"Fangirl" here is a neutral term for someone who squees, squicks, and Was There. General fandom posts encouraged!
What would you like us to do with this com?
Tumblr - Exchange tumblr names and post using #cranky old fangirls. Everyone follows that tag.
- Advantage: Large userbase. Fandom inhabits that space. May pick up new Mims. Modern website UI. Many people already have a Tumblr.
- Disadvantage: Tumblr has a steep learning curve. No communities. Everything is through individual follows and tags.
Dreamwidth - Set up a DW community that anyone can join.
- Advantage: Established site (unlikely to shut down). Communities work basically the same as they do here. Many people have an old DW account already.
- Disadvantage: Site is extremely old in design and UI. Small userbase. No phone app. Not a growing community.
Discord - Setup a COF server and invite anyone who wants to join
- Advantage: Easy to setup. Chatrooms can be made for a variety of fannish topics. Mac/PC, web, phone apps. Many people already have it, usually for gaming.
- Disadvantage: Only a chatting platform. There are no posts, so you'd have to post content elsewhere and link to it.
Slack - Setup a Slack server and invite anyone who wants to join
- Advantage: Easy to setup. Chatrooms can be made for a variety of topics. Mac/PC, web, phone apps. Many people already have it (usually for work).
- Disadvantage: Only a chatting platform. There are no posts, so you'd have to post content elsewhere and link to it.
Facebook Group - We could setup a FB group and invite everyone
- Advantage: FB is ubiquitous and everyone probably has it. Posting is easy.
- Disadvantage: Real names. Posting options are limited in terms of format. Fannish life gets mixed in with regular life.




I'd prefer DW. Tumblr isn't a good place for discussions, it tends to create a mess of reblogs in no time. It's better suited for reblogging pics and videos IMO. I realize that DW is basically LJ from ages ago, but it works, even though it might seem anachronistic these days. (I'm on there as mr_picard if anyone wants to say hi!) And DW has communities, personal blogs... everything that Imzy had as well.
Yes! DW!
I refuse to get involved with Tumblr. LJ is dying/dead. Facebook is irritating as all get-out. I was sooooo happy with Imzy, and this is my favorite community.
Please, please, please take this to DW.
ksl
I second this! I've revived my DW account and honestly there ARE people on DW.
DW is my primary online home, but I also use slack and discord.
Is there a current way on Tumblr to follow a tag without making custom sidebar links or typing urls yourself? It switched to newest to popular a while ago, and that is what messed up small fandoms there. I use workarounds like typing urls, but most people wont do that. In my experience Tumblr fights all attempts to have any organization, communication or community there. Even if we set something up, it could go poof.
AFAIK the only way to follow a tag is to do a search and then click Follow Tag and then it will add it to your sidebar. But this seems to do other things like add additional posts to your main dash sometimes.
I don't track tags or reblog to have conversations or meta on tumblr. I can see the piont about dreamwidth, but I guess I'm at a loss to figure out what this community wants to be about, which would influence where we move. Are we about meta? transformative works? chatting? I was only here a week or so. Discord plus something else would work for me, as long as that something else wasn't facebook.
Discord would be good for discussion on various topics but not much else (and as a side note, it is inaccessible to the blind. Idk if we have blind mims but it's worth asking about). Also, I do discord storytelling, if anyone is interested.
Since I mostly do fanfic I've been wondering where the space in the comm is for someone like me. I used to use comms on LJ mostly to interact with people by posting my fic, so I'd... really like to be able to do that again. It doesn't work very well on tumblr because you're relying on reblogs and your own personal popularity, rather than being able to post in a comm that has that purpose. Maybe a discord could be set up to do that, with one section of it being the fanwork feed or something.
Actually, given discord's functionality I think Discord would give us all the same features imzy seems to have, but with a less steep learning curve. My only reservations about tumblr are that it doesn't handle discussions well.
We could also move to zetaboards, if we wanted to go old-school and have a forum.
I'm not sure we ever really quite figured out what we wanted to be. Some initial complaints when I took over made me reticent about setting A Direction in case that direction wasn't what others wanted.
I had hoped that people would feel they could post their works to share or things that interested them or talk about something they just saw that they loved.
Certainly there could be a Fanfics Discord channel that was just for posting your stuff to.
Currently I have friends on groupMe that came together to be a Teen Wolf Meta discussion group but drifted into just friends talking about general fandom and helping each other write stories and talking about our lives with people who seemed to grok us. And various people all watch the same shows and talk about them.
