replying is how you make friends! reply to anything you want and be friendly. don’t make rude jokes if you’re not friends already though!
quote retweeting is a no-no. when you “retweet with a comment” it’s not liked by content creators because it makes a new tweet out of their tweet and they don’t get the likes and retweets they would get if you’d just retweeted it straight up. if you want to comment on a retweet, reply to it or post a new tweet starting with “LRT” which stands for “last retweet” (it’s fine to quote retweet dumb memes and so on.)
you can make your tweets private. this means no one but your followers will be able to see what you post and no one will be able to retweet your content. you can switch back and forth between private and public at will. some people make a separate private account to tweet personal stuff and let mutuals follow it only. it’s a good way to keep things separate.
what is privatter? privatter is a third party web app that content creators can allow to be attached to their twitter. it lets them tweet content that they can make exclusive to logged in users, followers, mutuals, or a specific list of users. as long as you are logged in to twitter and fall into the intended category, you’ll be able to see it.
you can mute people you follow. (and those you don’t, ofc.) you can also mute words and phrases and entire conversations. if you mute someone you follow and they reply to you, that reply will still show up in your notifications. it’s a good way to keep the peace!
you can limit notifications to people who follow you or to mutuals. (notifications from people you follow will still show up regardless of which option you’ve selected.)
miscellaneous tips and warnings: if you accidentally unfollow and refollow someone, it won’t show up in their notifications as long as it’s within a couple minutes. no more accidental stuff. everyone can see who everyone follows so watch out. people will know if you unfollow. if you want to report someone and want them gone forever, report a tweet where they used a curse word. screenshotting tweets for harassment is a no-no and can get you banned. don’t be lame. don’t be a dick. vaguing others is generally really bad form and so is complaining about content within a fandom you’re in. use the mute tools at your disposal and don’t be a spoiler. you won’t come back from a rep like that and everyone sees everything.
that’s it! happy tweeting!!
how do i keep all my content together on twitter?
threads are your best friend!! you make a tweet with your commission info and links and so on and pin it to the top of your page. then reply to that tweet with a copy and pasted link to the tweet where you posted the art/fic/etc you want to not lose. reply to that new tweet with the next piece of artwork and so on. you can also make a unique hashtag for your content to use when you post, so that when you search that hashtag later you’re able to see just your art. good luck!
2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 – FFN forums deleted
2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 – Quizilla shuts down
2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
FF.net banning porn isn’t a “fandom purge” though, just a porn purge. Fandom isn’t just porn.
Yahoo/other sites being incompetent/dying isn’t a “fandom purge”, it’s just bad business.
Youtube using content ID so you can no longer use stolen music is a GOOD thing, because YOU DON’T HAVE LEGAL RIGHTS TO THAT MUSIC!!!!!
Megaupload was MEGA FUCKING ILLGAL
God
It’s like none of you know… law.
No, fandom isn’t just porn, but when “porn” gets targeted, it’s always the m/m stuff that gets attacked first, followed by other queer stuff and anything made for women’s taste. To me, that’s a problem.
Queer content tends to be rated higher than straight content, even voluntarily and by the content creators, so deletions based on metadata will hit it disproportionately and include content that isn’t actually explicit. Queer content also attracts more harrassing grudge reports. AO3′s site rules and site culture discourage all of this, but it’s the reality for most internet spaces and was certainly the reality back when many of these FFN deletions happened.
There’s no specific definition of a “fandom purge”. The events people are mentioning here had a major negative effect on fandom and/or destroyed many fanworks. In many cases, they were caused by incompetence or by the host having other priorities, not by some specific targeted attack.
That doesn’t lessen their impact on us.
Megaupload going down and Youtube adding content ID were intended to stop straight up piracy. They also had a side effect of destroying lots of perfectly legal fanwork, specifically vids, which have historically been lost at an even greater rate than fic and collected and archived only rarely.
The way that music is used in vids will generally fall under fair use, though it’s not a defense that often gets tested. Vids have their own sort of vocabulary where the song and the images come together to create a meaning that is more than the sum of its parts. You can’t simply replace the song and have the same work with the same meaning. Vids aren’t piracy, and it is only the creeping, grasping erosion of fair use understanding by corporate propaganda that makes anyone think so.
It’s simply not accurate to call that kind of remix use categorically “illegal” in the US.
Even youtube has reinstated plenty of fanvids after a fair use-based challenge. I’ve done this myself. Many of the challenges about music on there are completely spurious. (There are scam artists who claim rights they don’t actually own.) The ones that do come from the real rights holder are not taking fair use into account.
The actual law is far more permissive than the de facto situation where we’re dependent on hosts that care about advertisers.
