what could a social media site for fandom look like?

Hi, Atmosphere folks, it's me, I'm the Eternal September, I don't understand programming, I'm tech-illiterate, I can barely add or subtract, I need AI's help to use the command line so that I can steal pirate acquire media and hoard art. The fact that I can even use Terminal at all is a miracle. I also ask AI how to use Docker. (I know AI's evil, I don't use it for writing or art, don't @ me, I also eat meat every day, leave me alone.)

ON THAT FRIENDLY NOTE! I love the enthusiasm I'm seeing here for reimagining social media, for freeing us from these shit-tastic sites, for building new things and making them cute and pretty and easy to use.

And since this is a site full of smart tech people who know how to build things, I wanted to come here and ask you, and myself: is it possible for someone to use Atmosphere to create a better social media site for fandom? Or is it a fool's errand?

First: by "fandom" I don't mean "every single person that has ever liked a video game/movie/anime/comic book/ancient tablet about Ea Nasir", I mean "transformative fandom", aka the branch of the fandom family tree I come from, aka the one that's mostly women. (Not all! Mostly.) Mostly women with a large segment of LGBTQ+ folks. The side that tends to be reading and writing fanfiction -- especially about shipping, i.e., about romance -- that tends to be drawing fanart (often also about shipping), that tends to be reading and posting fanfic on AO3.

I'm in the US, also, and I only speak English (lame), so I can only speak from that perspective.

First: I am not the first person to discuss this. Attempts at creating a Fandom Social Media Space Of Our Own have been made. I salute all of you who have done hard work on this! (ETA: [Oh, cool, Ms. Boba is doing ATmosphere stuff! )

Second: Where is fandom hanging out right now? I think looking at this, at the pros and cons of these platforms, can illustrate what different people want out of fandom spaces.

Right now, transformative fandom is hanging out on:

• TikTok. [deep, heavy sigh]

• Reddit. I love the text-heavy nature of Reddit, the old-school forum-vibes, the fact that you can post art and video there, that you can choose what you see, that it's community-based, i.e., not one giant firehose of every single person's thoughts. You can seek out communities based on what interests you.
  • The downsides of Reddit: Reddit has a lot of cishet dudes and sometimes that's perfectly fine, and sometimes it really, really isn't. We all know how many chuds are on Reddit. The problem isn't really the platform design, imo, it's the userbase. To be as charitable as possible, it's the transformative side of fandom and the curative side squished together on one platform when those sides come from different branches on the family tree and don't always play well together. There's a reason AO3 is titled "An Archive Of Our Own" aka openly referencing the Virginia Woolf essay. Yes, everything is gender.
• Discord. The upsides of Discord is privacy. You can create a private space that's as large or small as you want. It's often used as a refuge for people that want to be horny away from the anti-sex 22-year-olds that are pretending to be children and the children that are pretending to be 22-year-olds. It's easy to use, it's fun, you can post art and video as long as the file's under a certain size. People share writing there, they chat, they probably RP, etc.
  • The downsides of Discord: it's a chat room. If you like being in a chat room (I do!), it's great. If you don't, or if you're not in the same time zone as your friends or the most active users, it's not great. Spaces that allow for asynchronous discussion are helpful! (Discord did roll out message-board-like features, and maybe some servers are using them happily, but generally whenever I'm in a fandom server, people are using it like a chatroom. I've seen the forum-like features used well in servers more oriented to tech support around a specific piece of software.)

• Twitter. You know why Twitter/X is a problem. However, a lot of people are on there because their friends are there, or they're following the large amount of East Asian fanartists that are still on there. Fandom is much more image-based than it used to be, and artists are a big draw in terms of attracting and keeping people on a platform.
  • Another downside; hashtags are barely used anymore so it is really hard to find stuff. Archival in fandom is important, finding stuff is important, the unending tug of war between people like me who want history preserved except my own embarrassing long-ago fanfic haha obviously that's different vs the right to privacy and to delete what you want is a recurrent discussion in fandom.

