Snowflake Challenge #13
Jan. 27th, 2026 02:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annavereChallenge #13
TALK ABOUT A COMMUNITY SPACE YOU LIKE. It doesn’t need to be your favorite, or the one where you spend the most time (although it certainly can be). Maybe it’s even one that you’ve barely visited. But talk about that space and how it helps support fannish community.
This ended up being kind of a strengths and weaknesses for Dreamwidth and Discord post. They are the two places where I most frequently converse or observe others conversing, and here is what I have noticed.
Pro DW:
My main space is simply this network of DW journals, with links to AO3. It is designed for individual spaces. I like the archival qualities and the threaded comments, and the easy approachability of the conversations. Something I struggle with over on Discord is how conversations happen in real time and I tend to arrive after they have concluded. Older, interesting meta disappears several hundred scrolls above the current topic and the subjects I would have jumped on are over by the time I see them. Here, if I see an interesting post before I have to leave for work, it can wait and I can fire off a comment the instant I'm back home. And if I'm having a tough evening, it can wait until morning. I can even show up later than that. It is a very forgiving platform for the passage of time in the real world, where Discord is inherently linked to it.
If I have free time and open Discord, I sometimes face the irony that nobody is around until after I've given up and gone away. None of this is helped by my working Saturday afternoons. I feel like I miss all the good stuff over there. So Discord is mostly a place where I lurk, or do individual messaging like it's a phone on my computer.
DW is where I try to communicate to the world at large. It's also easier because Discord servers are a group area, a public space. If I go there to talk, I am inherently encroaching on someone else's time. "Stop what you're doing and talk to me!" Here, I have my own space, where I can feel like I'm not bothering anyone, especially with the wonder of cut tags, which make my posts completely voluntary to view.
On the paradoxical flipside, Discord is utterly terrible for shy fandom newcomers because it is a private public space. So much stuff is invite only and you can't see what you're stepping into before you do. I still only have the one server. I spent so much of the first couple years on DW scrolling through other people's journals, reading their comment sections and learning the etiquette by example. Discord would have made all of that research impossible and hindered my efforts to slowly learn how to talk to people.
Pro Discord:
However, there are a lot of people over there and the energy is palpable. That sense of somebody always being around in a server, and the layout where anything you haven't read getting bolded (the opposite of DW; you literally can't hide your words over there) means it is the go to place if you need swift advice.
First year I did the Shortcuts exchange, I was limited to DW, I was brand new, and the one person I saw offering to beta for others was my own assignment. I made a separate request, but failed to find someone else to beta my fic, and I felt great shame in this. Second year, I was on the Shortcuts Discord, and no sooner did I miserably type my request into the appropriate thread, without even having time to begin spiralling over the ways it could go wrong, when I got someone cheerily saying "sure thing!"
Also, the PM system over there works great and is super easy to switch over to, if a conversation starts to wander from the server topic, or just feels like it should be private. Sometimes the public-facing, archival quality of DW and AO3 actually hinders easy conversation. Sometimes I need to vent, and Discord having what amounts to a phone system makes that okay.
I also believe Discord is so high on energy because of the casual nature of its posting strategy. I wish more people would just fire off a casual thought on DW, but it is designed for long-form and that factors into the kind of thing people say. Posts take time to craft. People are expending higher resources, and that means a post which is met with silence is a bit crushing.
On Discord, you can just toss a quick sentence into the crowd. If it gets picked up and evolves into a conversation, great! If not, you lost about ten seconds. It is much easier to just hang out, to have a presence. I wish DW was more active, but I can see why it isn't. There have been plenty of times I haven't had the reserves for it, either. I get it. It's fun, but it's time consuming and can be very quiet.
Conclusions:
The best strategy is to use both, as they counterbalance each other's limitations. However, I think everyone will naturally have a preference. Mine is for DW. My adoption of Discord is slow, but I have learned to appreciate what it does for fandom. More so by making this post.
TALK ABOUT A COMMUNITY SPACE YOU LIKE. It doesn’t need to be your favorite, or the one where you spend the most time (although it certainly can be). Maybe it’s even one that you’ve barely visited. But talk about that space and how it helps support fannish community.
This ended up being kind of a strengths and weaknesses for Dreamwidth and Discord post. They are the two places where I most frequently converse or observe others conversing, and here is what I have noticed.
Pro DW:
My main space is simply this network of DW journals, with links to AO3. It is designed for individual spaces. I like the archival qualities and the threaded comments, and the easy approachability of the conversations. Something I struggle with over on Discord is how conversations happen in real time and I tend to arrive after they have concluded. Older, interesting meta disappears several hundred scrolls above the current topic and the subjects I would have jumped on are over by the time I see them. Here, if I see an interesting post before I have to leave for work, it can wait and I can fire off a comment the instant I'm back home. And if I'm having a tough evening, it can wait until morning. I can even show up later than that. It is a very forgiving platform for the passage of time in the real world, where Discord is inherently linked to it.
If I have free time and open Discord, I sometimes face the irony that nobody is around until after I've given up and gone away. None of this is helped by my working Saturday afternoons. I feel like I miss all the good stuff over there. So Discord is mostly a place where I lurk, or do individual messaging like it's a phone on my computer.
DW is where I try to communicate to the world at large. It's also easier because Discord servers are a group area, a public space. If I go there to talk, I am inherently encroaching on someone else's time. "Stop what you're doing and talk to me!" Here, I have my own space, where I can feel like I'm not bothering anyone, especially with the wonder of cut tags, which make my posts completely voluntary to view.
On the paradoxical flipside, Discord is utterly terrible for shy fandom newcomers because it is a private public space. So much stuff is invite only and you can't see what you're stepping into before you do. I still only have the one server. I spent so much of the first couple years on DW scrolling through other people's journals, reading their comment sections and learning the etiquette by example. Discord would have made all of that research impossible and hindered my efforts to slowly learn how to talk to people.
Pro Discord:
However, there are a lot of people over there and the energy is palpable. That sense of somebody always being around in a server, and the layout where anything you haven't read getting bolded (the opposite of DW; you literally can't hide your words over there) means it is the go to place if you need swift advice.
First year I did the Shortcuts exchange, I was limited to DW, I was brand new, and the one person I saw offering to beta for others was my own assignment. I made a separate request, but failed to find someone else to beta my fic, and I felt great shame in this. Second year, I was on the Shortcuts Discord, and no sooner did I miserably type my request into the appropriate thread, without even having time to begin spiralling over the ways it could go wrong, when I got someone cheerily saying "sure thing!"
Also, the PM system over there works great and is super easy to switch over to, if a conversation starts to wander from the server topic, or just feels like it should be private. Sometimes the public-facing, archival quality of DW and AO3 actually hinders easy conversation. Sometimes I need to vent, and Discord having what amounts to a phone system makes that okay.
I also believe Discord is so high on energy because of the casual nature of its posting strategy. I wish more people would just fire off a casual thought on DW, but it is designed for long-form and that factors into the kind of thing people say. Posts take time to craft. People are expending higher resources, and that means a post which is met with silence is a bit crushing.
On Discord, you can just toss a quick sentence into the crowd. If it gets picked up and evolves into a conversation, great! If not, you lost about ten seconds. It is much easier to just hang out, to have a presence. I wish DW was more active, but I can see why it isn't. There have been plenty of times I haven't had the reserves for it, either. I get it. It's fun, but it's time consuming and can be very quiet.
Conclusions:
The best strategy is to use both, as they counterbalance each other's limitations. However, I think everyone will naturally have a preference. Mine is for DW. My adoption of Discord is slow, but I have learned to appreciate what it does for fandom. More so by making this post.
