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quillpunk(This post is almost 1k words, welp. But at least I had fun thinking out loud!)
So I made this throwaway post on my shiny new Pillowfort account:
"I wonder what part AO3 having native fic exchange and prompt meme functionality played in it becoming the fandom behemoth."
And the thought stuck with me. Like, to participate in a fic exchange or prompt meme on AO3 you *must* 1) have an AO3 account, 2) post your resulting fic on AO3 and 3) probably comment on the fic you get gifted [in return] while logged in on your account. You functionally can not do a fic exchange on AO3 without everyone involved having accounts on AO3 and actually using them.
I mean, you can certainly do a fic exchange or prompt meme without AO3. But there's a barrier of entry to running something like that, a difficulty that makes it Intimidating™ and Big™. A prompt meme, sure, that's relatively simple. But an exchange?
Now you're talking math. You're talking matching requests and offers. You're talking moderating people who might break the rules, who might write something with a recipients DNWs, who might be an asshole if they don't like the fic *they* get gifted. You're talking juggling pinch hits and deadlines and trying to make sure everyone has gotten all the info about their match.
So I made this throwaway post on my shiny new Pillowfort account:
"I wonder what part AO3 having native fic exchange and prompt meme functionality played in it becoming the fandom behemoth."
And the thought stuck with me. Like, to participate in a fic exchange or prompt meme on AO3 you *must* 1) have an AO3 account, 2) post your resulting fic on AO3 and 3) probably comment on the fic you get gifted [in return] while logged in on your account. You functionally can not do a fic exchange on AO3 without everyone involved having accounts on AO3 and actually using them.
I mean, you can certainly do a fic exchange or prompt meme without AO3. But there's a barrier of entry to running something like that, a difficulty that makes it Intimidating™ and Big™. A prompt meme, sure, that's relatively simple. But an exchange?
Now you're talking math. You're talking matching requests and offers. You're talking moderating people who might break the rules, who might write something with a recipients DNWs, who might be an asshole if they don't like the fic *they* get gifted. You're talking juggling pinch hits and deadlines and trying to make sure everyone has gotten all the info about their match.
AO3 having that fix exchange functionality lowers the barrier of entry. I mean I've never run an exchange, much less on AO3, but I imagine it must. After all, as I gather, it does the matching *for you*.
Instant exchange magic.
And congrats, now you've gotta be on AO3!
I've been told that some exchanges are thinking of running on SquidgeWorld in the future. This is really cool and I'm very interested to find out more about that, if anyone has links please drop them. But. But actually, this doesn't change the problem, it just spreads it around to more places.
The problem is the... alright I know there's a word for this, I've seen it somewhere but I can not think of it.
So. The problem is the hostage situation. If you like participating in exchanges, you like running exchanges, you like pinch hitting for exchanges etc. you can not do this outside AO3 (or whatever AO3 clone you're on). An exchange running on an AO3 software is effectively locking you into AO3; you *must* now post and read fic there. And once you start, why not keep going? You probably will. You might read some of the other fics in your exchange and oops the ball is rolling annnnnd... here you are. Hi.
When given the option between doing all the hard work of matching and re-matching and re-matching again, and just using AO3's software to do it, most people are going to choose AO3. I don't think there's anything strange about that; I imagine most people running an exchange do it for fun and the less hoops you've gotta jump through, the simpler it is. That's just fact.
The intimidation factor goes down, the time spent on it goes down, and just in general it's easier to get started. (Again, no personal experience. I'm speculating XD)
But now there's a new barrier. The barrier of leaving. The barrier of running an exchange without AO3. The barrier of trying to drag your usual participants into not only doing the exchange on another site, but correspondingly making accounts *there* and *using* them because the code will lock you in no matter what clone you're on. The barrier of trying to convince an exchange runner to do it somewhere else. The barrier of "I've done it this way for so long, do I even know how to do this without AO3?" The barrier of everyone is already on AO3 and if doing it somewhere else, anywhere else, would you even get participants? Would they even trust you on matching them?
I like what Ourchive is doing just in general because I really like the idea of more, smaller fandom archives and communities. But I think, actually, that Ourchive, at least in this part, might be trying to become a part of the problem? Because I know I've seen the devs say on the discord that exchanges is a thing they wanna do/something they're trying to figure out how it would work (I'm not sure which one they actually said, sorry) and like. Would that not just fracture things instead of *decentralize* things?
So on that note, does anyone know of software that could take AO3's place in exchange matching? That could do it fancy and automated and maybe have a pretty site? That doesn't need login (for signing up to the exchange, I'd imagine it'd need it for running one) or is ties to any particular account, ie it only does the technical aspects or running it, it's not the actual place the exchange is taking place? That could perhaps be self-hosted so it's not an all eggs in one basket situation? (A piece of software that you could download, and then you manually input (perhaps via an import feature) the information a signup-ee gives you somewhere and then it'd automatically match everyone for you... that sounds cool.)
