#fanfic is created in a community oriented way and not for profit

[aadmelioraa]

when it comes to the defense of fanfiction, i dislike remarks along the lines of "the divine comedy is just fanfic!!" not because i look down on fanfic, but because i want to acknowledge the unique merits of fanfic, because i love fanfic and fanfic authors and transformative fandom. every story is in conversation with other stories, but every story is not fanfic. there is always going to be overlap of course, there are similarities between why people create and enjoy fanfic and why they create and enjoy other forms of literature, as well as similarities in content and style, but this type of flippant response is SO common now and has done way more harm than good. you don't need to justify your love of fanfic by erasing what's special about modern transformative fandom, the solution is not to broaden the category. instead, stop letting people use the term fanfic as a pejorative. it's their loss, not yours.

[equivalentexchangeanthology]

About / FAQs

The Equivalent Exchange Anthology will be a ship-friendly project open to Fullmetal Alchemist creators of all types. Content about any and all FMA characters and ships will be allowed (with appropriate ratings and warnings). Hate, harassment, or disparagement of contributors will not be tolerated.

The project will have multiple parts*:

A printed zine of gen fanwork and meta**

A printed zine of SFW ship-based fanwork

A digital zine of NSFW content (including a section for ship-based content and a section for gen)

A digital zine of NSFW ship content, including trigger-heavy content

 (*This general project structure is provisional and open to change, as the final scope of the project will depend on contributions. Under no circumstances will an alteration of the structure result in SFW and NSFW content being mixed into the same project.)

(**Meta can be personal essays about what makes FMA meaningful to you, analyses of characters, themes, or details from canon, stories about your experience with FMA, or another type of non-fiction)

What is a zine? A zine is an unofficial fan-made publication compiling textual and visual contributions from fan creators.

What is the theme of this project? We want to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Fullmetal Alchemist by letting creators express their love for FMA however they like! We are leaving this very open-ended on purpose. This fandom is full of creative people with varying perspectives – to us, the most important thing about FMA is the message that all of us coming together despite our differences is what gives us strength. The name “Equivalent Exchange” was selected to highlight the way that being a part of the fandom has given us so much in return for what we’ve put in, which is another element that we’d love to incorporate into the project.

What do you mean by “meta”? “Meta” in the context of this project can be any non-fictional content that someone wants to create: character analysis; thematic analysis; extended commentary on a scene or plot point; a short essay about your personal experiences with and/or your discovery of FMA; what FMA has meant to you. A description of the work or process that went into a cosplay or another type of fan creation could also fall into this category. You can find more information on what could qualify as “meta” here!

Will there be merchandise? Yes! We will have merch bundles available, and it will be possible to purchase them together with the zine parts of the project, or on their own.

What is the schedule? The full schedule is available here! Pre-orders will open August 1st and remain open until October 3rd.

Will the project have a Discord server? Yes! The Discord server, as well as periodic emails, will be the primary methods used for communication with contributors. The Discord server is carefully organized by project, so that contributors will only have access to content for the project they are contributing to. The server will be SFW by default, except for the project-specific spaces for the NSFW projects, and all server spaces will be moderated. All of the general “chat” channels will be strictly SFW.

Who can apply? Anyone who loves FMA, wants to create for it, and respects others in the fandom regardless of differences in fictional preferences (character interpretations, ships, etc.). Contributors must be prepared to collaborate with others despite differences of opinion, and should not have a history of shaming, belittling, or attacking others based on what they enjoy in fanwork. In short, applicants’ philosophy should be “Ship and let ship”!

Can people under 18 apply? As long as an applicant under 18 is legally old enough to work in their country of origin, their application will be reviewed. (Contributors under 18 will only be permitted to apply to, contribute, and view SFW content.)

How many contributors will be accepted? We don’t have a maximum number of contributors as of yet. For the two SFW physical zines, we will determine the number of contributors based on page limitations, but each SFW zine will have an extended digital PDF version to include contributors whose work or full work won’t fit into the printed zine. The all-digital NSFW PDF components will be able to accommodate more contributors. We’ve designed the project in the hopes of including as many creators as possible.

