✦ Coming Soon! ✦
What is FanHearth?
FanHearth is a digital third-place site for fandom. A place to share your gifs, your fan edits, your long form commentary, your short thoughts, your essay about how you relate, links to your favorite Ao3 fics, and more.
A home, an old school internet 1.0 community. We're all sick of social media, Web 2.0 that is owned by mega-corps who decide what we can say, when, and how much. Corporations who shadow ban and censor us, for their own arbitrary decisions, based on their anti-queer morals, or profit, or advertisers.
So, let's take fandom back. FanHearth will be a site by fans, for fans, never for profit, never for sale. Inspired by LiveJournal, Tumblr, Ao3, webrings, forums, with a little dose of Threads and Twitter, without the crap and the oversight.
A place to make friends who love what you love, as much as you love it. A place to have fun, and build community. A place where we teach newbie fans the rules of being good fans, of being respectful freaks.
A place that's slightly unhinged in the best way. A place where you don't have to be the online self that your job can find, and you're welcome to share as much or as little of who you are.
FanHearth is meant to be explicitly Queer friendly, and welcome to host mature content (as long as it's not illegal, or abusive. No kiddie porn, no photoshopping real people onto nudes or leaking non-consensual nudes. But Cowboy Shane is welcome forever). Exact explicit and offensive content policy to be determined, but the goal is to allow a wide variety of fan content, that big corps might find offensive, as long as it is not harming anyone.
I am committed that if we fail in building the culture we want, I will shut it down RESPONSIBLY, giving folks a chance to archive their fan works before the shutdown, rather than letting a toxic community thrive. We do this right, or we don't do it at all.
Want to Help?
We'd love help! Especially:
- Thinking about what the site feels like to the user
- Building the culture
- Graphic Design / mock ups / editing
- Advising on fandom history, pitfalls and successes of past fandom communities
- General brainstorming and collaboration
- Helping run or moderate the site
- Frontend software engineering
- Backend software engineering
If you're interested in helping, you can click over to the github (see the footer) and start talking / start an issue or PR, or fill out the google form. I'm going to make some sort of group chat for us to work together, but haven't decided on the platform yet.
I'd also really love input on the AI policy I'm developing. Please fill out the form above if you have input! Thanks
AI Policy
Draft AI policy — comments and discussion welcome
- We acknowledge the significant harms done by AI, to the environment, to the culture, to individuals.
- We find the use of AI for creative purposes appalling. Computers were supposed to help automate the drudgery of our lives, so we can do what humans do best — make art.
- As a tiny software project, run by (so far), 1 person who is a caretaker for children and elders with a full time job, the only way I can make this happen right now is by using AI for coding, at least somewhat.
Therefore, we allow AI to be used for software development of the site. However, we do not allow AI generated art, images, "photographs", or writing. All writing on this site (including these policies) will be human written.
(I know this is a bet, that folks will be ok with me using AI on the software, if we don't let it on the site as art. Unless I get a big team of folks helping me, I cannot singlehandedly make this without AI. Both because I have certain software engineering skills, but not others, and because I have only limited time. And it does make software engineering faster. I would like feedback on this bet)