My first fanzine experience was a hell-on-earth nightmare exacerbated by the pandemic, but my experiences since then have been positive. Sometimes there's a good community on a server, and sometimes people just submit their work and leave, but I've been lucky.
What I've noticed is that activity on fanzine servers tends to cool down over time as people finish their work and move on to other projects. A lot of contributors (not just writers) don't post their pieces on social media at all. Often, a full year or more will have passed since the story or art was finished, so I can understand the hesitation to share "outdated" work. I can also understand how it might not be a priority to return to someone else's story that you've already encouraged and complimented in the zine server.
Still, I get the feeling that a lot of fanzine experiences that aren't nuclear-explosion bad but also not 100% positive tend to be glossed over. The idea that every zine is a big fandom party is a problem, because (a) rookie fan creators don't know what to expect from the experience, and (b) people who don't get accepted to a zine can feel very hurt and excluded.
Nobody wants to badmouth zine mods, of course! But even a short post about "fanzines aren't necessarily the communities I thought they would be" has value, I think.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2025-01-26 04:15 pm (UTC)What I've noticed is that activity on fanzine servers tends to cool down over time as people finish their work and move on to other projects. A lot of contributors (not just writers) don't post their pieces on social media at all. Often, a full year or more will have passed since the story or art was finished, so I can understand the hesitation to share "outdated" work. I can also understand how it might not be a priority to return to someone else's story that you've already encouraged and complimented in the zine server.
Still, I get the feeling that a lot of fanzine experiences that aren't nuclear-explosion bad but also not 100% positive tend to be glossed over. The idea that every zine is a big fandom party is a problem, because (a) rookie fan creators don't know what to expect from the experience, and (b) people who don't get accepted to a zine can feel very hurt and excluded.
Nobody wants to badmouth zine mods, of course! But even a short post about "fanzines aren't necessarily the communities I thought they would be" has value, I think.