What will be required for an application? We will ask for a few samples of work similar to what you would be contributing (this does not necessarily have to be FMA fanwork), as well as your social media accounts and email address.

I haven’t created for FMA in a while… all my FMA work is old. In my application, can I submit more recent sample works from other fandoms instead? Yes, that’s fine! Having at least one FMA sample in your application (regardless of the application type) is great, but not required. We would mostly just like to get an idea of your style, so please feel free to submit samples that you think represent you well, regardless of the fandom!

Are all ships accepted in the ship-oriented parts of the project? Yes. As long as you are willing to tag and warn as appropriate, all ships are welcome. We will expect contributors to tag and warn diligently, to be mindful of others’ sensitivities, and to keep ship-related discussion in the appropriate parts of the server.

Can I contribute adult and/or controversial content? Yes. As above, all contributors will be required to tag and warn carefully with their submissions and when interacting with other contributors, to use the appropriate channels on the server at all times, and to respect others’ boundaries. The NSFW projects will only be open to contributors who are 18 or older.

I’d like to apply, but I don’t like certain ships and have some triggers. Will I have to see this content in the Discord server? While we can’t guarantee that you won’t encounter content that you would prefer to avoid, we will be compartmentalizing ship content, NSFW content, and potentially triggering content as much as possible in the Discord server. We are counting on all contributors to help us with this, and will do our best to facilitate a safe and friendly collaborative environment!

Do podfic recorders have to edit their own podfics as well as recording them? How many recordings will be expected, and how will work be assigned? Anyone who is accepted to record podfics for the Anthology is welcome to edit their own podfics, or to submit unedited podfics to our moderator team. We have a few mods who have volunteered to help others edit their audio.

Applicants accepted to record podfics would be able to choose which works they wanted to record for, so that everyone can edit an amount and specific content that they’re comfortable with. The total amount will depend somewhat on the amount of textual contributions that we end up accepting. Several of our mods will be helping to record any works not selected by applicants, in the hopes of making as complete a collection as possible (including descriptions of visual content). Depending on the amount of effort that we’re able to recruit, we hope to record podfics at least for every submission in the two SFW zines (fanfics for which will have a wordcount limit of 3,000 words, whereas PDF-only fics may be slightly longer).

Applications for podfic recorders are due by March 7, 2021, but the acutal recordings will be done between July and September (after text and art are finalized, while pre-orders and layout work take place).

Are AU (Alternate Universe) works allowed? Yes! AU works (canon-divergence, alternate universes, crossovers, etc.) will be accepted, both for application samples and for final contributor submissions if desired. Any AU works in the final Anthology will be tagged and described clearly.

Is this a 20-year anniversary project? Yes! We are hoping to open pre-orders in July to celebrate 20 years of Fullmetal Alchemist. It is not required that this theme is represented in any of the contributions, but it would certainly be welcome!

I am a recent pro-shipper. Some people may remember things that I did and said in the past that were not pro-ship, but I have changed my stance. Can I apply? As mentioned above and in the Contributor Protection Policy, our first priority is the safety and comfort of all of our contributors. Each application and applicant will be reviewed by our team, and decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis as to whether we anticipate that an applicant would be able to work well and interact positively with other contributors.

Is this project for-profit, or for charity? We are currently planning to donate half of the proceeds to the Archive of Our Own (AO3), and divide the remaining half evenly among all contributors to compensate them for their work.

I’m a little confused about the different parts of the zine. Could it all be combined into one zine? Our intention with this project is to provide space to as many creators, and as many different types of content, as possible – specifically including NSFW content and/or ships that are often not permitted – but to also make it easy for purchasers to choose only the content they are interested in or comfortable with. So you can think of it as four separate projects, with different “ratings” but with the same goal of inclusion. Dividing the project into subsections will allow us to accept more contributors overall!

In addition to making it more difficult to delineate types of content, ratings, and warnings, combining the projects into one zine would likely result in an extremely long volume. This would raise shipping costs for physical copies, and also make the digital version into a very large file! Our goal is to make it possible for people to buy a single project that they will enjoy every page of; or to bundle multiple projects together if they’re interested in several or all of them.

