Snowflake Challenge Day 14: future of fandom

Day 14

In your own space, talk about what you think the future holds for fandom. What are your hopes and dreams for fandom? Do you have any predictions about what the next five years holds for fandom? Where do you think fandom will end up congregating?

My fandom experience is kind of weird, b/c I started out in egroups (which then moved to yahoo groups), but then dropped out of fandom for the LJ years, and only hopped back on for tumblr. I've made my peace with the fact that tumblr deleted all of my stuff, but it means that, while others are trying to do tumblr AND something else, I'm just doing the something else.

My hopes and dreams:

For the next year or so, fandom uses AO3 for archiving, DW for blogging and Twitter for shitposting and memes. Somewhere, nsfw art will find a home. (I vote AO3 for archiving and various other sites for hype. For posting art on AO3, there are some decent nsfw image hosting options collected at mcukb.)

And then when the federated fandom stuff comes online, we use that! I'm excited about nomadic identities and federated networks where server hosting can be a distributed p2p network. I'm excited about being able to feed all the shitposts and longposts into one singular compatible area. It will definitely take time to figure out, and I don't have the brain bits for it right now, so I'm going to try to make DW the most cozy space for me as possible.

I don't know what I'll be doing in fandom in 5 years (omg Rutabaga at age 7?!!) -- it's definitely heady to think about. 5 years ago I didn't think I'd be in fandom at all, much less consistently the same one. I think the recent Tumblrpocalypse has lead to a lot of thinking about our collective motivations for creating and where the need for an audience and a community comes into that. So ... maybe as a result of the current Diaspora, communities will become more tight-knit? I'd like to think that there will be a greater urging to create, and to comment on fan works, and a greater appreciation for the fan spaces we have, be it discord or DW or wherever else.

Generating thumbnails with imgur

So, one way to host art is with a private imgur gallery. I think they don't actually like hotlinking, but then again, they do offer that as an option to the side of every image, so now I'm not sure.

Edit: shy_magpie found some helpful info about their TOS, which basically boils down to: hotlinking is okay as long as it's not (a) nsfw, or (b) commercial use. The workaround to that is to use an embed unit. The CDN stuff is probably just "don't use our server hosting to make money."

Anyway, in my proposed image reblog idea, quickly generating a thumbnail is pretty key to the process. Imgur is actually really good with that! Lemme show you how simple it is.

So, you go to imgur, you upload an image, and then you click on the image. This is the panel of link options you have on the right:


For just the raw image, you want the one called "Direct Link"

But at the bottom, you can also click on different thumbnail sizes and types, and the links automatically update to be the image that you want (even though the image preview doesn't).

Now here's the magical thing: Different thumbnail sizes is just the same file name, with an extra letter added to the end.

For example:
https://i.imgur.com/rfjKH8z.jpg is the original image
https://i.imgur.com/rfjKH8zt.jpg is the tiny thumbnail. (width=100)
https://i.imgur.com/rfjKH8zm.jpg is the medium thumbnail. (width=200)
https://i.imgur.com/rfjKH8zl.jpg is the large thumbnail. (width=400)

Which means that generating and linking to a thumbnail is the simple matter of adding a letter.

So if you're the artist and you're embedding from imgur, your textarea reblog snippet can be something like:

<user name="USERNAME"> posted: <a href="POSTLINK">post title</a><blockquote><img src="IMGUR_THUMBNAIL"></a><blockquote>

And if you are someone who wants to reblog from an artist -- if they've indicated permission -- you can also just take their imgur link, add "s" or "m" to the url, and use that as a thumbnail!

Reblog: Earth's shifting magnetic poles are confusing your phone

gingicat posted: Earth's shifting magnetic poles are confusing your phone

Earth’s Shifting Magnetic Pole May be Confusing Your Cell Phone

Earth’s magnetic field is acting up and geologists don’t know why

(no subject)

v excited about Shitpost February. The shortest month for the shortest posts! Lots of links going around, but I enjoyed "DREAMWIDTH IS FOR SHITPOSTING: AN EXERCISE IN FEBRUARY" by sara. Hilarious and inspiring!

I finished my grades and narratives, so am out of my hidey hole! huzzah!