Why We Need Small Archives
I posted some data yesterday on my tumblr about commenting rates during the first two weeks of B2MeM versus on AO3 and the SWG. You can read the post for the full data and analysis, but the short version is that commenting on B2MeM is much better than on the other two sites (and commenting on the SWG is slightly better than on AO3). Based on my research on commenting behavior to this point, I believe this is due to community, namely that when there is a strong sense of community on a site, commenting is more frequent.
This opened a discussion on the value of large versus small archives. And I'm wearying of trying to have a conversation in the tiny comment boxes Tumblr allows us (although I'm grateful that comments are at least a universal option now! this is a major reason why I have been able to enjoy Tumblr more lately). Let me start by saying what my ideal fandom would look like.
I have supported AO3 since the idea was first proposed on LiveJournal all those years ago. I think that a large multifandom archive is an essential part of the fandom, and all the better if it is a nonprofit like AO3. However, I do not think that this should be the only option. In the Tolkien fandom especially, a big part of our culture has always been building independent sites and archives. At one point, there were more than sixty Tolkien-specific archives, and this does not count communities established on social media sites like LiveJournal and Yahoo! Groups, nor does it count sites for resources, author's personal websites, etc. And I continue to believe that Tolkien-specific sites run by Tolkien fans should be a part of our fandom.
So I suppose this post becomes my manifesto about why I think small archives are important to fandom, particularly the Tolkienfic fandom.
Community
A biggest reason is community. AO3 is not a community anymore than New York City is a community. There may be communities within those larger entities, but the entity itself does not function as a community and in fact has few characteristics that promote community-building and social interaction. Aside from comments, on AO3, it is nearly impossible to communicate with another person. However, if you look at the Tolkien archives that existed in the mid-2000s, nearly all of them provided means for social interaction in more informal settings than public comments. Multiple sites had discussion forums, and nearly every site had a mailing list or journal community associated with it. These became ways to not only talk with each other but also to organize events and gatherings. I remember the Henneth-Annun mailing list being used to promote official events and challenges and informal gatherings like insta-drabbling sessions, as well as impromptu on-list challenges ("lobbing plotbunnies"). Even though I was not particularly active on the HASA archive, I made a lot of friends through these more informal social channels.
AO3 is not providing these features, and it is not fair to expect them to. AO3 is an archive, not a social site, and they are meeting their stated mission just fine. But they were never intended to be the only show in town. I remember early conversations, when the OTW was just getting off the ground and owners of small archives were worried about AO3 dominating the landscape, and reassurances from those working on the project that not only was that not their intent, but they planned to facilitate independent archives by making their codebase open-source (which they have indeed done, although last I checked, it is nothing that can be used out of the box and so is in fact of limited use to a fan wanting to start their own site).
I think it's important to keep in mind the historical context in which the OTW was founded and AO3 was built. This was a time when "fic fandom" occupied both large multifandom sites (usually Fanfiction.net) in addition to a wealth of smaller, fan-built options, often located on social media sites (like LiveJournal). The idea that AO3 was supposed to evolve us away from smaller, fan-run sites onto a single multifandom archive and that this was the intent of the founders or would have been construed by them as a positive development--much less an ideal--is not accurate, based on what I observed of the discussions around establishing the OTW (as well as having been active and a site owner myself at this period in time). I think that, had those founders been provided with a time machine to overhear some of the conversations I have where I essentially defend the right of my Silmarillion archive to even exist now that there is AO3, then that would have given them a big moment of pause in considering how best to go about the establishment of AO3.
Because lately there has been a movement that I can describe only as anti-small archive. Not "I'm not interested in using a site other than AO3"--there have always been authors in the Tolkienfic fandom who use only multifandom archives and are quite happy there, and if you can't follow your happiness in fandom, then where can you really?--but an attempt to devalue the worth of existing small archives and discourage fans who might want to build their own. In my own experience, this has taken the shape in protests against my hope of financing a Drupal module for a fiction archive. At the moment, it is difficult to build a small archive, since the only open-source option available (eFiction) is outdated and, as far as I can tell, not being actively developed anymore. My hope--which I have mentioned a few times on Tumblr--is to raise money across fandom to pay a Drupal developer to build an archive module. Since Russa has already modified the Book module to function as an archive on our Drupal test site, I have no reason to believe that this is an unattainable goal, and it would once again allow fans to set up an archive with almost no web design experience, in addition to having at their fingertips the hundreds of open-source Drupal modules that already exist (e.g., blogs, image galleries, video and multimedia capability, forums). Like AO3, eFiction was archive software; Drupal would allow fans to build archives that also have features that facilitate community.