A lot of zines fail or turn out to be scams. Is your mod team experienced and prepared to see this through? We kept our moderator bios a bit more personal, but many of our mods have prior experience with multiple zines from start to finish. Mai is the lead mod on another zine that is currently open for pre-orders, as well as the finance mod on three others in progress; Feo has been a mod on ten zines, one of which she headed and several of which have reached completion; and Noct has headed two zines, been a mod on four others, and contributed to six more. Kari has also modded and contributed to over a dozen zines; and Getti has been the lead mod for a completed zine and has contributed to numerous others. Many of our other mods have real-world and/or paid work experience relevant to the project: Grace has extensive editorial experience and a background in print and online journalism, and also runs events for work in the RL sphere; and Tierfal regularly runs ship weeks and fandom events, and has been coordinating events as part of her day job for many years. Some of our moderators have not participated in a zine before, but are longtime fandom contributors, organizers, beta-readers, and more; or have additional relevant experience and skills, which they are excited to dive in and apply!

Since the full scope of the project will be determined in part by the number of applications that we receive for each section, we wanted to have a lot of hands on deck to make sure that we can divide the work fairly without anyone getting overwhelmed.

To make a long story short: we trust our team, and we're passionate about this project. We hope that you will be, too!

[archiveacademics]

An Archive of Our Own

Yay, I finally get to talk about AO3!

If you’ve been following along on this blog you’ve definitely read a few mentions of AO3, but no explanations. If you’ve been curious about it and looked it up yourself you might have noticed that my blog is mildly inspired by both the name and the design of the archive. 

So, what is the Archive of Our Own really? Is it like LiveJournal, FF.net, and Wattpad? 

The answer is “kind of.”

AO3 is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works. The OTW, as it’s called, states that:

“The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.” (What We Believe)

One of the ways the OTW works to reach this goal of providing access, preserving history, and legitimizing fanworks in general is the Archive of Our Own, a repository of fanworks (at this point, just fanfic but eventually fanvids and fan art will also be hosted) that does not limit the type of fanfic you can post, unlike FF.net or LiveJournal. And unlike Wattpad, there are no original works living side by side with the fanfic. AO3 is an entirely fandom oriented space.

The OTW and AO3 came about in 2007, the brainbaby of a group of fans who faced a worrying new monster: Fanlib.com. 

“There were strangers in town, setting up shop...

The defining event was the debut of FanLib.com in 2007. Fanlib was a for-profit, multifandom fanfiction archive that billed itself as providing “the world’s greatest fan fiction by popular demand” ...When fans investigated, they didn’t like what they saw. Fablib’s press release asserted that the “launch of FanLib.com represents the coming of age of fan fiction”...Worse yet were the materials that the compay provided to its investors and sponsors, which made clear that FanLib was not putting fans first; rather, the site would be “managed and moderated to the max” with fan activity taking place “in a customized environment that YOU”--the corporate sponsor--“control.”

...FanLib wasn’t trying to help fans create and share fanworks. It was packaging fans for corporations.”

So writes Francesca Coppola, one of the founding members of the OTW, in Fic by Anne Jamison. Fic explores the existence of fanfic from the very beginnings to the modern day, spanning multiple fandoms and topics as well as controversies experienced within fandom. 

Coppola writes about the birth of the OTW and AO3, which resulted from the fear of corporations taking over fanfic and destroying what had, to that point, been a thriving, if sometimes slightly hidden, community. After a post written by LiveJournal user Astolat argued for the existence of a fan run archive and laid out the kind of design elements it would need, the community came together. Lawyers and teachers and media specialists were all galvanized to lend their talents to the newly formed OTW and so AO3 was born, as well as a few other brainbabies.

OUR PROJECTS

Archive of Our Own Fanhackers Fanlore Legal Advocacy Open Doors Transformative Works and Cultures

Which is not to say that the road has been smooth. As a nonprofit, the OTW must run pledge drives every so often and sometimes the discourse around the freedom offered by AO3. 

