On finding people in fandom a decade later

[superborb]

As most of you know, I inadvertently hiatused around a decade ago by dint of being unable to make the leap from LJ to tumblr. As a result, when I jumped back in head-first a little over a month ago, I was trying to find people from information left a decade ago. Some folks were curious about what kinds of response rates I got, so here are some (hopefully obscure enough to not erode anyone's privacy) numbers.

Overall, there were 110 individual people who I was friends with on LJ (who still had accounts and hadn't totally deleted in the meantime). Of these, I tried to reach out to 95; the others I didn't feel like I'd been close enough to to justify reaching out or in two sad cases had become very ill or died in the decade preceding.

Overall, I was able to get in contact with 52 people, just over 50%! This was much higher than I expected going in. Of those who responded, 38 were still active in fandom; an additional four (who I could track down to a new fannish home, but didn't respond to my message) were also active in fandom.

The highest response rate came from email or facebook: 17 people out of 22 that I had emails/facebooks for responded. An additional three people were still active on DW. 28 people had left enough forwarding information (or just didn't... change their nyms) that I could find a twitter/tumblr; of these, 23 people responded to my messages. I ended up sending out 42 LJ/DW messages, nine of which had a response.

EDIT: lol omg, 23/28 is a higher percentage than 17/22 please ... ignore that artifact of aggregating the numbers to make them less identifiable. 

Comments

[daegaer]

Man, tumblr both sucks and blows. I look at it once in a million years, just to see some random pictures, have no idea how to find anything and do my best to ignore discussions on it, because - how do? It is beyond my aged intellect. (OK, you reblog and repost - and they repost - and then you do - and then there's a thread that goes on forever? I think? Unless someone else joins in and then you never find where that is? Ahhhhhhhhh.)

[superborb]

Yeah, I've... ended up on twitter basically, bc at least twitter kind of has threaded replies. Also, nearly 4x the number of people are on twitter vs tumblr at this point.

However, the lack of ability to write a post is pretty annoying.