It's also possible to do more than one. So we could have a Discord AND a DW community. I already made a Discord server just to see what was involved, and the answer was: pushing a button.
ahh, i see. well i'm about a general community, and I feel like maybe having a blog and a discord would work then? that gives us the widest array of options. what's the link to the discord server?
https://discord.gg/FWVPmum
If anyone would like to hop in :)
@glitz Do you think a separate server or just a channel on the Imzynauts server greenie set up?
If discord is all live chatting it's going to exclude people in non US timezones (is it livechat? Idek)
Yeah it is. It's also always on, though. People can see what you've said even if it was ages ago.
Maybe rather than a separate server, I should ask greenie for a channel on the imzynauts server she created? A lot of familiar names are already there.
The desire for a DW com is quite high, so that seems like it should happen. But live chat can have its benefits too.
This link is expired?
Yeah, there didn't seem to be much point. There's a #fandom on the Imzynauts Discord that greenie setup. We could just use that.
https://discord.gg/2PUBuYS
I belong to a discord chatroom that has international members and it doesn't seem to exclude people based on timezone at all. there's always ebb and flow in a chat.
I'm not really into realtime chatting, so I probably wouldn't participate in any of those. :(
I like Tumblr and DW personally.
Dreamwidth is so horrible. It's like an old car that could be cool and nostalgic but nobody took care of it. But at least it's not LJ, amirite?
I would suggest a combination of Tumblr and Slack or Discord. I'm not fond of voice chatting (I do use it for gaming though; it's better when it's purpose-driven, imo) and I already know Slack's type chatting system very well. Tumblr allows for ease of sharing of static and visual posts, and Slack is fantastic for ephemeral chatting, link sharing, discussions, etc..
Funny thing, I just rejoined this community last week. I was hoping to get back into it.
That's my reservation with DW as well. The "beta" posting feature that could look vaguely modern is 6 years old. And still not released. And Image posting isn't a thing. No media posting is. Again, 6 years ago they polled people mentioning these "future updates" but nothing has happened.
All due to lack of resources, I'm sure. But... still.
A combination of Tumblr and Discord would be easy for me. Discord's text chatting is basically the same as Slack. My Slack account is currently all work-related servers, which is why I hesitate going there. But I do like its interface better than Discord.
I was trying to get my Teen Wolf Meta folks to agree to move to a Discord server (they are also mostly cranky old fangirls) so the groups could potentially meet up.
DW has had image hosting for awhile now.
Image HOSTING yes. Describe for me the process of adding an image to a post.
You have to upload it elsewhere and then use the HTML button in your post, that one provides you with an option to insert an image via its URL. hides It's very well hidden tho, LJ worked the same way for a long time.
Yeah, exactly.
Whereas posting an image on a modern website is usually "Select camera icon. Choose image to upload. Image inserted."
Yeah I was surprised to see that they still operate in this ancient way, but then, at least there IS a way of uploading images. What does bother me immensely, though, and I agree with the initial post there, is that there's no phone app. Handling the site via web browser on a phone is a hassle.
What they need is volunteer programmers/UX people, I think.
I'm sure paying accounts doesn't hurt, so I upgraded mine.
They might also be hindered by the need to do everything by committee and if the oldest users don't agree they just don't do it.
They said somewhere that the phone app IS on their list, but not exactly on top. (Which probably means it's never gonna happen, lol.) And yes, I also think they need more people. But then I am also amazed that the site is still going, despite not being THAT active. (It did get a new rush of activity recently when loads of people migrated there from Russia!LJ tho.)
If you're not doing a ton of development, or any development, it probably doesn't take much to just pay for the server.
Their list of things they should do is like 6 years old and none of it has happened. I kind of want to ask what would be the most useful thing for us to do if we want to see it modernized.
PHOOOOONE AAAAAAAPP lol (and the image thingy, that one IS irritating - I mean LJ changed it as well, so it can't be that difficult)
Despite the issues the site has, I still think DW is a good place for Imzy refugees - it IS the most similar thing to Imzy on the list of alternatives and creating a community there doesn't take that much effort or skills, and lots of folks already have a DW account, so it looks like a good match to me somehow...
Are you confusing DW with the OTW?
Yes.
I thought you might be when I saw the committee comment. They're thankfully unrelated.