In “The Online Free Speech Debate is Raging in Fanfiction, Too” Elizabeth Minkel (co host of the Fansplaining podcast, but in this case not writing under the auspices of said podcast) discusses the vitriol that gets tossed around by users of AO3 in regards to there “come one, come all” policy. 

“Fans have also long disagreed about what content any given space should host. Some early archives banned specific subjects, while others put restrictions on certain characters or relationships. AO3’s free speech maximalist approach to fictional content was founded in direct response to corporate censorship as a way to ensure that all fanworks were protected on the basis of simply being fanworks, rather than meeting a standard of literary merit or adhering to thematic guidelines or restrictions.

“One of our most quoted sections from the ToS is: ‘You understand that using the Archive may expose you to material that is offensive, triggering, erroneous, sexually explicit, indecent, blasphemous, objectionable, grammatically incorrect, or badly spelled,’” Matty Bowers, AO3’s policy and abuse chair, tells The Verge. The recent AO3 dustup, Bowers says, has been embedded in the conversation from the start. “Even back then, there were complaints that if ‘x’ was hosted, certain groups [that were against ‘x’] wouldn’t support the Archive. It pops up periodically over the years, and often gets more traction during drives.

”Some of fandom’s content wars are about preference: hating a particular character, for example, or preferring one ship over another. Simple disagreements in taste can get ugly enough, but in some corners of fandom, morality, activism, and shipping have become irrevocably tangled, and it can be challenging — even impossible — to untangle them.”

While this article was written in 2018, the issues of content, what is and isn’t appropriate, still makes waves. Newer, different waves, but it’s all the same ocean. 

Yes, that’s right. Aja Romano wrote this article just yesterday regarding the censorship practices of China and how AO3 is no longer accessible. There was some debate if the censorship stemmed from a fandom war between certain factions of fans of the actor Xiao Zhan, but that’s likely just bad timing on the fans’ part.

Not all stories about the AO3 are bad news, though. Just last August Romano wrote a much more uplifting article.

That’s right, the entire website won a Hugo Award for Best Related Work. It’s an amazing accomplishment and historical as well. No website has ever won an award like this, or on this scale. 

So that’s the basics of AO3. You can always learn more by checking out the site and playing around with the tags. You could even write your own fanfic and post it! 

And remember, if you’re a fan of something, you’re not alone.

[luxus4me]

Webmonkey http://j.mp/2EpUYt8

Julia Baritz is having quite a week. The Austin, Texas based developer is the founder and lead architect of Pillowfort.io, a community-oriented social media blogging platform that's quietly amassed around 20,000 users in its first two and a half years. Since Monday, however, Baritz has been inundated with more than 8,000 requests from people clamoring to join her site. Traffic to Pillowfort’s homepage has been 10 times higher than average, she says.

Baritz has porn to thank for this interest. On Monday, Tumblr announced a ban on all “adult content”, and creators have been frantically searching for a new place to migrate their NSFW art and porn blogs ever since. Pillowfort emerged as a potential safe harbor via word of mouth on social media. The site allows NSFW content to be posted with few restrictions, as long as it doesn't break any laws.

“It’s funny that adult and sexual content has become the linchpin and turning point of our popularity in a way, but I’m not surprised,” says Baritz.

Sexual content has always been a part of fandom communities online, from LiveJournal to Tumblr. And communities have a history of abandoning platforms that don’t support the free expression of adult material. It was LiveJournal’s crackdown on NSFW material back in 2007 that broke community trust in the site and initiated the mass migration to Tumblr, along with the creation of fandom sites like An Archive of Our Own. Now Tumblr’s facing its own porn-related exodus, because NSFW content appears to be at odds with its business goals.

For Baritz, the experience has been head-spinning. Pillowfort is still in beta, and this kind of spotlight is a huge test for the site.

