You know, I swear, there has to be SOME reasonable way in this day and age of interacting with and getting to know people in your fandom when you just can't/don't/won't do Discord.
When I stand here on my metaphorical lawn, shaking my fist at the kids who can do real-time fannish communication, I am sometimes overwhelmed with how much easier this shit was for me when I started in transformative* fandom:
- Boards devoted to in-depth discussion of specific shows existed and were just big enough to form tight-knit communities of like minds (seriously, the sheer number of friends made as adults who I met through Buffy is comical).
- Fandom was small enough/interconnected enough that you could easily meet friends-of-friends and thus make more friends.
- Fandom infrastructure was more roll-you-own and hands-on, and if you had the time and skills, you could literally build your own place in fandom and invite others to join you there. I managed archives, mailing lists, LJ newsletter communities...so many things.
- So many random ficathons/challenges! You got really good at writing exactly 1000 words! You all wrote for each other! (You can see the roots of Yuletide in there.)
- I didn't have a kid yet, my jobs were all contract gigs with 40 hour a week caps, long breaks between gigs, and a fair amount of time just waiting for builds to run, so I had time to devote to all of the above.
- (Despite the previous bullet, it also helped that things moved more slowly WRT communcations.)
Sometimes, by which I mean often, I look around and have a very Buffy "I used to be so good at this" moment.
Anyhow. Now I mostly just feel awkward half the time. Like, this is how I feel in 2023 fandom:
Which, fine, is kind of how I started to feel around 2011/2012 when fandom's shift to Tumblr took hold and AO3 replaced our rickety infrastructure, but it's WORSE now! That Yuletide-only hiatus of a few years didn't help. I've moved back to Fandom, but they've re-done all the roads in a city that I used to help plat! I have no idea where I'm going or what I'm doing, and I think I'm driving on the wrong side!
(I think I'm also torturing all sorts of metaphors and similes and what have you. I'm tired and killing time while I keep my knee elevated. My efforts to become a person who stress cleans wound up injuring me. Because that's how my life's been going lately.)
(*I specify transformative fandom because I've been involved in fandom spaces other than fic ones since I was 15. I mean, I went to my first sci-fi con at 16, more than a decade before I fell face first into transformative fandom. There's overlap, mind you, but they're not the same.)
