mysterytoast (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mysterytoast) wrote2020-09-07 02:46 am
mysterytoast) wrote2020-09-07 02:46 am
Entry tags:
Ode to Natter: The platform adopted by the roleplayer
It is the year 2015, the month November.
Twitter is getting on its legs in mainstream social media, but Tumblr is still by far the most prominent social media platform for fandom. If you need a casual chatting service, you probably use Skype, because Discord barely exists at this point.
Homestuck still has yet to end and is fact in yet another hiatus, the Omegapause. Toby Fox has released an obscure little indie title named Undertale, sparking the sudden skyrocketing of a massive fandom even larger than the monolith that was Homestuck fandom, and which heralds a new association of the term Megalovania with the funny skeleton man and not Vriska Serket.
The scene of fandom drama was in the middle of its transformation into the one we see now, but still wasn't nearly as pervasive.
This post is not about Homestuck, or Undertale, or fandom drama, or Vriska Serket. This post is about a now-twice-defunct social media platform named Natter.
------
Natter in its original form was a very unique social media site. It was a bit like Twitter and its then-140 character limit, but even more stringent - on Natter, you had three words, a hashtag, and the ability to @ a user.
If you hadn’t thought about it beforehand, pretty much the moment you actually tried to use Natter, you would realize that this was not at all a sustainable practice. Brevity, soul, wit and all, but this was taking it a bit too far. To me, at least, it was very much just a gimmicky space to play around with until its inevitable closure.
So. Strict post limit, small user base. What do you get when you expose that to a group of people who participate in the chaotic space that Tumblr is (in)famous for? You receive equally gimmicky results, by which I mean roleplayers.
At least, that’s how it went within the Persona fandom. For all I know this could have been a phenomenon relegated only to this series, though I suspect that Homestuck (canon and fan characters alike) would have easily found a niche on Natter. But that’s besides the point.
Because Natter was a new and obscure platform, a lot of canon-compliant names and nicknames were available to pick up. It gave you more of the illusion that the Natter profile “really” belonged to the character. Someone who appears by the username of “souji” or “soujiseta” seems much more plausible than someone whose username is “wildcardcrusher” or something like that. Even if it wasn’t in character, it might as well have been said by the character, because look at the profile picture and the username! That’s them.
Thus Natter developed a small but tight-knit community of roleplayers devoted to the characters they set their username to, because what else are you going to do with such a gimmicky, minimal platform in a time when most platforms, at the very least, still allowed more words than this one? Natter filled a niche that few sought out and that didn't stand on its own. Even within the Persona roleplaying microcosm, which came to be referred to as Personatter, its highlights were sent back to Tumblr.
This video covers some hijinks of the community:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggAl7kiSKLU
There were ways to circumvent the limits. The three word limit could be extended by placing periods between words (letting.you.extend your post). People used the hashtag both as its intended tagging purpose and as a way to add a bonus fourth word or phrase. A few days into the roleplaying heydays, expletives were banned, so people used the classic accent method. The period circumvention method was removed as well, so people adapted to other buffer characters. By consensus, though, people generally stuck to the proper limits and stayed away from long strings of text.
The manifestation of the semantics on such a limited platform is actually rather fascinating in retrospect. As far as I know there was no official or even widely-circulated style guide to formatting your post - what words were most necessary, where the buffers should go in a post longer than three words, when the hashtag should serve as an extra word or a poignant addition if at all, which buffer character should be used. It was all mostly done individually and by conjecture, and in the case of this community in the corner of a tiny platform where everyone took each other at face value, it managed to find unity within a matter of days.
What happened to Natter? Honestly, I don’t know how exactly its decline occurred over time, because I pretty much forgot about Natter after a short period of using the platform. I didn’t check for a couple weeks, and in that time the Persona community had pretty much dissipated, so I left for good. When I remembered again in 2016 and checked back for sentiment’s sake, the site itself had closed. According to Wikipedia it relaunched in 2017 as a 100-character social media site only to close again a year later, but I never participated in that phase.
Nowadays, there are plenty of tools that make roleplaying a relatively easy venture. There are a number of Discord bots that let you “send” messages as multiple different characters. Twitter (and botless Discord) lets you easily change your display name to pass as a character without actually having to make sure that its unique. Even on Tumblr there was a sort of unofficial format to establish your scenario even if your url wasn’t representative of that character, though there were also sideblogs and especially askblogs dedicated to the craft. The issue mainly lies in how devoted you are in replicating the character.
But in that blip of time, in a corner of the universe, there existed that brief, impassioned rawness of people masquerading as Persona personas and others accepting them as those characters, regardless of the canon or personality-compliance of their post’s contents.