If anyone understands what Baritz has been going through, it’s Denise Paolucci. As the co-founder of Dreamwidth, a web 1.0-style blogging platform that shares Pillowfort's user-first philosophy, she has seen a similar spike on her site this week. Dreamwidth is more established—it has existed since 2008 and has 53,595 active users (and 3,453,932 total accounts)—but traffic to the site has also surged to 10 times its typical amount, she says. Many Tumblr users are tweeting about their plans to migrate to both Dreamwidth and Pillowfort.

Both sites adhere to an anti-advertising, anti-VC funding, anti-corporate model that centers user privacy, control, and freedom. That's what makes them such appealing options to many disaffected Tumblr bloggers, but the challenges they face underscore why the dream of an independent web is so hard to achieve, even when there's demand.

Microblogging Like It's 2009

Dreamwidth began as a side project after Paolucci and her co-founder Mark Smith felt that LiveJournal, their former employer, had lost its way. Paolucci worked there as a community manager, Smith as a developer. They built Dreamwidth on LiveJournal’s open source code, which was already 10 years old at the time. A decade later, they still co-run the site. “The other day I realized I’ve been working on this code base for about 20 years and I had to go lie down for a minute,” Paolucci says.

The benefit of code that old is it’s incredibly stable, has been fully patched and security-audited, and it’s efficient. This week it has handled 10 times its normal traffic smoothly. “We have designed Dreamwidth to be very expandable,” she says. “We did have a big increase in traffic when Tumblr made its announcement and no one noticed because we set up the site so it can scale in an instant.”

But what it gains in stability, it lacks in new features. Dreamwidth can barely handle images, as some Tumblr exiles have noted on Twitter, and currently has no option to upload video. GIFs should work, Paolucci says, but users get only 500 megabytes of image hosting on their accounts, at least for right now.

“Unlimited image hosting is one of those features that people have gotten used to that are VC-subsidized on most websites,” she says. “We can’t afford to offer that same kind of unlimited, endless image hosting.”

Instead, Dreamwidth is a text-based community, full of everything from fanfic to erotica to you name it. Tumblr's new ban, however, focuses on visuals, like NSFW photos, video, and GIFs; the company says written content like erotica is still allowed.

Paolucci understands that Dreamwidth may not be right for all Tumblr exiles. “We are definitely thinking of this as an opportunity for users who are fleeing Tumblr to discover our philosophy and business ethics,” she says, “but there is also a certain level of people who are used to Tumblr and Tumblr's features [and Dreamwidth] may not be what they are looking for.”

Dreamwidth has been “a good lifeboat service for a lot of people,” Paolucci says—a landing place for people who have had to leave other platforms for some reason. When beloved services are shut down or change their terms, people can lose their communities and work. “Even those who have their primary hangout elsewhere use us as a permanent redirect to wherever they're socializing most," she says, "because after ten years, people are beginning to trust that we mean it when we say we're planning to be around for the long haul.”

Not Ready for Primetime

Pillowfort, on the other hand, looks a lot like Tumblr, but it can’t yet handle the traffic that comes along with popularity.

Baritz created Pillowfort in 2016 to be exactly what disaffected Tumblr bloggers are now in search of: an open-minded site that can host images and videos; allows reblogging, commenting, and community building; encourages a strong artistic bent; and doesn’t censor NSFW content. It improves on Tumblr, in some bloggers’ opinion, by offering nimble privacy features—like allowing you to make certain posts private to certain followers, while leaving other posts public—and focusing on customization. Pillowfort's terms of service also currently prohibit posts that target or harass other users, which some bloggers may crave in a new community.

It is meant to look like Tumblr but harken back to the original LiveJournal era, a simpler time on the web, when people could create small, cohesive, and specific communities without worrying too much about arbitrary censorship or ads. Baritz says she fell in love with LiveJournal when she was in middle school, and longed for a way to combine its creative, independent ethos with more modern features.

When Tumblr bloggers looking for a new home came to Pillowfort on Monday, though, they found a site that had been offline for ten days for security maintenance after a Tumblr user posted that they had found a bug in the site’s code. Baritz and her two developers got the site up and running by the afternoon, but then the surge in traffic overloaded the servers. The site is still unstable, and Pillowfort doesn’t have the money in the coffers to just add server capacity overnight. For some Tumblr users, the experience has been frustrating.

