My name is Matt. I love science fiction, and sometimes writing it. This is where I dump my brain garbage.
On Joining In
So, Imzy kinda presents an interesting conundrum.
Ostensibly, it's a social media platform. But it's clearly pretty tailored to people with established audiences, right? (I.e.: not me, who am I talking to, why am I here, etc. etc.)
But it's also incredibly easy to join a community. While there are powerful tools that community creators have to remove noxious people, unless a community is private, then the floodgates are more or less open. Now, this isn't a bad thing--and honestly, it'd be rare to find the social media platform that doesn't operate this way. For a social media platform to work, it has to be, you know ... social.
But presuming for a moment that you, my faceless, potentially-not-there reader, are a decent person, and that I am a decent person, there becomes a bit of a problem. When a space is delineated by the identity of a public person--in my case, authors, since those are the folks I'm a fan of--when does it become cool to occupy that space? Or, more pertitently, when is it not cool to occupy that space? To act buddy-buddy with someone who really wants to be spending time among their own peer-groups and friends?
It's not an easy question to answer, probably because there is no one exact answer. I've never particularly liked "stay in your lane" ideology, mostly because at the drop of a hat it can become pretty exclusionary ... but I think there's a point to that. One of the biggest challenges about the internet is figuring out just exactly what your lane is: does joining an imzy community automatically give you the right to join the conversation? Well, sure, it gives you the right, but is that the same thing as being a member of an ingroup?
Honestly, I don't know. I suck at communities, but I try not to be a burr in them. Hopefully I can avoid that.
Anyway. This has been a very weird post.




Helpful note: people who want peer time (i.e. Authors) with no "extras", as it were, are far more likely to do it in private groups. We are far too limited in time to be extroverts where other people can see us but not participate. ;)
Thanks! I think part of the disconnect I'm feeling is that there's a big difference between imzy and, say, twitter or Tumblr, where the only thing keeping someone from chiming in is a vague sense of boundaries that may or may not be there