vulgarweed:

makamu-a-tumbling:

elfwreck:

star-anise:

pearwaldorf:

So I made a tweet about how Maciej Ceglowski (aka Pinboard guy) should consult with fandom on how to build a new fandom platform inclusive of not just text, but images and multimedia. 

And then Maciej DMed me and said if fandom (I realize this does not include all parts of fandom) can get a consensus spec of what this platform should consist of, he’ll see what we can do. I have split the document into requirements and nice to haves. I know I’m not going to get everything, but hopefully this is a good enough start to get the ball rolling.

I kind of laughed like “Haha, what hubris, my tech friends say it’ll take a couple million dollars to create a platform like this, one does not simply walk into Mordor” but then all my tech friends were like, “Uh, hon? It’s 

Maciej Ceglowski. He either HAS a couple million to spend, or can talk his friends into fronting the money.”

So, uh… go make a wishlist!

I think my favorite part of the document is the minor hints of, “oh hey, could this be a nonprofit like AO3?” 

Because yes. Yes it could. “Literary” is one of the types of nonprofits. “Place for people to share creative communications” is definitely in the range for nonprofit orgs.

I have read through the original ideas, and even as I normal user with no coding experience I could get behind very many of these ideas.

I feel like we don’t need another literary nonprofit for fandom, because we already have that. That’s OTW/AO3 and it does what it does pretty well; also Dreamwidth (also fan-owned and fan-run), Pillowfort, Twitter, and Discord exist for text-based folks like me. What we need most of all is what AO3 doesn’t do, which is 1) Image hosting and posting, first and foremost. In the Tumblr meltdown, fanARTISTS are the people losing the most, not writers. It needs to be a good platform for fanart, gifs, vids, etc. and also be able to link/share to other platforms easily.

Fandom platform of the future – specs and features