Let Nanako say #fuck.
Twitter is getting on its legs in mainstream social media, but Tumblr is still by far the most prominent social media platform for fandom. If you need a casual chatting service, you probably use Skype, because Discord barely exists at this point.
Homestuck still has yet to end and is fact in yet another hiatus, the Omegapause. Toby Fox has released an obscure little indie title named Undertale, sparking the sudden skyrocketing of a massive fandom even larger than the monolith that was Homestuck fandom, and which heralds a new association of the term Megalovania with the funny skeleton man and not Vriska Serket.
The scene of fandom drama was in the middle of its transformation into the one we see now, but still wasn't nearly as pervasive.
This post is not about Homestuck, or Undertale, or fandom drama, or Vriska Serket. This post is about a now-twice-defunct social media platform named Natter.
------
Natter in its original form was a very unique social media site. It was a bit like Twitter and its then-140 character limit, but even more stringent - on Natter, you had three words, a hashtag, and the ability to @ a user.
If you hadn’t thought about it beforehand, pretty much the moment you actually tried to use Natter, you would realize that this was not at all a sustainable practice. Brevity, soul, wit and all, but this was taking it a bit too far. To me, at least, it was very much just a gimmicky space to play around with until its inevitable closure.
So. Strict post limit, small user base. What do you get when you expose that to a group of people who participate in the chaotic space that Tumblr is (in)famous for? You receive equally gimmicky results, by which I mean roleplayers.
At least, that’s how it went within the Persona fandom. For all I know this could have been a phenomenon relegated only to this series, though I suspect that Homestuck (canon and fan characters alike) would have easily found a niche on Natter. But that’s besides the point.
Because Natter was a new and obscure platform, a lot of canon-compliant names and nicknames were available to pick up. It gave you more of the illusion that the Natter profile “really” belonged to the character. Someone who appears by the username of “souji” or “soujiseta” seems much more plausible than someone whose username is “wildcardcrusher” or something like that. Even if it wasn’t in character, it might as well have been said by the character, because look at the profile picture and the username! That’s them.
Thus Natter developed a small but tight-knit community of roleplayers devoted to the characters they set their username to, because what else are you going to do with such a gimmicky, minimal platform in a time when most platforms, at the very least, still allowed more words than this one? Natter filled a niche that few sought out and that didn't stand on its own. Even within the Persona roleplaying microcosm, which came to be referred to as Personatter, its highlights were sent back to Tumblr.
This video covers some hijinks of the community:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggAl7kiSKLU
There were ways to circumvent the limits. The three word limit could be extended by placing periods between words (letting.you.extend your post). People used the hashtag both as its intended tagging purpose and as a way to add a bonus fourth word or phrase. A few days into the roleplaying heydays, expletives were banned, so people used the classic accent method. The period circumvention method was removed as well, so people adapted to other buffer characters. By consensus, though, people generally stuck to the proper limits and stayed away from long strings of text.
The manifestation of the semantics on such a limited platform is actually rather fascinating in retrospect. As far as I know there was no official or even widely-circulated style guide to formatting your post - what words were most necessary, where the buffers should go in a post longer than three words, when the hashtag should serve as an extra word or a poignant addition if at all, which buffer character should be used. It was all mostly done individually and by conjecture, and in the case of this community in the corner of a tiny platform where everyone took each other at face value, it managed to find unity within a matter of days.
What happened to Natter? Honestly, I don’t know how exactly its decline occurred over time, because I pretty much forgot about Natter after a short period of using the platform. I didn’t check for a couple weeks, and in that time the Persona community had pretty much dissipated, so I left for good. When I remembered again in 2016 and checked back for sentiment’s sake, the site itself had closed. According to Wikipedia it relaunched in 2017 as a 100-character social media site only to close again a year later, but I never participated in that phase.
Nowadays, there are plenty of tools that make roleplaying a relatively easy venture. There are a number of Discord bots that let you “send” messages as multiple different characters. Twitter (and botless Discord) lets you easily change your display name to pass as a character without actually having to make sure that its unique. Even on Tumblr there was a sort of unofficial format to establish your scenario even if your url wasn’t representative of that character, though there were also sideblogs and especially askblogs dedicated to the craft. The issue mainly lies in how devoted you are in replicating the character.
But in that blip of time, in a corner of the universe, there existed that brief, impassioned rawness of people masquerading as Persona personas and others accepting them as those characters, regardless of the canon or personality-compliance of their post’s contents.
Let Nanako say #fuck.