Diversification
Perhaps foremost after community is diversification. I am not even talking about fandom cultures at this point--although I think this is important too and will discuss this later--but the same reason that stockbrokers tell their clients to diversify their investments. Or (because I'm scaring myself a little right now), to put it in my socialist hillbilly terms, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." (Seriously, I dropped a basket of eggs in the chicken pen the other week and it was a nasty mess.)
There is lately a sense that I find frankly disturbing that the OTW--and therefore AO3--are invincible. They're not. The irony is that one of the arguments trotted out against small archives is that they can fail. I remember when HASA closed and, on Tumblr, someone tagged one of the announcements about it along the lines of "this is the problem with small archives."
No, this is a risk for any and all--yes ALL--sites on the Internet. Since I first started using the Internet in the early 2000s, how many big sites have I seen collapse, close, or become graveyards? Let's see ... MySpace. Geocities. Remember when AOL was the service everyone used? Multiple LiveJournal clones (GreatestJournal, JournalFen, InsaneJournal) have closed or become obsolete. LiveJournal itself is a graveyard. Yahoo! Groups is a graveyard. These were once fandom hubs; ten years ago, imagining them desolate would have been unthinkable. Yahoo! itself is failing.
For that matter, let's go back even further into fandom history. How many people enthusiastically stapling zines at parties in the '70s and '80s would have imagined a fandom where zines were virtually nonexistent?
If I have learned anything in my years in fandom, it is that we have to proceed with the assumption that what is the center of our fannish world at any given moment might not be a decade from now--and might not even exist anymore.
AO3 is in no way immune to this. In fact, I fear it is more prone to failure than a smaller site. Look at how many small sites linger after going dead when a larger site would have folded long before ... because it costs a lot to run a large site. In 2016, AO3 cost just under $95,000 to run. When I renewed the SWG's hosting at the beginning of the year, it cost me a little over $150. I have been through spells of near-poverty in the decade of the SWG archive's existence and never not been able to pay that bill. Sometimes I haven't been able to pay for the full year at once! But the lights have been kept on for more than ten years by one person.
Were I not able to afford it? Donations equaling 40¢ a day would do the trick. In comparison, using the 2016 figures, AO3 needs $260 a day to stay open.
How many of you can drop $260 right now to save a site you love from closing? How many of you can dig out 40¢ to give me, probably from the cushions on your couch?
For a site as popular as AO3, $260 a day is not a large lift. But look again at that list of sites above that have become obsolete or disappeared altogether. Many of them were live, beating hearts in fandom not very long ago. Some of them, like LiveJournal, were mismanaged into obsolescence, but others, including the zines, were simply victims of rapidly evolving technology that they couldn't keep up with. That the SWG is outdated gets brought up often in these discussions of AO3's superiority, again with a puzzling lack of awareness that, in ten years, AO3 will also be outdated. Where will fandom have moved in that time? What technology that we can't even imagine in this moment will have become commonplace and supplanted what are the live beating hearts of our fandom right now? Will AO3 be able to keep up with these changes? If not, if fans decide they'd rather exist elsewhere or doing something other than writing fic online, that near-six-figure annual bill becomes a bit more problematic.
Remember those eggs I dropped in the chicken run the other week and the mess they made? If the lights go out on a small site archiving a few hundred or thousand fanworks, that is a loss, don't get me wrong. As a fandom historian, I grieve the sites that have gone dark without warning (not least of all because they could have been saved with minimal expense and effort). But if we have chosen to put all of our fanworks on a single site and the lights go off? That is a loss of art, fan cultures, and fan history that is nothing short of tragic. Do you ever stop to think that, just like we study the Romantics and the Harlem Renaissance and the beat poets, literature students two hundred years from now well may study us? What we do matters; it deserves to have every possible chance to survive. This is why we diversify: Why we crosspost, even when it is a pain in the ass, even on sites where we don't get feedback. It is essential that we do not trust all of our fandom history in one place. It matters too much.
Staff and Policies
The point is sometimes made that AO3 has a larger staff and policies that guide use of the archive. I have to admit that this puzzles me because small archives also have policies and usually have staffs as well. I cannot think of a single Tolkien-specific archive that was run by a single person. The SWG currently has four moderators who have full access to the archive and server, as well as several volunteers who help out with other aspects of running the site.