Because I think that might be really helpful toward decentralizing fandom and breaking away from the dependance on AO3, actually.
Instant exchange magic.
And congrats, now you've gotta be on AO3!
I've been told that some exchanges are thinking of running on SquidgeWorld in the future. This is really cool and I'm very interested to find out more about that, if anyone has links please drop them. But. But actually, this doesn't change the problem, it just spreads it around to more places.
The problem is the... alright I know there's a word for this, I've seen it somewhere but I can not think of it.
So. The problem is the hostage situation. If you like participating in exchanges, you like running exchanges, you like pinch hitting for exchanges etc. you can not do this outside AO3 (or whatever AO3 clone you're on). An exchange running on an AO3 software is effectively locking you into AO3; you *must* now post and read fic there. And once you start, why not keep going? You probably will. You might read some of the other fics in your exchange and oops the ball is rolling annnnnd... here you are. Hi.
When given the option between doing all the hard work of matching and re-matching and re-matching again, and just using AO3's software to do it, most people are going to choose AO3. I don't think there's anything strange about that; I imagine most people running an exchange do it for fun and the less hoops you've gotta jump through, the simpler it is. That's just fact.
The intimidation factor goes down, the time spent on it goes down, and just in general it's easier to get started. (Again, no personal experience. I'm speculating XD)
But now there's a new barrier. The barrier of leaving. The barrier of running an exchange without AO3. The barrier of trying to drag your usual participants into not only doing the exchange on another site, but correspondingly making accounts *there* and *using* them because the code will lock you in no matter what clone you're on. The barrier of trying to convince an exchange runner to do it somewhere else. The barrier of "I've done it this way for so long, do I even know how to do this without AO3?" The barrier of everyone is already on AO3 and if doing it somewhere else, anywhere else, would you even get participants? Would they even trust you on matching them?
I like what Ourchive is doing just in general because I really like the idea of more, smaller fandom archives and communities. But I think, actually, that Ourchive, at least in this part, might be trying to become a part of the problem? Because I know I've seen the devs say on the discord that exchanges is a thing they wanna do/something they're trying to figure out how it would work (I'm not sure which one they actually said, sorry) and like. Would that not just fracture things instead of *decentralize* things?
So on that note, does anyone know of software that could take AO3's place in exchange matching? That could do it fancy and automated and maybe have a pretty site? That doesn't need login (for signing up to the exchange, I'd imagine it'd need it for running one) or is ties to any particular account, ie it only does the technical aspects or running it, it's not the actual place the exchange is taking place? That could perhaps be self-hosted so it's not an all eggs in one basket situation? (A piece of software that you could download, and then you manually input (perhaps via an import feature) the information a signup-ee gives you somewhere and then it'd automatically match everyone for you... that sounds cool.)
Because I think that might be really helpful toward decentralizing fandom and breaking away from the dependance on AO3, actually.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-09 02:12 am (UTC)(Though also full disclosure, I've never participated in an exchange, either on or off AO3. I've participated in other community fic events like zines and big bangs, but never an exchange. So at least personally, that has zero bearing on my preference for a site to use.)
But to an extent... any and every site that people use has the same "hostage situation" problem. Once there's a critical mass of people using one site over another, for whatever purpose, it's easier to join it and it's harder to leave.
LJ was that home of fandom for a long time, and if you didn't have an LJ account, you were limited in how much interaction you could have with the parts of fandom that did use it.
Twitter (prior to *gestures* everything) was where the critical mass was for quite a while. I never used it, but was made very aware at times how much stuff - in terms of content or community or the like - I was missing. Even when I followed creators on other sites, things like giveaways or contests and such were often run only through twitter, and you could only participate if you had a twitter account.
Now it's discord, and if you don't have the right invites to the right servers by knowing the right people... you likely have zero idea what's going on in a given fandom circle at all, and there's certainly no ability to lurk to view what's happening.
It's maybe not exactly the same, but if an exchange has any sort of shared platform - Dreamwidth, twitter, discord, tumblr, AO3, etc. - then anyone who wants to participate is back to that same "you must have an account to be a part of this" situation. More OPTIONS isn't a bad thing, and having one site be where nearly ALL exchanges happen is very eggs-in-one-basket, but I feel like moving to a different platform with different matching software doesn't really change the "hostage" situation so much as it just... replicates it in a new place. (Like you say with Ourchive.) That issue of what is decentralizing vs. what is fracturing is a real one, and unfortunately too much stuff seems to wind up being the latter!
This is mainly me rambling and sorting my OWN thoughts out about it, ha. Because I miss the days of less centralized spaces, and of smaller sites and archives being a thing. I also think fandom could be a healthier space if people felt more empowered to curate their own spaces to suit their own preferences and rules.
But it sort of feels like there's some element of that "you MUST be a part of THIS site" that's simply inherent to the way fandom on the internet works, and moving things off of AO3 isn't going to change that, except in terms of what platform you're required to use.