Curating Your Online Fandom Experience

Curating your online fandom experience is a lot of work. There's the traumatized back button, the sad unfollow button, the angry block button, the meaningful time spent researching apps, userscripts, and extensions that'll both enhance the experience of finding + enjoying content you want and for which shall help you avoid content you can't handle. It's about going into unsafe places, the dark waters of nearly every social media platform, and getting exposed to Stuff That Freaks You Out and metaphorically (or literally!) rolling yourself into a blanket until you're good enough to actually write that Freaky Stuff out in a blacklisted tag field in those aforementioned filter userscripts or extensions you researched for just these occasions. And all of it to find your kind of safe people and safe communities. It's a quest.
Curating your online fandom experience is getting furious or icked or hurt over someone's else's content and then relaxing yourself back to good. It's knowing that to engage with animosity would be a drain. It's reminding yourself that your time is valuable, and consciously re-directing yourself into worthier pursuits: mining your fandom for the things that bring you joy. Simply put, curation of your fannish experience is self care. It takes a lot of maturity and discipline to both start and maintain this kind of responsibility over what you see and do online (and everybody makes mistakes so remember be kind to yourself when that happens : breathe, let things go, move on).
Mindful curation of your fandom experience is gardening. What beautiful flowers and herbs to plant? What kind of fandom content do you love? What blisses you out?
Plant those things in your space, whether it's a blog or community or some social media mash-up of the two. Then with great care work to nurture it all. In this way you sculpt your experience in fandom to be a garden paradise of your own creation.
A big perk of this approach is that as you do this, you'll find many others with similar fandom paradises. Random interactions get better and more positive. You make friends. Everyone flourishes

Cultivating a contented soul in fandom is challenging but it offers increasing returns!

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