Why are we surprised?

cesperanza:

flourish:

I try very, very hard not to go all free culture, free/libre software, and fandom-oldbie-get-off-my-lawn on people.

I am suspending this policy for the next few minutes.

Why is anyone surprised that Tumblr banned porn? 

Look, Tumblr is a platform owned by big, faceless corporations. Every other corporate social network bans porn. They aren’t all good at it, and often the terms of banning are foolish (Honestly, “female presenting nipples”?), but they all do the same thing.

THIS HAS LITERALLY HAPPENED BEFORE.

When LiveJournal was shitty to fandom—way back during Strikethrough—people left in droves. And then went to Tumblr, another corporately-owned platform. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…?

But that’s not all. Several times, Fanfiction.net has banned erotica (and then backtracked, and then purged again, ad infinitum). That’s because it’s owned by a random dude who can pick to host whatever he wants, and sometimes what he wants is cleaner than others. 

That’s why fans founded other sites, and then eventually the AO3, which isn’t run by a single person and can’t just be fucked with because someone is having a kinda prudish ~moment~.

The only way to be sure our fanworks won’t be taken down is to own the servers.

I get it. It’s not easy. Not everyone is able to do things themselves. It’s a privilege to have the time and money to figure out things like how to run a Mastodon instance, or (insert whatever other free culture thing here). And that sucks! It sucks a lot. It means that rich white people can afford to fuck with free/libre culture, while the rest of everyone is like, “well, since we can’t spend a lot of time dicking with building our own, guess we have to accept the thing corporations are making for us and feeding us for fake-free.” And that really does suck.

But the world is not fair. Corporations do not care about you. If we want to have nice things, we have to make them ourselves, for our own communities. And people? 

EITHER LEARN FROM THE PAST, OR GET OFF MY LAWN.

We’ll figure it out; we did it once, we’ll (collectively) do it again–all of us, and  this means YOU.  NOT WITHOUT YOU.