We also have policies. Again, I cannot think of a single small group--I'm going to go beyond sites and even include groups like LJ communities and Yahoo! mailing lists--that do not have policies guiding what is acceptable on that group. Having been part of the building and management of multiple fandom groups, great care is taken in writing these policies and in making sure they are justly enacted for all participants. When, on occasion, there is a perception of unfairness, that group tends to go down in flames: witness the Tolkienfic fandom's Mithril Awards. The idea that small archives and groups are run solely on the whims of one person is patently false.
Now a site or group's policies may not be to your liking. As shocking as it may be to those for whom AO3 is their happy space, AO3's policies are not to everyone's liking. This is, again, an argument for diversification, not against it.
Putting my fandom historian hat on again, I'd make the case that our fandom's history shows that much of our fandom's progress away from gatekeeping and intolerance was facilitated in a large part by its fandom-specific sites. The first archives established in the era of the LotR film trilogy often had restrictive policies around what could be posted and gatekeeping measures, often aimed at keeping out film fans. Some of these policies were troubling: bans on slash or "Mary Sue" (which often equal bans on OFCs, which given the dearth of women in the legendarium, translates to a ban on women as characters). Gatekeeping policies were sometimes used to keep out interpretations of the text that were disfavored. (This is where my blog's name The Heretic Loremaster comes from, after a vocal group of us who self-styled as "heretics" for promoting in our stories and meta what were then divergent readings of the books.) I think it's important to note that these characteristics were not due to small archives, however, but a long-standing part of the Tolkien fandom when it was walloped by the simultaneous rise of home Internet use and the Jackson LotR films. The Tolkien fandom, until relatively recently (see below), has always had a conservative, exclusionary attitude, especially toward new fans and fans who bring atypical readings of the texts. (
heartofoshun has done research on this; see our New York Tolkien Conference presentation Borders of the Fictional World for more on this.) The early-mid-2000s were the fandom behaving as it always had, magnified by the Internet and the demographic boom brought about by the LotR films.
But if you look at the archives that were built in 2004 onward, they represent a perceptible backlash against these kinds of policies. LotRFanfiction.com was the first and was established as a place that would accept what was either against the rules on other archives or unlikely to make it past the gatekeepers. Faerie--which was built as a reaction to LotRFF being sold--maintains this culture of openness. The SWG was also founded on policies of openness and "don't like, don't read" that gave it the teeth to crack down on the bullying of authors that was happening on other sites. Many Paths to Tread (MPTT) positioned itself as a genfic site actively trying to avoid the whiff of homophobia present on other genfic and het sites that were anti-slash. None of these sites used gatekeeping practices, and all of them were to varying degrees responding to the policies on other sites that their founders found problematic to the extent that they wanted to work to change them.
With the exception of LotRFF, all of these sites are among the few Tolkienfic archives still active today.
The reason the rush of fans who came into the fandom with the Hobbit films found a fandom that wasn't mean-minded, canatic, and intolerant--which is what the fandom was often like when it was found by LotR film fans like me--is in a large part because of these sites and their leadership in believing in and showing a different way that the fandom could operate. There was a long history of intolerance and exclusivity, but we shook that off by building sites that showed a better way. With the exception of the founder of LotRFF, I know all of the founders and mods on those post-2004 sites, and all of them are committed to a fandom that is welcoming and open to all, even when the "all" are bringing ideas and fanworks that are contrary to their own personal tastes and beliefs. But this is the power of owning and controlling your own spaces: You build to your ideals and members choose based on their own ideals. An an archive owner myself, my research into Tolkienfic archives has been humbling in this regard. It is the members of sites who determine the site's culture more than its admins (who determine its policies). The dystopian vision of a Tolkien fandom fragmented into a bunch of quibbling cliques would come to pass only if we allowed it to. And if it did? If we returned to earlier attitudes of intolerance and exclusivity? Then we have a bigger problem than where to archive our work.
Accountability
The Tolkienfic fandom is one of the oldest fandoms in existence. Tolkienfic existed before Star Trek "invented" fanfic. The Tolkienfic fandom is also unique in many ways from the media fandoms that scholars are usually talking about when they discuss fanfiction and fandom. Part of this is because we are not only a book-based fandom but one that is driven by an extraordinarily complex canon in the way that media fandoms and even most other book-based fandoms are not.
