The next True Fandom Home will not appear until Discord or Twitter (or both) have a major purge. Discord skirted the edge of this with its "no 18+ servers on iOS" shift, but there are workarounds (...the servers are still available on desktop app/browser), so it avoided a mass migration.

However, either Discord or Twitter could, at any time, decide they have too much "adult" content, and take steps to forbid it or make it harder to access. Or they might "take a stand" against "piracy." And someone new to social media trends online (read: anyone who's only known one digital fandom home) might think "oh, they'll lose a few people, a few communities, but that won't affect everyone else - most people & most servers are vanilla-tame, so a no-explicit-content rule won't affect them."

That's not how it works. A "no explicit content" rule always means an attempt to purge queer content of any sort. (A man and a woman holding hands in a park, leaning in for a kiss, is not considered explicit. Two men doing the same, often is. It depends on which advertisers are footing the bills.) And a crackdown on "piracy" often means a purge of fanworks, because social media devs are not well-versed in copyright law, and besides, their goal isn't "allow all legal content." It's "reduce the chance that we get hit with a lawsuit" - and that's not based on whether the content is legal. If a company with big lawyers decides "fanworks are bad for our public image," they start throwing around C&Ds, and it's easier to ban the fanficcers and fanartists and vidders and so on, than to send someone to court to challenge the copyright claims.

The reason a migration hasn't already started is that there's no obvious next place to go. If you want to catch things early, start talking with your friends - what kind of site do you want for social media? Do you want everyone-sees-everything like Tumblr, or must-get-invited arrangements like Discord? Do you want reblogging like Twitter or threaded discussions like Dreamwidth? Forum-esque discussions like Proboards or BobaBoard, or chatroom-esque like Telegram? (Note that I'm not saying "like instagram" or "like Pinterest" - because I don't participate in those. But they're also options, I suppose.)

How important is image hosting to you - and are you willing to pay for it? How willing are you to give away personal data and privacy in order to get site features?

What kind of moderation are you hoping for? Note that moderation is expensive; the more strict the content control on a site, the fewer active users there can be. (Metafilter is pretty good for moderation - but they pay for 24/7 moderators. And almost everyone who's active is very aware of the mod presence on the site.) If your preference is "I don't want strict content control; just no trolls, no harassers, no nazis" - I have news for you: that's strict content control. Figuring out the difference between shitposting and bigotry requires active, constant moderation.

If you can find 25 friends who agree on the answers to all those questions, you may have the necessary foundation for a social site of your own; start looking for a dev/coder who can help you put it together.

(AO3 was started by a few dozen people who agreed on the features they wanted an archive to have. And the features and policies they didn't want it to have.)

If you can't find two dozen people who agree with you about what The Best Fannish Social Platform would be... welcome to the hordes who are stuck waiting for our current platforms to collapse and nervous about where we'll be going next.

Yes to all of this!

One thing I will note that people often don’t think of and you really really need to is this:

How much are you willing to scale?

We knew AO3 would get “big”, but I think for a lot of us, that was pretty abstract, or we were thinking big like a hundred thousand accounts, not big like eight million. If you want to build a thing for 25 friends, that’s easy. On the technical side, scaling that up to 5,000 friends isn’t too bad (though moderation is exponentially harder).

If, however, your idea is that literal millions of tumblr users are going to migrate to the thing, plan for that from the very start. Pinboard very clearly had no grasp of how to scale for even moderate traffic. Not only were they not ready yet (which can happen to any site), but it didn’t seem to me like they even had the foundation to be ready later. The best way to code for 50 and the best way to code for 50,000,000 are different.

And if you aren’t building something that will eventually scale (and let’s be honest, you probably shouldn’t be because it’s a hell of a lot of work), you’re going to need to eventually turn people away or make it only be attractive to a niche group.

Re discord and twitter: they’re going to have to fuck up far more spectacularly than so far to unseat people. I agree with you that it’s coming, but to my eye, it looks like we’re still in the joining phase where fandom is on its way up on both. We haven’t yet peaked, and we haven’t seen any true strikethrough/tittyban equivalents.

Did you mean Pillowfort instead of Pinboard? afaik Pinboard hasn't had any major traffic problems (and also is trying NOT to be a social media site explicitly). And yeah, the question of scale is part of the reason DW runs on the LJ codebase - the core bits have been stress-tested to hell and back. AO3 has probably gotten more efficient over the years (I hope), but I know in the early 2010s they required like 10x the server resources for equivalent amounts of traffic to DW.

LOL, I absolutely did. Doh! Thanks, fingers-brain that types things on autopilot.

(Pinboard actually also has fandom, but it is a strange beast I do not understand, and if they’re happy there, more power to them.)

Since I'm already on my Dreamwidth train...

If you can find 25 friends who agree on the answers to all those questions, you may have the necessary foundation for a social site of your own; start looking for a dev/coder who can help you put it together.

If you're willing to work with what Dreamwidth has available, twenty-five people who agree on the answers to the above questions is a fantastic base for a community. Dreamwidth's site-wide rules are fairly permissive, but people in charge of a community can be pretty much as restrictive as they like, and a lot of the base work is already done. I know image uploading isn't as sleek as it is on Tumblr, but I can't swear it would be much better if you were working from scratch, and if that's your only complaint, well. You could do a lot worse.

Plus, there’s already a chunk of fandom on Dreamwidth. I have an account over there, although I basically never use it. But if Tumblr dies that’s where I’m going.

It's a bit of a loop we're stuck in: Fandom will go where the activity is. As long as there's more activity on Tumblr, that's where we'll stay.

If people are more active on Dreamwidth, more people will go there, because there will be more activity. But first we have to be active there. And while there aren't a lot of people to be active for, it can feel a lot like shouting into the void, which gets demoralizing quick. Which means you end up doing less, which means there's less activity overall, which means you end up doing less, which means there's less activity overall, which means.... Well. You get the picture.

I speculated on another post about the idea of some sort of fandom-themed weekly questions community as a way to start generating some momentum, but I remain unlikely to start such a comm myself, and especially to run one. Still, if I shout about it long enough into the void, maybe someone will hear the echoes and pick up the idea?