The original post was not intended to pass moral judgment on yahoo or ffn or anywhere else, just to suggest that the current tumblr shenanigans are part of a long history. My conclusions are:
1. Fans who got in via tumblr should take heart: fandom won’t be over even when we inevitably leave tumblr at some point (which won’t be just yet anyway).
2. We got tired of all of the deletions and built AO3 to protect fic. It’s time we started doing the same for art and vids and blogging because all of those are still vulnerable.
3. Websites have every right to not care about us… But we have every right to leave them and make our own spaces that value us.
that in the Chinese version of Disney’s Mulan, the fake name she gives is “Ping”, but her family name “Fa” in English is “Hua” in Chinese, therefore her full name is “Hua Ping”, which is literally “Flower Vase”, and that’s why Shang is so bewildered because it’s a silly name.
but OP how could you not tell them the best part
“hua ping”/flower vase is chinese slang for “camp gay”
I—
Mulan, introducing her soldiersona: Hello yes it is me, a twink
And suddenly it makes sense why no one batted an eye when Mulan’s “yes I like ladies too!” talk all sounded suuuuuuuper unconvincing. “Uh huh. Sure ya do, Twink. Sure ya do.”
staff tomorrow: we decided we’re banning gay people we’ve thought about this long and hard and think we can make a more friendly environment for children. a new and friendlier tumblr starts now *pulls out gun and starts shooting*
We at Piczel.tv are sad to see Tumblr’s stance against NSFW artists, and would like to offer up our services as an alternative to Tumblr’s arbitrary shadowbans, deletions, and general stupidity.
We’re happy to host adult artists who are looking for a new place to call home, and are planning a few key upgrades and features.
Effectively immediately though, our gallery upload size restriction has been removed, to be likely raised to 10MB in the near future for non-premium users.
As always, we support image sets, and don’t compress anything.
Firstly, for those that have been using tumblr as a portfolio, you’ll need a way to download all of your art, if you don’t have backups somewhere else. We are planning a tool for Piczel.tv that will import zip files full of images, including titles and descriptions if we are able.
Second, we’re planning the following upgrades to piczel in the coming weeks:
1. Bulk upload/import to your piczel.tv gallery 2. Gallery UI cleanup and improvements 3. Gallery performance improvements 4. Gallery comments with in line image and custom emote support 5. Site-wide PMs (in the vein of tumblr asks, but better) 6. Archive button for your piczel account
Don’t forget to follow us on twitter, we may be deleted on the 17th with everyone else. Until then, we’ll make posts here to keep everyone in the loop
Please consider reblogging this to help artists in need.
Tumblr seems to be in potential death throes or at least, incredibly volatile and unreliable lately, but we’ve done some pretty good and informative work on canon analysis and reference guides so I was looking for ways to back it up without losing it…and the solution became obvious to me:
Archive of Our Own, aka AO3.
“What?” you might ask if you are less familiar with their TOS. “Isn’t that just a fanfic archive??”
No! It’s a fanWORK archive. It is an archive for fanworks in general! “Fanwork” is a broad term that encompasses a lot of things, but it doesn’t just include fanfic and fanart, vids etc; it also includes “fannish” essays and articles that fall under what’s often called “meta” (from the word for “beyond” or “above”, referencing that it goes beyond the original exact text)! The defining factor of whether Archive of Our Own is the appropriate place to post it is not whether or not it’s a fictional expansion of canon (fanfic), though that is definitely included – no, it’s literally just “is this a work by a ‘fan’ intended for other ‘fannish’ folks/of ‘fannish’ interest?”
The articles we’ve written as a handy reference to the period-appropriate Japanese clothing worn by Inuyasha characters? The analyses of characters? The delineations of concrete canon (the original work) vs common “fanon” (common misconceptions within the fandom)? Even the discussion of broader cultural, historical, and geographic context that applies to the series and many potential fanworks?
All of those are fannish nonfiction!
Which means they absolutely can (and will) have a home on AO3, and I encourage anybody who is wanting to back up similar works of “fannish interest” – ranging from research they’ve done for a fic, to character analyses and headcanons – to use AO3 for it, because it’s a stable, smooth-running platform that is ad-free and unlike tumblr, is run by a nonprofit (The OTW) that itself is run by and for the benefit of, fellow fans.
Of course, that begs the question of how to tag your work if you do cross-post it, eh? So on that note, here’s a quick run-down of tags we’re finding useful and applicable, which I’ve figured out through a combination of trial and error and actually asking a tag wrangler (shoutout to @wrangletangle for their invaluable help!):
First, the Very Broad:
– “ Nonfiction ”. This helps separate it from fanfic on the archive, so people who aren’t looking for anything but fanfic are less likely to have to skim past it, whereas people looking for exactly that content are more likely to find it.
