Frowny face of a lack of popularity

[yvannairie]

Fun fact I recently extended an invitation to someone who's like lowkey fandom famous and whose work I deeply enjoy to come hang out in my Robot Server(tm), someone I have no personal relationship with, and having been emboldened by that, I kinda wanna reach out to other people in the fandom I'm aware of! Who I think are cool!

But it's become so normal for antis in the TF fandom to have gone underground and purged all mention of having participated in violent harassment campaigns in the past three years that I don't feel comfortable inviting someone off just the vibe I have of them, and I can't seem to get the server to take off word-of-mouth since almost nobody in the fandom is up for forming new social bonds either.

IDK. I feel more bold about wanting to reach people who have kind of lost the joy of the thing and come hang out with us! Because yeah, been there! That's why I started it! And I really resent being afraid of my fellow fan and not wanting to put the people who have been harassed into danger in case my own social radar turns out to be complete shit.

EDIT: I suddenly started wondering if the lack of spread by word of mouth also has to do with not just me being like this with strangers, but also people who are on this server being like this with their strangers? Like are we all just in an ouroboros of not trusting one another b/c it's so much safer to NOT have a stance on this, and those who have hard stances have often been harassed enough to be suspicious of a stranger being like "hey you're cool and I heard you'd gotten shit for stuff, would you like to come on our Anti Giving Shit To People For Stuff That Doesn't Matter" server?

Comments

[yvannairie]

Yeah :( And it's not like my brand is strong enough to immediately mark me out as someone safe, and you can't really tell without seeing the server that we're taking this shit extremely seriously.

I honestly feel like. I should advertise more. I don't want to run a server people are on b/c all their friends are there, I want to run a server that people will enjoy being on because it's moderated and secure.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Yeah, that's one of the sort of sad things about fandom moving into servers instead of forums; with a forum, at least you could SEE things before deciding to join. But with a server, if you join and then decide its not for you, there can be social repercussions to leaving. The arbitrary rules that irresponsible mods choose to enforce are super unpredictable and even though there may be plenty of cool servers out there, the unknowns create an effort barrier.

Advertising might prove to be very good! Especially if you're consistently straightforward about your moderation policies and community expectations. I am definitely more liable to take the risk if the person promoting the group seems to be reliable and morally consistent.

[yvannairie]

I've been thinking I might just, like. Post the code of conduct we've implemented as an advertisement somewhere, but I'm just intensely put off from putting it on Tumblr, where we would get called a pro-ship server and subsequently get a target painted on us.