Baritz is facing a very tricky challenge: make the most of this opportunity without bankrupting her company or betraying her conscience in the process.

“If our server costs increase by 10 times the way our overall site traffic has, then we won’t be immediately bankrupted, certainly, but it’s more expenditure than I planned for,” Baritz says.

Her plan is to approve new requests to the site in batches so that she doesn’t overload server capacity, and so that she has time to take in the money from each new user in order to pay for the server capacity to host them.

Money, Money, Money?

Both Pillowfort and Dreamwidth embrace a business model that charges users directly and aims for relatively small profits—a radical idea in a web dominated by ad revenue and data sales.

Like LiveJournal did when it first launched, Dreamwidth makes money by charging users for premium accounts, at annual rates of $35 or $50. With the paid subscriptions, you get more Dreamwidth tokens, which can be used to access perks like user icons or the ability to rename blogs.

“We’re not making a whole ton of money but we're not losing money and we have enough people who really value what we are trying to do from a business ethics standpoint that they will support us,” says Paolucci. Aside from her and Smith, the site is run by volunteers.

Premium accounts is the same business model Baritz is planning for Pillowfort. She and the team are about six months away, she estimates, from launching that pay functionality. She’s currently crowdsourcing suggestions from users about what features they want and are willing to pay for.

Until then, Pillowfort keeps the lights on by charging new users a one-time $5 sign-up fee. Baritz has also turned to crowdfunding campaigns. She raised a little more than $5,000 on Indiegogo to launch the site in 2016. This year, she quit her job as a developer at a software company to focus on Pillowfort full time, and raised around $60,000 from a successful Kickstarter in August. That money is earmarked to pay her two contractors, and to hire another full-time developer to work on scaling the company up.

“What’s central to how Pillowfort’s being planned is we’re going to be getting our money from our users. We won’t be beholden to anyone but our users, so we won’t have to worry about third parties or outside forces,” Baritz says.

Those are laudable future goals. But they don’t help right now, when suddenly 8,000 people are “knocking down my door,” as Baritz put it, and Baritz doesn’t have the money to go out and buy extra server hosting immediately.

“We have to make some sacrifices, like keeping the site relatively small right now. If we did go a corporate route then I would be nervous then we’d be under a lot more pressure to turn a profit and inevitably it would influence the way we build the site, and I don’t want to compromise on user privacy and user control,” she says.

Even without taking VC money, however, sites and platforms can still be vulnerable to outside forces, including the services they rely on to function. A number of internet infrastructure companies have taken action against users this year, from PayPal, Stripe, Joyent, and GoDaddy all kicking off Gab to PayPal cracking down on the ASMR community. Dreamwidth has had trouble with PayPal, too, when the payment processor wanted it to censor some NSFW material in 2010. And Pillowfort tweeted earlier this week that it plans to change domain names, after learning that .io domains don't support NSFW content.

And even if Baritz were willing to go the VC route, it's not a sure recipe for success. Small social media companies have raised millions from Silicon Valley in the past, only to crash and burn. Take IMZY, a site founded by ex-Redditors who wanted to create a nicer, gentler, safer version of Reddit. In 2015 IMZY raised $11 million dollars from VC firms, but after generating lots of excitement and getting thousands of users, it shuttered after less than a year. The reason the founders gave was that they couldn’t find a place in the market, but with the money they had raised they were under pressure to not just find a small niche, but to actually compete on profit with bigger companies.

IMZY was a great example, Paolucci says, of the old “underpants gnomes” business plan, a reference to a Southpark episode about the concept. (Step 1: Collect users. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit.)

She admires what Baritz is doing with Pillowfort, and hopes that the site can handle the sudden surge of interest. “I think that the web needs a lot more of the kind of sites and communities that are created with motives other than profit in mind,” says Paolucci.

More Great WIRED Stories

http://j.mp/2Ef2hmz via Webmonkey URL : http://j.mp/2wxgkOF