Is There a New LiveJournal?

The year 2004 changed my online life. It was the year I discovered LiveJournal, a blogging platform, then on the rise in popularity, that supports personal blogs, communities based on interests, and threaded comments from other LiveJournal users. It was a revelation!

For the first time in my life, I had easy access to a worldwide network of geeky fangirls like myself: there was Blake's 7 role playing, fan fiction galore, meta posts on Farscape and the upcoming new Doctor Who series, icon communities, vidding communities. There were users from all around the English-speaking world: I met Americans, like me; Brits; Australians; New Zealanders; Canadians; a Scotsman, and many with non-English native languages, including folks from Eastern Europe and Singapore. The users, by and large, were thoughtful, polite, and mature. Many were excellent writers and thoughtful commentators. It was a beautiful community.

As LiveJournal took some criticism for becoming too commercial, similar platforms appeared: I still use my account with Dreamwidth, founded with non-profit fandom in mind. But Dreamwidth, while it has staying power, never took off quite like LJ had, and over the years, LJ dwindled. Users departed for Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and a range of more professional, sadly less interactive blogs associated with various websites. LJ (and DW) is still there, and I still have a few good contacts there: thoughtful, nice people who have been there with kind words of advice in hard real-life times. But the community I was part of is a vestige. I mourn it.

So where do I go now? Where is the community?

I do not like the obvious options—and I'm perfectly willing to grant this is partly because I'm a Gen X fuddy-duddy out of step with the Zeitgeist.

Facebook: I use Facebook these days more than I use LJ, but Facebook has an entirely different presence: its thrust is updates about daily lives and reposting things from various websites. It's rare to find extensive text. It isn't geared toward fan community.

Twitter: I confess I'm still just learning Twitter. It's obviously a good means for mass communication. It has real power to aggregate information through hashtags. What it lacks is the sense of a group of friends freely conversing with each other in threaded discussions in one location without significant text limits and, thus, thought limits.

Tumblr: Okay, I hate Tumblr. I hate it unreasonably. I admit it. Maybe I hate it because it, more than anything else, killed LJ. I did get a Tumblr account; I've never really used it. I do not like how Tumblr privileges "likes" and reposts: repetition over actual discussion. I do not like that is isolates individual posts with no easy option for threaded replying. There's a lot of good stuff on Tumblr. A lot of the good fandom meta has gone there. But I resist going there. Its architecture seems to be pushing me to parrot rather than freely communicate with others, and I resent that. /Tumblr rant.

Discussion Boards!: Oh, how I miss them. One of my early online community experiences (circa 2001-02) was with Buffy fan boards. That was a golden age: plain, quick loading HTML, blue on white, no graphics, threaded replies easy to scan and visually search, generous max character counts. You could click, read, and comment as fast as your fingers and eyes could move, everything clearly and logically organized. Alas, they seem to be gone. Discussion boards today seem almost entirely graphic-heavy skins that are slow to load, hard to scan, and mostly consist of tiny snippets of communication for a vast amount of scrolling, clicking, and sorting out replies from quotes from sigs.

Still, I would navigate that for a really good board with good folks discussing the kinds of things we used to on LJ. Ditto mailing lists maybe.

An Archive of Our Own: This fantastic, vast, fan fiction archive is where the people from my fandom community have gone. But it is not, itself, a platform for community. It is not meant to be: it's an archive of fic, and it does what it says on the tin beautifully, with much of the grace and no-nonsense of that early Buffy board. But it's not designed to facilitate communication beyond comments on specific stories. I would dearly love to see an initiative like AO3 aimed at creating fan community for role-playing, meta discussion, collaborations, etc.

Wikis, TV Tropes, etc.: There are wonderful specialty sites out there for sharing information on specific fandoms or media in general. They have great content, but again, they lack community. The focus is on the content, not the producers of it, who are often pretty anonymous.

Reddit: I cannot understand it. I'm told there's a lot of good, diverse content and community, but I get defeated by the architecture. I find it hard to sort through. When I go there, it seems like comments and replies are mostly short form, like discussion forums. I can't find much content.

If you know of wonderful fandom enclaves that encourage free, largely textual discourse within a community(ies), please let me know. And this may well include things like lingering communities on LJ or sweet spots on Tumblr. Where do you hang out?