We have unique fan cultures, and we also have unique needs. We deserve to have those cultures respected and needs met.
Accountability ties in somewhat with the issues surrounding policies and, in particular, the mistaken idea that small archives are run like mad power-hungry monarchies at the whim of a single owner. This ties in too to my humbling discovery in my research that my site is more driven by its members than it is by me. All of this--our culture and needs and the power of a site's members--ties together into accountability.
As a small archive owner, I am extremely accountable to my members because the SWG does not exist without them. If I mess up, if I fail to respond to their needs, then they will take their stories and their community elsewhere. I have no delusions that they need me; rather, I need them.
The problem with larger sites is that this power dynamic is reversed. AO3 does not need any one of us, or even any single fandom. Therefore, they have little compelling reason to respond to our needs. However, I would say that there are definitely fans who are at the point where they would say they have a need for AO3. Their fannish experience would be significantly diminished without it. They will put up with less than ideal conditions or decisions they don't agree with because they lose more by leaving AO3 than they do by settling.
This is similar to the present situation with Facebook and the revelations of how much user data they have sold for skeevy purposes. How many people are utterly disgusted and enraged with Facebook right now ... but continue to use Facebook because the loss they would experience if they left is unthinkable?
Again, this is to be expected with large sites. I do not think it is a liability of AO3 in particular, and I certainly don't think that it is anything that they would use nefariously. However, when you have a fandom with a culture as deep and unique as ours, we stand to suffer losses if we consolidate onto a single site that can't respond to our culture, history, and needs. And AO3 sometimes simply can't. There are thousands of other fandoms on that site, and its governance cannot be guided by the needs of one.
As far as I can tell, the Silmarillion fandom asked AO3 to respect our autonomy just once, in considering how characters would be tagged, or the infamous piped tag controversy. Not only are the tags almost impossible to read, but they were unfriendly to newcomers to the legendarium, and as I touch on above, our fandom has an ugly history where our behavior toward newcomers is concerned. But AO3 either ignored or was ignorant of that history. They did what they wanted, which they would ostensibly defend as the best choice for the site. It was not, however, the best choice for our fandom. But we could do nothing about it. What we wanted simply didn't matter to them.
I think this is where it comes down, for me, to a key philosophical difference. Some people feel comfy and safe when they think of massive entities. I just don't get this. I like having a voice. I like being part of decisions made in communities that matter to me. I know I won't always get my way, but I want to know that I have a chance to be heard. I like to know that what I value has a chance to shape my community, if others feel the way I do. This simply cannot be accomplished in large organizations, in all but the rarest of instances. Certainly, as a member of a small fandom, I don't expect that I matter to AO3. Even larger multifandom initiatives, like Long Live Feedback, have struggled to effect meaningful change with the AO3 admins. Again, this is not to denigrate AO3, but they are a massive site trying to serve and keep happy tens of thousands of users. Simply put, they are not accountable to us, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to hand over the entirety our fandom's culture and history to them.
Empowerment
Here, I need to take a brief moment to acknowledge also that the ability to build and manage your own fandom space is empowering. As noted above, many of us in the Tolkienfic community did just that to protest and eventually overcome aspects of the fandom culture with which we disagreed. I sometimes remark, only half-joking, that there was a period in time where every Tolkien fandom group was created at least partly to respond to the shortcomings of another Tolkien fandom group.
The impact on my own life of having the privilege to build and own my own site cannot be understated. I was underconfident and shy when I started the SWG. I probably should have never started the SWG--I was ridiculously unqualified in so many ways--but I did, and in the past twelve years of running it, I have learned so much about leadership, innovation, and collaboration. I have ultimately gained confidence enough to bring those skills into my real life work, where I have made a real difference in the lives of the children and families I serve. Participating in fandom has given much to me, but it is building and running the SWG that has allowed me to become the person I am today.
There is something empowering--almost magical--about being able to stand up and say, "What I do matters. It matters so much that I and my community deserve our own space and self-governance to make our community what we imagine and hope it to be." This is why, even though we solved the archive problem on Drupal for the SWG, I want to see a specific Drupal fiction archive module built: because I want others to have that same opportunity to build something that shows that what they do matters.