• Tumblr. Yes, people are still on Tumblr! Or went back after a bunch of people left for Twitter after the porn ban. (lol.) (lol pt ii.) Tumblr is great for art. It was created to post photography, so obviously images look really good there. It's great for gifs/fanedits, an art form that was created there. You can post video. Its chatty, anything-goes style tags are anathema to some, a huge draw to others, and clearly informed AO3's tag design, or at least the way tags are used there.
  • Tumblr was especially good if you were shy. Whenever me or others wax rhapsodic about the good old days of Livejournal, people will rebut that LJ was not great if you weren't extroverted, that it could be cliquey, that commenting to interact always felt too forward or anxiety-provoking. If you just wanted to lurk, to not be perceived, Tumblr could still let you participate by liking and reblogging. Is this something I personally want to cultivate in a fandom platform? I think it has very real downsides BUT there are real downsides to causing friction for shy lurkers as well. Being shy is valid.
  • Cons: Tags don't always show you all the posts, they don't always work right. Search doesn't always work right. Tumblr isn't open source. It could disappear at any time if it's no longer profitable (how could it possibly be profitable???)

• Threads. [long, heavy sigh.] Pros: they have Community Topics so you can narrow the firehose down to things you're interested in.
  • Cons: 1) Mark Zuckerberg. 2) Threads' algo is even more ragebaity than Twitter's, because, and I don't know why this is, somehow, your Following page, and I follow a lot of people!, is dead. It's limp. I can't explain it. It doesn't make sense. The Following tab is so flaccid that I'm actively using For You and I feel dirty. Idk what foul magic they're doing behind the scenes. Maybe I'm the problem.
  • But yeah, Threads has basically all of Heated Rivalry fandom (which is HUGE) and a fuckton of Interview with the Vampire fandom and a whole lot of Trekkies. Also, all of what used to be Romance Novel Writer Twitter and YA Novel Writer Twitter, which has a medium-to-large fandom overlap. The people are there, they want to microblog about their interests, they just need a non-evil alternative.

• Facebook, for some reason. Let's not dwell on it. They're using their real names. Their real faces. It hurts.

• There are some folks hanging out at Dreamwidth, a Livejournal clone that emphasizes text and discourages images or video in order to keep the userbase small and sustainable. It's meant to basically be 2006-era Livejournal, only not broken and not owned by a totalitarian state. (Unless the US is a totalitarian state now. We'll see! hahaahasob.) Anyway, there's still an RP community there, people blog there.

• There are still people at Pillowfort! I really thought this would be the winner after the Tumblr porn ban. It combines the image-friendly design of Tumblr and Tumblr's/Twitter's/Bsky's reblog feature with Livejournal-style blogging and Livejournal-style communities.
  • A word on Livejournal communities: these were basically subreddits, except they could be public or private. It's the opposite of the Twitter/Threads/Tumblr firehose of content where everyone is in everyone's face and everything is blasted at you, which causes endless fighting because people are always seeing shit they don't want to see and hearing from people they don't want to hear from. Obviously, you are going to run into that in any group of humans, but at least in closed spaces, like ye olde LJ communities ("comms") and ye currente Discord servers, you are self-selecting into a space of like-minded individuals to hang out with. Ideally. Allegedly.
• Anyway. Pillowfort still exists AND it's anti-AI AND it allows NSFW, so I'm not sure why it never got off the ground or why it still fails to attract people, why basically no one knows it exists.
  • I do not know if Pillowfort is open source or not.
  • Sidebar: Pour one out for Imzy, a Reddit/Livejournal mash-up that encouraged pseudonymity (a must for people writing pornography where that guy from Baldur's Gate 3 shapeshifts into a bear and lovingly fucks all the members of BTS). I thought it was cool! Oh, well.

• Mastodon did not become a thing for transformative fandom at large. "Choose an instance!" That's when it died. People freaked the fuck out. Zero friction or everyone will bail. Sorry, folks.

• Bluesky! You know what Bluesky is! I'm logged in via Bluesky right now! I love Bluesky. It has a lot of fanartists! And artists in general!
  • It has not become the hot spot for most of transformative fandom. They're still using X.
  • I love Bluesky but I don't think the firehose model is good for fandom nor do I think character limits are good for fandom (LOL said this motherfucking windbag).

• Forums. They still exist! Why isn't anyone interested? I don't know.

One quick (LMAO) note: Once blogging became a thing, transformative fandom shifted from using discussion spaces that were, well, designed for discussion (forums, personal websites, usenet, email lists) to colonizing sites that weren't designed to host us. Livejournal was meant to be for blogging, but fans turned it into a combination blogging site, forum, fanart gallery and fanfiction archive. We did the same with Tumblr and Twitter. I have no idea what the hell they're doing on TikTok, I'm too old for that shit. But probably the exact same thing, somehow.

