"Fangirl" here is a neutral term for someone who squees, squicks, and Was There. General fandom posts encouraged!
Everything has a fandom, no matter how small!
Is this not true anymore? Or was it never true and I am idealizing the past?
Fandom is spread out over many social media platforms and different LJ clones. I hear whispers of lost tribes still using InsaneJournal. Many of the platforms we use are terrible for conversations, challenges or even fans playing silly games among themselves. Changes to Tumblr tag tracking seemed to be the nail in the coffin of the few small fandoms I was in.
What do you think? Are small fandoms pretty much a relic of earlier versions of the internet?




I think truly tiny fandoms are much easier to find now.
A forum has to be able to sustain a certain critical mass of people, because if there's no conversation then people will assume the place is a ghost town, and won't think starting new conversations is worth it, and eventually people will stop checking for updates at all.
LJ/DW et al are easier because you can use one account to track multiple specialized communities -- you'll read your flist every day for the sake of the comms that update every day, and that means you'll be around for the comm that updates once a year. But that still has cases of comm activity drying up because people assume it's abandoned. And it can be hard to search. And someone has to care enough to create the comm in the first place -- if the only fic for something is in Jane Q. Fangirl's personal fic journal, unless Jane happens to have a huge following, other fans of the series just aren't going to hear about it.
Deviantart, AO3, and now Tumblr all make it much easier for fannish nobodies to find the work of other fannish nobodies, based on a shared fandom. They all have options for active curation (groups on DA, collections on AO3, single-topic sideblogs on Tumblr), but searching the un-curated works isn't a hassle. (As opposed to LJ, or something like ff.net -- if your fic gets relegated to a category like Misc Books, who's going to take the time to hunt it down?)
Tumblr is bad for a lot of kinds of interaction (AO3 and DA also have their drawbacks), but if you're one of the people in a fandom of two, it's good at making it easy for you to find That One Fanart The Other Person Posted That One Time 5 Years Ago.
Tumblr--reading the comments to this post (as well as any other post where Tumblr has come up), I'd have to say that it sounds like a really piss-poor forum for actual fan interaction.
Not that my comment has anything to do with the topic under discussion, so carry on.
:-)
Tumblr is set up to make conversations and community building somewhere between hard and impossible. The work arounds fans have used have all been removed.
Yes, that is what I have heard. By and large, Tumblr seems to be all about "Hey! Look at me!"
I'm too old for that nonsense.
I can still find some small fandoms on tumblr. Escaflowne is tiny but still holding in there. And found fandoms for the more unpopular characters from popular shows.
Small fandoms can be a real blessing. No drama, much much less discourse, you get close to others, fic quality is usually pretty good. The only problem, tags rarely update. For a popular pairing, everyone freaks out when there is only two new posts in the tag. For a rare pair, its Christmas when there is a new post.
Young Wizards fandom has established itself pretty well on Tumblr. They've built a network and we follow each other. It's still not great for conversations, but given how hard a time I've had trying to lure people to Imzy, that may not be what these youngsters want
Tumblr changed its search but it's still possible to look through tags, you "just" need to type a URL. The problem is that not everyone bothers with tagging their stuff, so a lot of it gets lost and you never find it unless you know that specific person and/or follow that person's blog on there.
Older, smaller fandoms have a hard time on Tumblr in general though, folks there seem to love what's new and shiny and also ongoing. Also, some actor fandoms there are often batshit crazy, I'm glad I like an actor who DOES have some younger fans but who are usually respectful enough towards him due to his age. Other, younger actors aren't so lucky. It's terrifying sometimes.
But I do have to agree, small fandoms are VERY hard to find. I tend to look for fan fiction on AO3, but that doesn't bring in a lot of results either. Dreamwidth also doesn't offer much. I also, very fondly, remember the good old LJ days when there were a few fans but at least they were all in one place OR could tell you where to find others.
Googling for message boards used to be a good place to find like-minded people, no matter how small the fandom, there was a board for almost everything - but they're practically the dinosaurs of social media these days, and they all but died out as well.
Yup, fandoms used to all consolidate around mailing lists, message boards, lj or something so finding like minded peeps was a lot easier.
I manually type lot of tumblr urls to deal with it's problems, but most users dont or wont. So even if we can find stuff and people, others can't.
Yeah I, too wish Tumblr had never changed the tag search system. It was much easier to find fellow fans back then.
I don't know about the fan community side these days, but from a fic fandom point of view I think the existence of AO3 has actually been pretty helpful to small fandoms - it's much easier to create a fic section if you're the first one to write in a completely new fandom, and therefore easier to find any existing fic when you get into one. (Good luck finding works in a fandom too small to sustain a fandom-specific comm/archive back in the days when fics were archived on personal LJs or jumbled together in one of ff.net's 'misc' sections.) So you can find fellow fans that way to some extent.
But admittedly, I've always been fairly fic-focused in my fannishness and a bit of a lurker outside of that, so how you find discussion and other types of fanworks these days I'm not so sure. Most of my current fandoms are pretty small, but I tend to get into things years late to the party, so they're generally old enough to still have content archived on LJ/DW that I can go back through. It's going to be much harder to do that with fandoms that started up on Tumblr/Twitter, which are not at all designed for going back to find content posted years or even just a few months ago.
I think it is very difficult. I'm on Tumblr, but I mostly just look at the pretty pictures - I have little sense of how to "find" particular things there, it's too noisy and unstructured. I really miss the days when a fandom had only a couple of places and you could check everything ...
I think there were/are hope that imzy might be good for getting back more focused discussion areas about fandom, but we'll see ... I'm glad they changed the following feature, I think that's a good step.
The few small fandoms I'm in that are active at all are not on Tumblr. I think it's very hard to follow anything on that platform - you just get a lot of noise.
I hate to say, but I agree that it's hard to be in small fandoms now. Especially since Tumblr killed tags and went to search. I'm in a couple of relatively small fandoms and it's super hard to find content unless you follow everyone (and then you get other stuff you don't care about)
I wish small fandom was still a thing, because small fandoms are where I've met the best people.
Do you use New XKit?
Tag Tracking+ extension will show your tracked tags in the sidebar. And you can add a tag to follow from the search screen (it puts Follow in the search bar after it gives you results).
I don't know if they're a relic. Sails and Emerald City have small fandoms, but I've been able to find SOME people on tumblr.