FWIW, if you're remotely interested in poking at tumblr, I really have found that it makes all the difference to have one; it's not like journals where you can poke around easily from outside to find things (partly because so many people have tumblr layouts that to my eyes are just pure chaos, with no way for my eyes to know where to look next).
It's still a very different way of approaching fandom, even then, but if you've got your own and you have a dashboard that posts show up on that you can look at whenever you want, it starts to get more familiar. And the ability to track tags across the entire site is fantastic.
Weirdly, it reminds me of the mailing list heyday, when you could just subscribe to all the lists in a given fandom and see everything everyone was saying, unlike journal-based fandom where you have to know what individual people to follow (and you wind up having to see all their posts about everything to get to the one post on the subject you want). I have always, always wanted a way to find all the posts on a given subject on LJ/DW, rather than having to go the more cumbersome route of sorting people by interests and hoping they said something you wanted to read.
So being able to just say "bring me all the X!" on tumblr and have it *work* makes me ridiculously happy. Granted, on tumblr you're more likely to see what screencaps and fanart people like best, rather than what they're saying, but the visual feast is sort of amazing once you adapt to it, and there is some discussion going on, too.
Since it's such a fast-moving, ephemeral sort of place, current fandoms are more active, but I've seen posts for all kinds of things.
But otoh, if it's totally not your cup of tea, I don't think it's as big a deal as it would have been a decade ago; things are so scattered now, there's no such thing as the "main" platform fans are on. I mean, my newest "platform" is really AO3, which is now my go-to place for fanfic, ahead of anyplace else; every now and then I blink to realize that some people haven't shifted over to posting there, and are still only posting on their journals or what have you.
no subject
FWIW, if you're remotely interested in poking at tumblr, I really have found that it makes all the difference to have one; it's not like journals where you can poke around easily from outside to find things (partly because so many people have tumblr layouts that to my eyes are just pure chaos, with no way for my eyes to know where to look next).
It's still a very different way of approaching fandom, even then, but if you've got your own and you have a dashboard that posts show up on that you can look at whenever you want, it starts to get more familiar. And the ability to track tags across the entire site is fantastic.
Weirdly, it reminds me of the mailing list heyday, when you could just subscribe to all the lists in a given fandom and see everything everyone was saying, unlike journal-based fandom where you have to know what individual people to follow (and you wind up having to see all their posts about everything to get to the one post on the subject you want). I have always, always wanted a way to find all the posts on a given subject on LJ/DW, rather than having to go the more cumbersome route of sorting people by interests and hoping they said something you wanted to read.
So being able to just say "bring me all the X!" on tumblr and have it *work* makes me ridiculously happy. Granted, on tumblr you're more likely to see what screencaps and fanart people like best, rather than what they're saying, but the visual feast is sort of amazing once you adapt to it, and there is some discussion going on, too.
Since it's such a fast-moving, ephemeral sort of place, current fandoms are more active, but I've seen posts for all kinds of things.
But otoh, if it's totally not your cup of tea, I don't think it's as big a deal as it would have been a decade ago; things are so scattered now, there's no such thing as the "main" platform fans are on. I mean, my newest "platform" is really AO3, which is now my go-to place for fanfic, ahead of anyplace else; every now and then I blink to realize that some people haven't shifted over to posting there, and are still only posting on their journals or what have you.