I think in the wake of LJ deleting inactive journals, I can in good conscience once again pimp the good old fanfiction archive for everyone
This is a post from 2010 - from my Livejournal. I think a lot of the younger folks have no idea what used to be out there. And don't get me wrong: I like AO3. I was there was it was born and feel very strongly about OTW's aim to protect fandom and fanworks. They're doing a fantastic job.
And yet, we've lost something along the way. We lost all the other archives. Big and small, take-it-all or highly specialised. The archives with the single moderator who kept everything afloat out of his or her own pocket and by sitting in front of a monitor in the middle of the night. We lost a lot of passion and knowledge. We lost variety. We lost the opportunity for people to pick and choose where they want to hang out.
I don't want AO3 to go away again. But I wish that AO3 wouldn't have come at the expanse of all the diversity and variety we had back in the day. Fandom was richer back then. If you need this to be a lesson, it should be this one: Nothing is forever (on the internet). And the older I get the more I realise that we had something special in the early 2000s. When the internet was new and a passion project for so many people, there was true community. There were people sharing knowledge and love for a certain subject with no higher purpose than that: sharing. There were no influencers doing it for the reach and the advertisers and the likes and the user engagement. We did it because for the first time ever, there was a possibility to connect with fans everywhere in the world - I will never forget the awe I felt when I realised I wasn't the only person loving Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was such an epiphany to find all these people out there with the same passions and interests as me. Nowadays, you take your pick of a social media app and you know you'll likely find people there with whom you can align. But back then this was absolutely groundbreaking. It changed everything! For a short while there, it made everything possible.
And then came the corporations with their greed. They told everyone they were going to make things better and easier to use, but instead they've made the internet an extension of their capitalist endeavours. They saw it as unchartered country - and it certainly was that. But like with all unchartered country they didn't come to enjoy the scenery and the beauty in it. They started to dig, because there had to be money in there somewhere. And because it's kind of hard to find money in a place where everyone is just passing on things for free, they started to fence off places while at the same time telling people that these fenced off places were the most important part of the internet to begin with. They've been so successful that people today only seem to know these fenced-off places. They don't even seem to realise that they can build their own places and make them free and welcoming for all. Corporations have taken the idea of the internet, of making available all knowledge at the tip of your fingers, and have buried all that knowledge under tons of ads and pop-ups and apps and places where you have to sign up and sign in. It's now a place where you're never alone, where corporations and governments follow you everywhere, where you leave footsteps and breadcrumbs on every site you visit. No wonder everyone is paranoid today. The internet has virtually become unusable. You can't even google something and expect an actual answer to your question. If you want to know more about this shift, Edward Snowden writes about it in his memoir and he articulates a lot of things that I feel myself (we're roughly the same age).
Back to fanfiction: Yes, there is a project like Open Doors. However, apart from the fact that Open Doors can't and hasn't preserved everything its only aim is in preserving fanwork. It will preserve what has been created for future fans to enjoy. But it can't preserve the community that came with a certain archive. It can't preserve the vibe, the mutually shared love, the dedication. In short, it can't preserve the experience that came with being a part of a certain community, of a certain group. That part of fandom is ultimately lost. The interconnectivity of fandom, the threads that connected websites, journals and archives (through people, stories, shared interests) are ultimately lost.
Open Doors archiving works means egalising them. It means incorporating stories into AO3's big belly. It means that stories that in the past made up an archive, a corpus of work - with bookmarks, comments, a certain design choice or no design choice at all - will be stripped of everything that made up their personality. Way back when you knew exactly where you were: If you visited HASA you knew you'd get high quality LOTR fanfic. If you visited Library of Moria you'd know you'd get all the slash. Stories were and are always embedded in a deeper context. So many archives corresponded with a Yahoogroup. So many Yahoogroups corresponded with a Livejournal. The idea was to give people the choice of "outlet". It was never just about throwing the fic out into the world. It was also always about cheering each other on, commenting, tinhatting, discussing. Essentially, it was what so many are missing today.
And yes, you can still see today on AO3 whether a story was archived from HASA or LOM - no one cares, though. It's nothing but an echo of its former glory, it's like reading an eBook when before you had the print version with endpapers and sprayed edges.
Nothing has replaced this idea of companionship via the internet. Personally, I think that's why so many authors bemoan the lack of interaction with their fanfic nowadays. This has many reasons, of course, but I do think that it's partly because AO3 was never meant as a true community. It's an archive - it's in the name. It's good at what it does, but it's lacking the community aspect. In my mind, nothing and no one picked up the community part of fandom. With Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Yahoogroups, lots of personal websites/archives and a gazillion of forums falling away, it's now up to Tumblr and Discord. And they just don't provide. Why, is maybe another discussion entirely.
