If you don’t like AO3′s core, founding mission–a fan-run archive where you can host your fanwork without having to worry whether it will get yanked when someone decides it’s objectionable–or if you’re upset that they aren’t interested in budging from that mission even when it comes into conflict with values that you, personally, hold dear…
All the code is on Github. You want an archive with all the fandom-tailored bells and whistles that AO3 has, but with a moderation policy for content you find objectionable/offensive/injurious to public morality/in unforgivably poor taste? Nothing’s preventing you from copying the software that runs AO3 and setting up your own archive with it. Well, nothing but the resources and technical skills required to host, deploy, and maintain a complex Rails app. Which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but if having a space free of the shit you’re objecting to is important enough to mobilize like-minded folks for vigilante enforcement via assorted charming forms of social coercion–shaming, harassment, ostracism, smear campaigns, doxxing, suicide-baiting, etc–surely it’s important enough to mobilize like-minded folks to contribute money, volunteer hours, and technical skills towards building the kind of space you actually want to see. The kind of space where you don’t need to resort to the vilest depths of social coercion to enforce a content policy in line with your values, because it can be enforced quietly and civilly by the mods with a few mouse clicks.
And if that’s too high a barrier–if your fandom is awash in stuff you find intolerable and you need a moderated fanwork archive now now now but the technical side might as well be sorcery–five bucks a month and an afternoon of point-and-click setup will get you a WordPress install on shared hosting. WordPress ain’t AO3, but it can be bent into almost any shape you want via plugins, and even a bare-bones default install comes with categories, tags, user accounts, comments, and moderation options. That’s all you need for a basic archive. WordPress.com will even host a small one for you for free. If it fills a need, and people put a fraction of the energy and social capital into promoting it as they currently put into witch-hunting transgressors into submission, it won’t take long for it to hit critical mass within a fandom.
You want a strictly-moderated safe space? The bad news is, AO3 is never going to be that space. You don’t get to demand that the people who sink a bunch of time, skill, and effort into providing it to you (for free–actual free, not “selling your most sensitive data to advertisers” free) throw the entire carefully-considered purpose of their work under the bus whenever that purpose can’t be fully reconciled with the values you think deserve precedence. You want an archive with a different ultimate purpose and a different set of values that override competing considerations, you’ll have to contribute your own time and effort to building it.
But the time and effort required is by no means prohibitive. Fandom has been DIYing shit since forever, and right now the tools are more powerful and accessible than they’ve ever been. So the good news is, if AO3 isn’t doing it for you… it takes less heavy lifting than ever to build an archive of your own.
Censors, fandom police, purity culture diehards… put your money where your mouth is.
But, but … that involves doing actual work besides yelling at people!
In fairness, it would involve a lot of work. I kind of blew it off in the original post as “nothing’s preventing you… well, nothing but the resources and technical skills required to host, deploy, and maintain a complex Rails app.” But from what I understand, the actual infrastructure side of installing and deploying the Archive app doesn’t lend itself to easy replication. There certainly aren’t a bunch of AO3 forks and clones running around out there like there were for LiveJournal.
However! Most of the anti-AO3 grumblers’ use cases don’t require anything near the scale of the Archive. If what you want is an archive for one fandom (or even a handful of related fandoms) where you don’t have to worry about stuff you find objectionable, it is really and truly possible to build that with WordPress on shared hosting for less than $10 a month. Point-and-click, no coding required. Install WordPress, from the WordPress admin panel install Writeshare and a security plugin like Shield, be sure to enable auto-updates, and you’re done.
