(This is a public post and I'd love to have a discussion beyond the people who read my journal. If it interests you, feel free to link elsewhere or respond on your own journal)

Every generation and subgroup of fans has its own platforms, norms, ways that people become part of the community, memes. People are always coming and going from fannish life, too, and in every movement of a community that's formed -- to new fandoms, to new platforms -- some people get lost. Many of us have times of intense fannishness and also breaks in between where we're not so active and only keeping up with people we are already close to.

When I first found transformative fandom, everything seemed to be happening on LiveJournal. There were still mailing lists — I remember having to promise I was an adult and join a particular Yahoo group to get access to one popular fic — but what was visible and accessible to a lurker was the LJ communities. The way you could find a writer you liked and follow their journal to see whatever they shared publicly, both fictional and personal. LJ and its offshoots have a format that's never been duplicated by the next generation of social media and communication tools: a hybrid of personal spaces (journals) and shared topic-focused spaces (communities) that use the same tools and visual language. Both spaces were crucial to the unique culture of fandom at that time. People had a space to make very personal posts and build a circle of people who were interested in reading those, and also spaces that weren't so personal, often with clear rules and facilitation to keep things on topic.

None of the tools that are most popular today have the same dynamic. Twitter and Tumblr let us follow people personally, but with few tools for filtering. If that's the way you're keeping up with fandom, you have to follow whoever's into what you're into or you won't see what you're looking for — and you get their posts about other fandoms or their personal lives whether you want that or not. People to follow are only discovered through serendipitous retweets and reblogs. Dreamwidth doesn't have a strong comm culture despite support for it technically. I go to DW friending memes, try to find a few people who are interesting, read their posts feeling like I don't know how to be friends because we haven't connected over something fannish yet. Discord servers are the opposite, with only the community or interest and no option of getting personal updates. AO3 falls somewhere else, a place where we can subscribe to get a favorite artist's fanworks but not see much of a window into their lives or what they themselves like, cutting us off from the spontaneous discovery of your favorite author's recs.

Fandom abides. We stitch things together in various ways. We go to an author's tumblr that's linked in their AO3 profile, or find a discord server that's linked in the end notes of a fic. We look to the people we're already connected to to find new communities, and then use the communities to connect to some of the people in them on a more personal level. And of course none of these communities are or have ever been spontaneous. They take a lot of labor to build, curate, moderate. I haven't found a fannish discord server that was both active and felt like home to me yet, but even the ones I have been in have a clear hand in inviting, vetting, structuring, and moderating to create a unique culture. A few people are still out here on Dreamwidth trying to build communities.

How do you use the tools we have today to find community? Are you trying to build communities yourself? How is that going? What can we do as "fandom," this vast sprawling network, to create authentic connections, be accountable, find communities and friendships that make us better people?

Great tumblr post by cherrybina on the definition of shipping:

In the vast majority of fannish spaces I’ve been a part of over the years, the word “shipping” does not imply anything about whether or not a couple is actually together, both for fictional and real-person fandoms. It could refer to a real relationship (either in canon or real life) but it could also refer to something completely outside the realm of possibility. There is (what seems to be) a very large part of 1D fandom that uses the word “shipping” to refer to relationships they believe to be real. Without assigning any value judgments to either of these positions, this is a potential problem because it is very hard to have any kind of meaningful exchange when one word has different meanings to different people.

I've seen this before, to a lesser degree, in another young fandom filled with people new to social fannishness: Harry Potter. In the vicious het shipping wars between Harry/Hermione and Harry/Ginny shippers, fans believed that their ship was always intended by the author... and they believed it would become canon. Other fans called the most out-of-touch Harry/Hermione shippers "Harmonians" to distinguish their assertion that Harry/Hermione was and had to be canon from regular shipping. But if you'd asked me, I would've said that what they were doing was simply the most extreme form of shipping.

I see where people are coming from when they say that "hard core shipping" is believing the relationships to be real. It's a dilution of terms, yes, especially when we have "tinhatting" as a perfectly good term for RPS shippers who go beyond wanting their ship to be real to believing it is. But it's a spectrum. Most slashers think that our ships weren't intended by the creators, and even when they are, we know that they'll never be canon. But there are the shippers who believe the creators do intend a ship, whether it's a coming het ship or a slash ship that's more "real" because the subtext was intentionally inserted to circumvent the mores of The Powers That Be.

Whenever there's a large influx of new fans, they develop their own language. Lacking full knowledge of existing fandom, we get overlapping terms, even redefinition. I don't think new 1D fans are going to be able to change the meaning of the term for the rest of fandom. Maybe for 1D fandom, or even music slash -- but fandom as a whole is so large that it would take more than one big batch of newbies to move the center.

anatsunohas written a couple of posts asking for and listing Inception fandom resources on DreamWidth for people who have recently moved: inception in dth and inception on dreamwidth, 2.

First off, inception is a relatively inactive comm that accepts all kinds of fanwork: fic, art, graphics, podfic, meta, recs. Let's make it active! I don't think the fandom is too big to have one unfiltered community (they have character and pairing tags anyway) and then branch off into more specific ones. I just issued a challenge on Twitter for everyone in the fandom who uses DreamWidth to post their most recent work to inception. If you don't normally think of yourself as a creator, how about posting a rec list of fic, podfic, or art?

If you're interested in modding something, then head over to one of anatsuno's posts and maybe find someone else to partner with you.

A lot of people who were formerly only on LJ have created or started using DW accounts in response to the latest comment kerfuffle. Remember that DW can be joined free without an invite code until the end of the year, and it supports automatic cross-posting to LJ if you want to maintain a presence in both places.