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

[redthedragon]

for what it's worth, on my end i almost don't want to invite people because i like the server too much? it has a good vibe going and i don't want to throw someone into the mix who will mess that energy up
but also honestly i don't trust that anyone will either not be a whole anti or will not be weird about me having a "secret" discord server where i talk about robots that i only mentioned now lmao. like either i dont know them well enough or i know them tooooooo well and i should've told them already

[yvannairie]

Hmm. How to phrase this so that it doesn't sound like I'm trying to chide you for bad behaviour...

Basically, I don't think the users of Off-Orbit should worry too much about that sort of thing. Of course, if there's someone who uses Discord like a social media (basically, someone you would never recommend Dreamwidth on b/c they would have a miserable time) then Off-Orbit isn't the right fit for them just because we aim to be more of an old-school IRC or a forum-adjacent chat room, and as baffling as I find it, some people just don't like that sort of impersonal engagement.

And also obviously -- there are people who aren't antis, but would not enjoy Off-Orbit because it's a space we moderate. That's, frankly, not something everyone can handle in fandom. Some people just need more personal control than that. So there's a lot of legitimate reasons to not suggest Off-Orbit to someone.

But I emphatically do not want Off-Orbit to become just another hangout server for friends, which is why I'm so stressed about how to safely expand our reach. I want to actually build a fandom space, which is why the moderation is currently so extensive despite we having had very little need for. Ideally, I would like it to be a place where people can make new friends, but I will settle for a space where strangers can amicably interact. That's gonna require some degree of mixing friend groups. I have such high aspirations for that place, which are, honestly, only tempered by the fact that getting too greedy with publicity will only bring bad publicity.

The only people I, like, outright don't want the link to Off-Orbit coming anywhere near is people you know for a fact have actively participated in harassment. On a personal level, I'd rather not it even show up in the hands of people who have passively participated in harassment, not unless there was clear sense that they'd made amends isntead of just slunk off and stopped, because I'm just deeply distrustful of behaviour like that, but I still can't stop someone from making the judgement call to invite someone like that to 00, and also tracking new users down to check their credentials or whatever is against our rules, the rules which moderators are also bound by.

So, like, I feel you, and I do, on some level, appreciate that you like the vibe on the server enough to not want it to change, but also what the server becomes and how it changes... shouldn't really be your problem to worry about. Not unless I offer you a modship at some point, and that's not exclusively in my hands :P