Hell, let me make an offer: I know I’m a filthy degenerate who’s written and–even worse!–defended all sorts of depraved fic, but I’m also of the opinion that if antis want an archive they can moderate to their standards, they deserve one. Having control over the spaces they frequent instead of having to duke it out over the community standards of a general-purpose, lightly-moderated platform like Tumblr or AO3 might ease some of the pressure driving these conflicts. So. If you want a fic archive for your fandom that’s free of problematic ships, underage, noncon, abuse, etc, I will build and pay for it. I will shell out up to $10/month for shared hosting. I will handle as much of the technical end as you trust me to handle: server, database, domain name, WordPress install and plugins, security. All I ask is that you and/or your friends run the site yourselves and not involve me in any of the moderation decisions (which you wouldn’t want me involved in anyway), and that you crowdfund anything above $10/month if the site gets huge. That’s it. You can even lock me out of the WordPress admin panel if you’re comfortable maintaining and updating WP yourselves.
Fine print: The offer to pay for hosting is only for one site. Anyone after that gets the technical setup offer but not the $10/month. No real-life identity or contact info will be exchanged: I don’t want yours, and I definitely don’t want to share mine. I will do my best to trick out your WordPress install however you like it, but no guarantees that all the features you want will be possible. If either of us wants out after the site is up, I will hand you a full backup of the database/filesystem so that you can install it elsewhere, plus a static HTML archive of the site that you can put up on a free webhost.
Go ahead and reblog this if you want to. I’m curious to see if anyone will bite and be serious enough to get a site up. I know I’m dead serious. I may be a degenerate with terrible opinions, but I’m a professional techie who’s hosted/run/modded a lot of sites in my time and never pulled untrustworthy shit with admin access. I will lock myself out of whatever you want me locked out of. Just let me put my money where your mouth is, because I figure it’s in everyone’s best interests if those who want a safe alternative to AO3 can build one.
FWIW, if you want a safe space following whatever rules you want, you can do that INSIDE the AO3 with zero coding work or hosting cost whatsoever. You don’t even have to convince anyone to cross-post to your site.
1. Recruit people and figure out your moderation standards. (You DO need people who are willing to review stories that might NOT meet those standards to make sure they fit, but you need that no matter where you do it.)
2. Make an AO3 collection and make your recruited people mods (Optionally: make a subcollection for each fandom you have someone to mod.)
3. Each mod looks over whichever new stories you want to review, and then bookmarks the safe ones (Optionally: with whatever tags or description you want), putting the bookmark in the appropriate collection.
4. People who only want to read works that match your moderation standards can just browse that one collection.
This is part of the purpose of bookmarks and why they have tags and notes, so people could follow specific bookmarkers who curate and/or provide the level of information they want to know about stories even if not all authors provide the level of info they want.
Tag: censorship
a critical thought exercise
if you are not in fandom and you see somebody in fandom describing themselves as ‘anti-pedophilia’ or ‘anti-abuse’ I want you to take a moment and apply some critical thinking to that label.
who has to explicitly state they’re anti-child molestation or anti-abusing people? Is this not the normal position? This is like saying ‘I’m anti-cancer’. of course you are. Even actual child molesters and domestic abusers are going to claim they’re morally opposed to what they do in the dark, when they think they can’t get caught.
And if that’s the case, do you really think that self-described ‘antis’ are running into open opposition for their views on pedophilia or incest? do you really honestly think that’s likely? Do you really, honestly think a bunch of people leading otherwise normal lives are going to bat for child sexual abuse and beating your spouse? OPENLY going to bat for it, even?
Is it remotely realistic for there to be such a huge amount of unmasked support for csa, rape, and abuse that people have a reason to label themselves as ‘anti-pedophilia’ or ‘anti-abuse’?
Or … is ‘anti-pedophilia’ actually code for being anti-something else? Something that isn’t utterly reprehensible to the overwhelming majority of people. Something that people would reasonably be willing to go to bat for with their name and reputation attached.
Which is more likely: that fandom is overrun with people who unapologetically and openly support child molestation, incestuous rape, and domestic abuse? Or that people who say they are ‘anti-pedophilia’ – a position so normal, so common it’s hardly worth mentioning – are signaling they oppose something actually controversial to oppose?
Just something to consider.
Interesting concept.
