The One Silver Lining about this bullshit that Tumblr is doing, that I am seeing less and less of y’all being shitty towards “The Fandom Olds” on this site.
Seems like a bunch of you are starting to realize what we meant when we said things like “AO3 Is Important” , “Know your Internet History”, “Why Censorship is a Slippery Slope and why you should only report things that *are*actually illegal, and opt to just filter/not interact with legal subject matter you don’t agree with”
Because all of us Fandom Olds have gone through this…over and over. We’ve lost friends, we’ve lost safe spaces, we’ve lost countless hours of work – fannish and personal- everything gone in an instant and without warning.
Every time a fandom space is deleted or censored to the point where people are forced to migrate, it’s like another burning of the Library of Alexandria. You may think I’m being dramatic because y’know are things like Bowsette or Superwholock, things we want to be remembered about ourselves…and I would say yes, because humans *are* weird and we do need these cultural touchstones to know where we were and where we are headed…but the bigger point is- we can’t let censorship of legal things become a precedent. Because if this works for Tumblr, then we’ve lost the original culture of the Internet. We can’t let blanket censorship under the guise of “Family Friendly” social media spaces become standard. Because today it’s “ban all the lewds”, which may be fine to some of you, but tomorrow it could be “ban all blogs that discuss trans people’s transition journeys” “ban all pages that discuss birth control and body autonomy”.
But I digress.
The point is, a lot of you have only known microblogging sites like Tumblr for fandom and internet interaction, and you’ve never had something like a blanket ban and censorship affect you. You’ve never had to think about things like mirroring posts, figuring out where your friends are going en mass. You’ve made home here- yeah we all joke about the shittiness of Tumblr, the purity police culture that was prevalent here – but for better or for worse, Tumblr worked for a lot of us – it brought so many of us into spaces we never had before and reunited a lot of us who were effectively homeless after being run off sites like Livejournal.
If Tumblr becomes a virtual graveyard after Dec 17, it’s going to suck to suddenly decentralize where you go for your safe internet space/fandom/friend interaction.
But I’m here for you, and I hope that a lot my fellow Fandom Olds are there for their younger followers. Fandom Olds, we know the way out – we’ve done this before (unfortunately). So please be there for your followers- don’t knee-jerk delete your blogs, provide communication of where you’re going even if it’s just to Twitter or a Discord for a time being. Help people back up their posts – if they can’t post to sites like AO3 (due to country bans or whatever), offer to post their stuff for them on their behalf there. Start post libraries – even if it’s physically downloading images and text posts/stories, with the OP’s permission of course- to hard drives.
Just be there for your followers and be an example. We can’t save anything, but we can at least try to preserve what we’ve built here.
wisdom from a fellow Fandom Old that I’ve known and followed across, uh, three platforms? no, four. five? oh, the years, they all run together…
One Silver Lining…
Published
magicalbluelightning 