imzy

I have invitations. Wait, that's not all!

When I saw Aja retweeting official Imzy appealing for fandom signups, I went, "Who?" So I googled it. Google found an article that left me squinting a lot but basically conveyed that it is

• A bit like Tumblr, except everything you follow is communities



• Every post has threaded comments (but the threading only nests 3 deep so far. They intend to improve that in future)



• Designed to allow "tipping" for posts - I assume the idea of this is for things like Patreon and Medium; one of their built-in post types is Podcast, so it makes sense for that too. This requires credit card info obvs. Potentially problematic fandom implications also obvs.



• Designed to allow anon posting and linking of multiple aliases under one sign-in.

This is several of the big issues with Tumblr - communities and commenting - but maintaining the WYSIWYG interface of Tumblr; there are image posts too, although they don't look great right now.

Obviously, people are saying "What about the TOS? Are you going to start banning fandom for posting erotica?" and there's a post about that at /fail_fandom_anon over there (which seems to have some useful fandom-specific information and newbie tutorials and the like), here (viewable if you've got an account and are signed in). To quote relevant bits,

Strikethrough? Not going to be banned or deleted without warning

First, we’ve banned very few people, and only when they were explicitly and repeatedly violating our TOS. If we think you’re crossing a line, we’ll try to talk to you first. And even if you do get banned, you still have access to the entire site and all your content, you just can’t do anything new. When content is removed by a leader or staff, it is only removed from public view and is still accessible to you.

NSFW content? Erotic fanfic is okay. We don’t have a problem with this, as long as you make sure you’re still marking everything as NSFW and following the community’s guidelines. [...] Our community policy states that “we define pornography as imagery whose primary or sole purpose is sexual arousal.” Sometimes there is sexually explicit or otherwise graphic content that is a part of a story and is a crucial part of character and plot development in, say, a web comic. That should be okay. A lot of fan art I think tends to fall into this category. If you have fan art about a show, certain characters, even a romance, there will likely be some erotic art that comes up. That’s fine, in that context. This is about celebrating characters, a show, a story, a world, whatever else, and exploring them. And some erotic content just may come up as a part of that. But the erotic part of it is not the “sole or primary purpose.” A community dedicated to pornographic art, on the other hand, isn’t so cool.

This is a staffer answering questions, apparently. Not terrible, at least. It sounds like they are aiming to disallow porn spam and porn blogs, but not nsfw content when it pops up in fanwork comms (if they stick to that).

Anyway, I'm cautiously hopeful.

And I have 199 invites, because when you make an unrestricted community you get a big packet of them. So you can drop your email address in a private message to me if you want one, or you can use the request button on this page (joining the community in question is not required, it'll just get namechecked in the invitation mail)(feel free to join if you like Poirot, though).

As yet there is no major content there, but it might be worth your time to namesquat just in case.