Fans also usually kind of mess around with the existing features of a site to do things that weren't initially envisioned; I don't think the creators of Livejournal expected people to roleplay or archive fanfiction in the comment sections of posts, or use user icons to express a whole litany of emotions, but I think it's cool that that culture evolved. Likewise, I have my love/hate with the tag style on Tumblr, but I think it's neat that that became a thing.

So what does a space for fandom need? What do fans like to do?

• They want to be where their friends are. They want to be where the action is.
  • This is true above all else.
  • When you're checking out a new space to talk politics or just to see if you like how it looks as compared to your current online platform-hangout, that is a different feeling and motivation from:
    • Are my friends here and will I be able to easily talk to them about our shared fave?
    • And/or:
    • I AM OBSESSED WITH THIS WEIRD LITTLE FICTIONAL PERSON AND I NEED TO SEE ART OF THEM AND READ FANFIC ABOUT THEM AND TALK ABOUT THEM IMMEDIATELY. It's just a different drive and a different vibe. If you're feeling this way and you go to a place and it's a ghost town, you will bolt.
    • This generally means that you will need to attract Big Name Fans with a lot of friends to whatever space you create in order to cause interest and FOMO. It's how the move from usenet to mailing lists happened, and the move from mailing lists to LJ, and LJ to Tumblr and Tumblr to Twitter.

The other stuff fans like to do:

• Talk about our favorite characters and what we like and dislike about what we're currently into, with other people, with as little friction as possible
• Make friends
• Often we want a "home base" where we can express ourselves visually (like your tumblr (not the dashboard), your old MySpace page) and curate posts that speak to us
• Write, post and share fanfic
• Write post and share ideas that don't take as much time and effort to write as a full-on fanfic
• Create, post and share visual art: illustrations, comics, video clip montages edited with a song (aka edits, fanvids, AMVs), gifs (also aka edits)
• I've criticized the "firehose" of the twitter/bsky/threads timeline and the tumblr dashboard and the Facebook feed, which existed before with the Livejournal Friends page and also with whatever MySpace was doing, but one thing I like about the firehose is I like seeing what the people I'm following are into, even if it's something I'm not into. It's fun!
• Be horny on main
• Be able to create fun weird pseudonyms
• Be able to create alts. A fair amount of fans love alts. Having just one identity is not going to work. People will work to get around it.
  • One thing fans like to do, that alts are sometimes used for: creating group projects and events. Fanfic exchanges are basically like fanfic Secret Santa, and fans use social media to advertise those. Or a bunch of fanartists will band together and make a bunch of really pretty art and collate it into a zine as a .pdf, and use social media to entice participants and advertise the zine.
  • ETA: Also, you need pseuds and no pictures of yourself for basic safety. No real names, no real photos, This Is the Way and it should Be The Way Again. ./ETA

Who is the userbase?

• The people who have the free time to dick around on the internet. Which means: tweens, teens, college-aged young adults, and then adults who are 40+ aka either they're child-free, or their kids are old enough to not need constant supervision. (I've been in fandom since 1995, and based on what I've seen, people's fandom presence seems to drop off when they hit their 30s, aka they are getting serious at their jobs and/or are having babies. Which is why Heated Rivalry hit like an atom bomb with moms in their 40s and 50s. They had the time to watch it.)
• Because this is mainly a) minors and young adults with no income and b) mostly the gender who makes less on the dollar, YOU WILL NEVER MAKE MONEY OFF THIS ENTERPRISE. No one is gonna wanna pay you a dime. People do donate to AO3 and people do pay for Dreamwidth, but there is no way that those donors/members represent a large section of the userbase. (If I'm wrong, show me, I'm happy to be corrected.)

Stuff anyone creating an online space for transformative fandom at large will need to watch out for and think hard about:

• So if there's no way to fund it, how do you create it? Babe, I got no idea. I assume that's been the problem this entire time. Now, it's not impossible. AO3 got funded. That said: With AO3, there was a real need created by Strikethrough, there was a push from respected and popular members of the (MUCH SMALLER! compared to the amount of people on the internet today! aka it couldn't fall apart due to a loud small group of dissenters) community, there was a Rosie-the-Riveter "We can do it!" attitude and, crucially, it meant the rest of us no longer had to create fanfic archives ourselves. The OTW wanted to create a gigantic archive for us! Someone else was proposing to do the hard work! No one hand-codes little archives anymore! It's all centralized on AO3, fanfiction.net and Wattpad!

• Moderation
  • Bluesky's nuclear block is smart and good, imo. As much as my nosy, gossip-loving ass loved context-please, banning it was smart, because it defeated the entire purpose of the nuclear block. Keep freaks like me from getting that crumb of context. Cut the drama down at the source.
  • Muting is also helpful and good.
  • I'm on the fence on blocklists. They are so so so useful but also a source of drama.