– while “Meta” and “Essay” and even “Information” are all sometimes used for the kinds of nonfiction and analytical works we post, I’ve been told “ Meta Essay ” is the advisable specific tag for such works. This would apply to character analyses, reference guides to canon, and even reference guides to real-world things that are reflected in the canon (such as our articles on Japanese clothing as worn by the characters). The other three tags are usable, and I’ve been using them as well to cover my bases, but they’ll also tend to bring up content such as “essay format” fanfic or fanfic with titles with those words in them – something that does not happen with “Meta Essay”.
– I’ve also found by poking around in suggested tags, that “ Fanwork Research & Reference Guides ” is consistently used (even by casual users) for: nonfiction fannish works relating to analyses of canon materials; analyses of and meta on fandom-specific or fanwork-specific tropes; information on or guides to writing real-world stuff that applies to or is reflected in specific fandoms’ media (e.g. articles on period-appropriate culture-specific costuming and how to describe it); and expanded background materials for specific fans’ fanworks (such as how a given AU’s worldbuilding is supposed to be set up) that didn’t fit within the narrative proper and is separated out as a reference for interested readers.
Basically, if it’s an original fan-made reference for something specific to one or more fanworks, or a research aid for writing certain things applicable to fanworks or fannish interests in general, then it can fall under that latter tag.
– You should also mark it with any appropriate fandom(s) in the “Fandom” field. Just like you would for a fanfic, because of course, the work is specifically relevant to fans of X canon, right?
If it discusses sensitive topics, or particular characters, etc., you should probably tag for those. E.g. “death” or “mental illness”, “Kagome Higurashi”, etc.
Additionally, if you are backing it up from a Tumblr you may wish to add:
– “ Archived From Tumblr “ and/or “ Cross-Posted From Tumblr ” to reference the original place of publication, for works originally posted to tumblr. (I advise this if only because someday, there might not be “tumblr” as we know it, and someone might be specifically looking for content that was originally on it, you never know)
– “ Archived From [blog name] Blog ”; this marks it as an archived work from a specific blog. And yes, I recommend adding the word “blog” in there for clarity- Wrangletangle was actually delighted that I bothered to tag our first archived work with “Archived From Inu-Fiction Blog” because being EXTREMLY specific about things like that is super helpful to the tag wranglers on AO3, who have to decide how to categorize/”syn” (synonym) various new tags from alphabetized lists without context of the original posting right in front of them. In other words, including the name AND the word “blog” in it, helps them categorize the tag on the back end without having to spend extra time googling what the heck “[Insert Name Here]” was originally.
Overall, you should be as specific and clear as possible, but those tags/tag formats should prove useful in tagging it correctly should you choose to put fannish essays and articles up on AO3 🙂
Oh, and protip sidebar for those posting, especially works that are more than plain text: you can make archiving things quicker and easier for yourself, but remember to plan ahead for tumblr’s potential demise/disabling/service interruptions.
The good news: You can literally copy and paste the ENTIRE text of a tumblr post from say, an “edit” window, on tumblr, straight into AO3′s Rich Text Format editor, and it will preserve pretty much all or almost all of the formatting – such as bold, italics, embedded links, etc!
But the bad news: keep in mind that while AO3 allows for embedded images and it WILL transfer those embedded images with a quick copy-paste like that, AO3 itself doesn’t host the images for embedding; those are still external images. This means that whether or not they continue to load/display for users, depends entirely on whether the file is still on the original external server! As I quickly discovered, in the case of posts copied from the Edit window of a tumblr post, the images will still point to the copies of the images ON tumblr’s servers.
What this means is that you should back up (save copies elsewhere of) any embedded images that you consider vital to such posts, in case you need to upload them elsewhere and fiddle with where the external image is being pulled from, later.
Personally, I’m doing that AND adding image descriptions underneath them, just to be on the safe side (and in fairness, this makes it more accessible to people who cannot view the images anyway, such as sight-impaired people who use screen readers or people who have images set to not automatically display on their browser, so it’s win-win)
Thanks for this helpful guide! I haven’t used some of these tags so far for the fandom stats work I’ve cross-posted to AO3, but that’s because I didn’t know about them. Great ideas! 🙂
I keep meaning to mass archive my Toastystats work to AO3, but I am always stymied by image hosting when trying to overcome inertia and do so. It takes time to repost all the images to external hosting (like imgur). So thus far I’ve only done it for a few major analyses, and even in some of those cases, the images are hosted on Tumblr. But I should finally get around to it. At least I’ve exported my Toastystats side blog recently, so most of my stuff should be preserved if anything should happen. But maybe this holiday break I’ll finally make more progress.
I second all of this!
I’ve also found that AO3 is the best way for me to distribute my vids. I do have to host them elsewhere, but AO3 gives me a consistent URL and a way to have useful headers with fandom/ship/etc. even if I switch hosting a hundred times.
willowfoot 