwidth sale if you want the extra bells and whistles beyond the free blog level, or if you just want to support a fan-run project.

rex-luscus:

rex-luscus:

rex-luscus:

Well I’m curious what folks who enjoy adult fanworks but condemn the OTW think about them now

Oh and for people who are like “well just post nsfw artwork somewhere else,” that’s not the point. What kills a fandom platform is, if you put up any significant content restrictions, you divide up the userbase enough that it stops being the place to go for fan activity. Also, people stop trusting the platform not to implement further restrictions (or simply make mistakes) that lead to deleting more stuff. After a point, the platform drops below the critical mass of fandom users it takes to have a community anyone wants to participate in.

That’s what happened to FF.net – since people couldn’t depend on them not to randomly delete their fic, they stopped trusting their fic to the site. And also, since they could no longer post all their fic there, many people stopped posting anything there. (I know I did.) 

When you restrict certain content on a platform, you don’t just eliminate that specific content, you erode the whole foundation of the fan community. This is why OTW was created.

p.s. If you want to learn about the perils of restricting adult content more generally, listen to (or read the transcript for) this episode of Reply All about backpage.com, which was shut down on the same principle of protecting children from sex trafficking. A completely unassailable reason, right? Well yes, but it had some bad unintended consequences, specifically for the safety of sex workers. Consequences Tumblr’s new content restrictions will replicate. 

If you want to target the exploitation of children on a platform, you just…do that. You pour resources into finding the people who post that shit. Nuking all adult content on a platform is just a marketing move. It also forces people who do exploit children to be cleverer about hiding their activities. They don’t go away, they just go underground.

Let’s face it – when you prohibit harassment or hate-speech, platforms tend to improve. They become safer and more widely used. When you restrict “adult content,” vulnerable people usually get hurt.

let’s not forget that loads of people said the Backpage thing would make matters worse and lawmakers went ahead with it anyway, and then it made things worse, and everybody who supported it was like “GOSH HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN” because they didn’t fucking listen

and, well, Tumblr is real good at not listening to people

Tumblr “Find Me” Directory

unicornempire:

gallusrostromegalus:

copperbadge:

A directory of social media handles so people can find you on other sites. Once you fill out the form (none of the questions are required so in theory you can just hit “submit” without answering anything, but you can also just View Here) you will be able to access, but not edit, a spreadsheet of everyone’s handles across their social media. 

As the disclaimer banner says, EVERYTHING you enter into this form is made public so you know, be careful. If you don’t want two of your handles linked…don’t put ‘em both in there. 

I can’t think of a genuine reason this would be a bad idea but it’s a lot of data about people and their personal names that’s easily scrapeable so you know, if you can argue that this is a really bad idea for X reason, I’m willing to listen and delete as necessary. 

Well this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my Monday.

I’ll still be posting here but I don’t know how long this site is going to last tbh, and I’d still like to be able to contact all the friends I’ve made here.

I’ll be doing this today =/ wop-wop.

Tumblr “Find Me” Directory

Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th

gaslightgallows:

dduane:

About this…

If you’re someone affected by the platform’s definition of what they’re going to be banning, I strongly suggest you back up your Tumblr blog. RIGHT NOW. Info on how to do that is here.

I can’t think why my own Tumblr would be affected, but I’ll be backing things up too… because in situations like this one might expect the algorithm to get a little out of hand and make mistakes that one might or might not be able to recover from. (See this article.)

For safety’s sake – because I’d very much dislike losing the content I’ve shared with other people here – I’l be embodying my Tumblr content in a new WordPress blog over the coming days. I’ll share the address here when it’s ready, for those who might be interested.

But in the meantime, seriously: friends and cousins, back yourselves up.

Even if you run a SFW blog, back that puppy up asap.

Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th