• Children. They're on the internet and we can't make their parents do their jobs. "But that's not my problem!" Look, it chafes my nuts, too. But you're on the left, right? We don't do this with needle exchange. We say, "Look, people are gonna do drugs. So let's make it safe." We don't do this with condoms. We say, "Look, people are gonna fuck. So let's make it safe." Kids are gonna use the goddamn internet. How do we keep the children away from the stuff they shouldn't be looking at? Is this possible?

• The horny people like me that want to write and draw porn vs. the teens and twenty-somethings that think getting horny is a sin not progressive: this has, for whatever reason, been a problem since about 2010 or so. It's been sixteen years and it hasn't stopped. These two groups should be kept apart. How do you do that?

• ETA: CREDIT. CARD. PROCESSORS. If you're going to allow NSFW and you rely on donations or some kind of "Plus" tier, you are going to be fucked by credit card processors as well as bad actors trying to fuck with you via credit card processors
  • RELATEDLY: CENSORSHIP LAWS and AGE VERIFICATION

• If you allow NSFW, do you allow everything? If not, what do you ban? There are some people who think that if you ban loli/shota, that's a canary in the coal mine for everything else you'll fold on; for others, they figure it's a more than acceptable compromise. But there are a LOT of other "do we allow this or not?" scenarios to consider! ./ETA

• Storing images and video. I've been told it's super expensive, prohibitively. I've been told, "No, it's not." You tell me! But in 2026, a text-only site is not where people are gonna go. I personally think short form vertical video is the devil and don't want THAT, but I do think fanart is good.

• The Fannish Gift Economy vs. Artists Want To Make A Living Doing Art: there is a strong taboo in fandom against selling fanfiction or making any kind of money off it in any way. This extends to some division and rancor in fandom over people that "pull to publish" (aka you write your Twilight BDSM fanfic, you change the names from Bella and Edward to Ana and Christian, you delete it from the internet and submit it to a publisher as Fifty Shades of Grey). Do not make a fandom platform where monetizing fanfic is a thing. Do not.
• This taboo, for Reasons, does not and has never existed for fanart. That said, VGen exists for artists to sell their wares and artists like it. I think it would be a huge mistake for any fandom platform to try to recreate that marketplace or even to copy its features. Fandom is for communism. For sharing. For doing stuff out of love. Let artists post their work in the fannish space, then link to their VGen or its equivalent, keep the streams separate.

• Smartphones. The userbase is not using desktop. I'm using desktop right now because I'm a weirdo. And while fandom is for the weirdos, desktop is just not how people are doing things. Anything you create has to be something that is easy to use on mobile and looks good on mobile. Look inside your heart, you know it to be true.

• TOO MANY PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET. This is the source of most internet problems. Dogpiling, for instance, has always existed. There is a big difference between getting dogpiled by ten people (1995 on usenet), 30 (Livejournal) and 30,000 (today). How do you incentivize small communities in order to make moderation less of a headache?

• I don't want to be all "WAHHH fans don't make things anymore!", because A) it's not true, fans as I said, organize exchanges and fests, make digital zines, sew and build and glue together costumes, and B) it makes me sound like that orange shitstain.
  • That said: fans used to be forced by a lack of technology and interest to have to really get off our asses. I don't know how the people who organize small, scrappy, fan-run cons like Escapade or VividCon have the energy, but they're awesome. Same for the women who created and printed and mimeographed and bound fanzines back in the day. Couldn't be me.
  • Similarly: throughout this, I've been like, "CUT DOWN THE FRICTION. MAKE THINGS EASY. IT'S GOTTA BE ON THE PHONE. LET PEOPLE LISTLESSLY SCROLL." But that's kind of. bad for us. Right?
  • How do you balance how people actually behave and what peoople actually want (to talk about Blorbo in stolen moments of free time between math class/writing dissertation/on break at work/nursing baby) with incentivizing people... making stuff? Doing stuff?
  • As well as incentivizing being kind? Taking a breath before replying? Taking a beat and rereading?

ETA: Oops, I had more thoughts:

• making it easy to scrape for archival/datahoarding freaks like me vs. respecting the right to be forgotten
• NightShade/NightGlaze/anti-AI-proof the art ./ETA

Anyway, this was long as fuck and the caffeine has worn off, but if anyone has thoughts on this, please share them!