Sorry but am I having a stroke or
so there’s a thing people will do where they want to campaign against something, but if they were honest about what the thing is, they wouldn’t be able to garner much support. they can’t say “I’m against romantic YA literature” or “I’m against porn” because people won’t back them as readily. so what they do is attach a buzzword that people are automatically sensitive to and try to connect the two. “romantic YA lit” becomes “pedophilia”, “porn” becomes “abuse” etc etc, even though they’re not remotely the same thing.
you see this happening all over fandom now, where fanworks exploring dark themes, or adult ships with an age gap, or even real life adults engaging in consensual kink play, are all labeled “pedophilia” in an attempt to make an emotional argument against them. the actual definition of pedophilia, as a serious mental illness causing attraction to prepubescent children, is completely ignored in favor of watering down the word to apply to anything that makes certain people uncomfortable. and this is really dangerous, because it creates alarm fatigue and causes confusion over what this word actually means, which leads to real world cases of child abuse being ignored or misrepresented.
making a big deal about being “anti-pedophilia” is like hollering about being “anti-slavery”; of course you’re anti-slavery, what kind of society do you think you live in where that’s something you need to broadcast! certain people cultivate the impression that fandom is full of abusers and predators so that they can hold the moral high ground and use that leverage to police how others engage with fandom, and they misuse the terms for very serious crimes to do so. that’s what this post is about.
thank you so much for this excellent, level-headed explanation of the point I’m trying to make. (My own addition was less eloquent and much more ‘loud’.)
there are a few reblogs from fandom antis on this post now as well. their reactions have shown me something that I hadn’t fully considered: that many anti-shippers actually buy their own press to the point that they genuinely believe things like:
- saying they are ‘anti-pedophilia’ is the same thing as saying they are against the inappropriate sexualization/objectification of teenagers
- there is no difference between fandom being full of objectified teens wrestling with their own objectification via fanworks and the objectification/sexualization of teenagers in mass media
- it is inappropriate to ever acknowledge or address that adolescents can have sexual desire or sexual feelings and express those feelings
- simply acknowledging that adolescents can have sexual desire or sexual feelings and are capable of expressing those feelings (in fiction or irl) is the same as justifying adults who have inappropriate interactions with adolescents irl
- no matter what the reason for its creation, fanworks containing fictional adolescents having sexual feelings or sexual interactions of any kind are exactly the same as objectification/sexualization of adolescents in mass media and have exactly the same effect
I knew that fandom antis conflate fiction and reality (and fanworks and mass media) because it makes their cause look much more legitimate and builds the assumption that people who defend fanworks are proponents of awful things irl: that’s literally what this post is about. but the reblogs on this post make it clear that fandom antis either can’t or won’t distinguish between a fanfic writer depicting child molestation and a real life pro-contact MAP or a person who collects and consumes cp of real children.
They can’t or won’t tell the difference between a person who has been sexualized and objectified their whole life against their will now sexualizing and objectifying a fictional character (which, being fictional, can’t even be hurt by it) and a person who sits at the top of a media empire and authorizes a line of ads that uses sexually provocative images of real people to sell a product.
They can’t or won’t differentiate between interest in nsfw fanworks about fictional, animated characters based on ‘looking good together’ or ‘interesting character dynamics’ who happen to be assigned adolescent ages, and interest in a porno film that kinks on a character being young and inexperienced.*
(*in the sense that interest in the porno may be founded on objectification/sexualization of teens, just as purity culture kind of drives up the ‘value’ of inexperience and youth and the taboo of sex as inherently corrupting. the porno itself would be a symptom of the problem more than the cause, imho.)
it’s all the same to fandom antis. they believe their own hyperbolic labels because from their POV, all of these things are equally dangerous, equally corruptive, and equally present in fandom. (Which I guess makes sense, seeing as anti-shipper rhetoric is predicated on black and white thinking. when you can only depict concepts in two shades of morality, it’s hard to see or care about nuance.)
Steel Phoenix Studios 