The Fandom Platform Diaspora
Fans, especially the women, have always been technology forward, usually in a way that society disapproves of. Similarly to how the Western world used to believe that novels were corrupting women, the use of the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s created a lot of fear and uncertainty until it could be commercialized and controlled through singular companies. Early fangirls (gn) learned how to make and distribute zines in (relatively) large quantities. When the chance to get on a computer to trade stories instantly came around, it was immediately a popular choice.
The migration of fandom through internet 1.0 to 2.0 to whatever it is now was usually through force. Geocities was an easy way to host your own website - starting in 1994 thousands of fans created dedicated webpages to their fic and art and linked to their friends and maybe a popular Yahoo group, a discussion board or mailing list that could be built around a specific topic. Geocities closed in 2009 and Yahoo groups was wiped, after fading popularity and usage, in 2019. Early internet mostly functioned on forums, there was Kryptonsite for Smallville and other Superman shows, Television Without Pity (TWOP) which was twofold in their dedicated recaps by writers and extensive forum section for fans of each covered show, Harry Potter hubs like Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet - there was even fanfic in the discussion posts of Neopets (before that summarily got shut down. This is word of mouth from a friend.)
No one got "kicked" off these sites but the popularity of LiveJournal in the early 2000s led to a centralization of fandom. Those forums were still fairly healthy for a while but they were single topics. The closest you could get to a wider fandom community was hopping between shows on TWOP and seeing someone you recognize from a different show forum. LJ let you host your own blog and then join communities that other fans had created. Sometimes the communities were based on a specific show or character or ship but there were also wider fandom communities that followed fandom drama or were built to answer anonymous questions or highlight the best fic rec lists. Fandoms built up around the concept of whump or hurt/comfort itself regardless of source text.
This Fanlore page recounts how it was seen a balkanization of fandom due to the ability to create your own friendslist and use blocking, etc. leading to the "you're living in a bubble" argument, but my reasoning is that because all different types of fans and shows are being hosted on the same website, it creates a much larger, 'singular' community.
The strikethrough of LJ in May 2007 (and subsequent boldthrough) has been extensively covered in fandom circles, including a timeline of LJ's entire history. The short of it is that accounts with listed interests such as rape, domestic violence, or BDSM, were suddenly deleted without any notice. Many users pointed out that other tags that weren't sexual, like violence, drugs, and murder, went untouched. Many fans took this as a personal assault on fandom - the home of writers and artists who loved to push boundaries and talk about uncomfortable topics, to work through their trauma with words and create positive spaces and boundaries for stigmatized subcultures.
Thankfully Tumblr was founded in February of 2007. Even more thankfully, recent fan discussion about the state of LJ led to Archive of Our Own (AO3) being ideated in May '07 as well. AO3 is an independently-hosted fan-run site specifically for the tagging and archiving of fanworks. As long as the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works existed, a company that owned a fannish website could not decide to wipe all the stories or shut down all the accounts. It is not the only site for fic, as other show-specific archives do exist and, as I learned today, webrings are back somehow, but it is the hub for a lot of writers. When you join a fandom, you start with AO3 and see where it takes you. Also, it won a Hugo!
On the flip side, Tumblr has been around for 18 years and been declared dead many times. Tumblr's mass exodus in 2018 which lead to the first "dead" phase was a NSFW purge, meaning that all explicit material on the site was banned. One of my posts of Cybermen was flagged for content because of...eyeholes? Unclear. A big meme at the time was the ToC use of "female-presenting nipples."
It seems like people who aren't fans and have a lot of power can't quite wrap their heads around the fact that technologically speaking, fans (along with sex workers and furries) have always been first. You want the internet to be a success? Fans will build your user structures for you out of sheer necessity because that's how badly they want to talk about their blorbo and be freaky. This makes is sound like I want fans to be explicitly used as unpaid labor, which I do not, but some acknowledgment and legal protections would be nice.
As I've said before, the current platform of fandom is a bit of a question mark. It seems like the core of weird, niche fandom is staying on Tumblr, but because of all the purges and site changes there's been less of a consensus. Many people who responded to me on Bluesky said they go to reddit for fandom discussion, which qualifies as one of the last Web 1.0 experiences but is historically not hospitable to the fangirl (gn) playing-with-our-dolls point of view.
The history of fandom being kicked off a site when we're no longer considered a desirable demographic leaves many fans bitter and jaded when it comes to social media. Some even feel persecuted to a degree that is most probably unhealthy (but the basis is not entirely unfounded). Inevitably, fandom will exist both on and offline, we have been since the beginning - the question is simply what it will look like next.
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