« I want to be a part of scenes which give a shit about the silly things I care about (romantic c·dramas, anime, Pokémon, Nintendo). I want that much more than I care about belonging to any “fandom” or “fanspace” in the vernacular sense. And I think that having those scenes can form the bedrock of culture, not only fan culture but also culture in a general sense, a culture which produces interesting content for an audience of like‐minded people, some of which may reference some person or corporation’s Intellectual Property but a lot of which probably won’t. Plenty of “original content” is produced by S·F·F fandom, furry fandom, ⁊·c, and the willingness of people to create unique works within those spaces as opposed to without I think is a testament to the fact that they have some·thing which other spaces lack.

I’ve made my own small efforts at building these sorts of scenes, with the Mastodon instance I moderate and the Discord server I run and the wiki I set up for my friends. I don’t think spaces like these are enough (I’d love a forum), but I think they are a start. We need bigger ones, tho᷎, ones that are big enough to host events or challenges or other sorts of community happenings, and big enough to where they can adequately serve the function of introducing one to new people and ideas. I’m very interested in the inflection point from “friends and family” to “community” and think that transition is the only kind of scale which matters. »