#it happened after years of being homeless in fandom spaces and i'm glad for my experiences and my newfound friends

[trashquisitor-shirozora]

hello there shiro! i apologize if this is an odd question but how do you find friends in the dinluke fandom? i have been around for a while now (since the first season to be exact) but i noticed that unless you are not part of a friend group it's hard to find people to talk to or to hang out with. i have a lot of dinluke ideas to talk about but it gets really lonely sometimes. how do you navigate your way in the fandom?

Hello there! No need to apologize! So let me tell you how I ended up knowing the people I do - while browsing the AO3 in the weeks after the high of the Season 2 finale, I saw a fic that was more a massive list of prompts from a Discord community. It had an invite link and so I decided to join. From there, I found people I got along with and we stuck together while also finding new spaces and servers after the first dinluke server imploded. Sometimes, you just have to be brave and message an account that posts about dinluke regularly. I will admit, it was easier for me to find friends and dinluke spaces because I posted fic and art (and opinions on occasion) so prolifically which put me on a lot of people's radars.

But I have to say, it has gotten a LOT harder to find fandom communities and friends since the journaling fandom spaces fell off years ago. Tumblr and Twitter are pretty chaotic and disorganized, and they lack a directory that can point you to various community spaces. The only reason why I've been able to join fandom servers on Discord is because I either found a public invite link or had a friend/acquaintance invite me in, and I've never figured out how one can search Discord for servers. If you've never felt comfortable reaching out to strangers in hopes that their interests jive with yours, it can be incredibly hard to find that lifeline to a place where you can hang with like-minded fans.

I do miss the days of kink memes where you can post anonymously or as your account while engaging with prompts and fills and other posters, and i miss the days of being members of multiple journal communities that cater as generally or specifically to your needs as you like. I miss how much easier it was to find the fandom spaces that catered to your interests. Those sure were the days.

Your ask did inspire me to check if the "dinluke" handle had been claimed by anyone over at Dreamwidth. Anyway, there is now a dinluke community on DWJ. It is currently under construction so membership is moderated and I doubt anything will truly come of it, but it's nice to dream that it could act as a backup space when other spaces become inaccessible or incompatible.

I hope this answers some or all of your questions, Anon. My ask is always open for anything dinluke :)

#shirozora awkwardly responds to asks #dinluke #and some rambling on fandom communities #tbh mine is more a case of stumbling into making friends and finding communities #it happened after years of being homeless in fandom spaces and i'm glad for my experiences and my newfound friends #ANYWAY! that's it from a Fandom Old