(no subject)

[somniloquy]

All right, so only six out of ten of the communities that I got when selecting "random community" in Dreamwidth were for fandom purposes. (One of the others might have been, but it seemed to be transcriptions of lyrics of songs in Japanese, which could well be fannish.) Out of the four remaining, only one was not set up for some private or inexplicable purpose.

I have no great issues with fandom at all, but it just isn't something I'm interested in. I am not, and never have been, much of a fan of anything. My sister, who is on LJ, can confirm that I was always the person who bought one book in a series and then said "meh" and never bought any others. I think I was in fact the original introducer of Pratchett to the household on that basis - no, actually I did buy a few of those myself, the first four or five, but not after that, somebody else bought them.

Possibly I count as a fan of China Mieville, in that I own pretty much all of his books, but not to the extent that I am particularly interested in discussing his work with other people. (There are other authors whose publications I have purchased en masse as well, but they tend to be both dead and not very genre.)

Comments

[matgb]

Aye--one of the big problems is that a big chunk of the initial userbase was drawn from th9ose that paid attention enough to LJ itself as a business/service/movement to care.

They tended to be power users, and the type of person that wants 10 paid accounts for each of their ten seperate RPG characters is far mor elikely to notice LJ fuckups than the normal user with a small circle of personal friends who posts a few times a month.

Combine that with the falloff in general usage of LJ itself, with a lot of comms Iused to be active in barely being used at all these days, and the DW userbase is drawn fromt he active LJ userbase, which is overwhelmingly fandom.

There will be more comms as time goes by, but a lot of us are more inclined to stick to personal journals for stuff--I wonder if part of that is the subscribe/grant access thing, I can follow people without worrying about giving them access to private stuff, so I have less inclination to join and use a comm actively, as people can read my stuff on, say, politics, by subscribing to my politics tag, instead of joining the politics comm I used to use.

So, what sor to fcomm would you use/promote/whatever? There is already a chunk of UK based users, more than I expected, but uk isn't very active.

[somniloquy]

"What sort of community" is a fair question, but the answer is really that I don't know - the main reason I'm looking for a community is to meet new people, and the subject just has to be something that I'm vaguely interested in or that generates some diverting backchat and doesn't have too much spam involved. The people are the most important part.

I agree that LJ communities have been going downhill. Most of them are dead or dismal. The politics ones particularly seem to have been overrun by dimwits to an degree that it's not worth the time to even bother.