Culture
And speaking of culture ... that is the last point in my manifesto, for now anyway.
heartofoshun and I did a presentation two years ago at the New York Tolkien Conference about the cultures on Tolkienfic archives. Earlier in the year, while working on survey data for my article "Attainable Vistas," I'd had a true moment of serendipity. No, it wasn't quite the importance of discovering penicillin, but it did start me down a new path of inquiry that I might otherwise have never taken. In short, when running data where I thought I knew the outcome, I discovered that the outcome varied quite a bit based on the archive a participant used. When Oshun and I did our presentation, I explored this more fully and discovered that nearly all of the major Tolkienfic archives (defined as a site used by 5% or more of participating authors, fifteen sites in total) had unique cultural characteristics.
This research quantified what I'd always felt as a member of and visitor to those sites. Some places were a good fit for me and others weren't, for reasons that I couldn't always put my finger on why. MPTT, for example, was a site where I heartily approved of its mission. I was the tech mod there for years and considered my comods and many of the other members there to be friends. But I never felt like my work fit there.
Even as I knew different sites "felt" different, I never expected to quantify that. That has been the biggest surprise and delight of my research to date.
I also strongly believe that all of those different cultures matter. They deserve to be honored and preserved, allowed spaces where fans can totally geek out and squee with other fans who love what they love. I hear concerns over fragmentation, but as a Tolkien fan who has always had a niche interest (The Silmarillion), the joy and relief at being able to create and write freely about what interests me, without worrying that I am boring almost everyone around me or making a nuisance of myself with something that doesn't interest most people, is impossible to understate. Nor do I think that fragmentation is an unsurpassable obstacle. The Tolkien fandom was "fragmented" for most of its existence and, to an extent, still is. You visited and read and chatted on sites that matched your interests and where you felt comfortable with the culture.
I don't think anyone reading this would agree that diverse cultural groups should be thrown together in a setting where that culture cannot survive. Yet that is precisely what some would like to see happen in our fandom, to our distinct cultural groups. Who benefits from that?
And furthermore, something that may come as a surprise to those who see AO3 as a neutral space that equally welcomes everyone: It's not. In my research, AO3 had its own culture, just like the Tolkien-specific sites did. If you're comfortable in that culture, you probably don't see it, just like I don't see the culture in the SWG in the same way that many others do. AO3's policies may welcome everyone, but remember too that humbling lesson from my research: Policy only does so much. It is the members of a site who ultimately determine its culture.
This brings me back to my vision at the beginning of this manifesto. Fandom needs both the large and small. I appreciate the need for a centralized multifandom archive. We have always had that, since fanfic moved online, and I think it is very important that it continue to exist. And I think it is even more important that it continue to exist via the OTW, as a nonprofit entity. I absolutely understand why people like and need AO3. They have my wholehearted support.
But we need our small archives too, and I would ask, if not for their support, then at least their respect in understanding why we want to continue to exist. Small archives meet needs that AO3 does not and frankly cannot. And just as an ecosystem is healthiest when diverse and not a monoculture, our fandom is healthiest when we have diverse options, even if everyone will not utilize them. (That's okay!) For this reason, I will continue to fight for the recognition of the value and survival of the Tolkienfic fandom's independent sites and archives, and I will continue to work to make it possible for people who want to build fandom sites and archives to have the tools available to do so.
This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/430199.html
This opened a discussion on the value of large versus small archives. And I'm wearying of trying to have a conversation in the tiny comment boxes Tumblr allows us (although I'm grateful that comments are at least a universal option now! this is a major reason why I have been able to enjoy Tumblr more lately). Let me start by saying what my ideal fandom would look like.
I have supported AO3 since the idea was first proposed on LiveJournal all those years ago. I think that a large multifandom archive is an essential part of the fandom, and all the better if it is a nonprofit like AO3. However, I do not think that this should be the only option. In the Tolkien fandom especially, a big part of our culture has always been building independent sites and archives. At one point, there were more than sixty Tolkien-specific archives, and this does not count communities established on social media sites like LiveJournal and Yahoo! Groups, nor does it count sites for resources, author's personal websites, etc. And I continue to believe that Tolkien-specific sites run by Tolkien fans should be a part of our fandom.
So I suppose this post becomes my manifesto about why I think small archives are important to fandom, particularly the Tolkienfic fandom.
Community
A biggest reason is community. AO3 is not a community anymore than New York City is a community. There may be communities within those larger entities, but the entity itself does not function as a community and in fact has few characteristics that promote community-building and social interaction. Aside from comments, on AO3, it is nearly impossible to communicate with another person. However, if you look at the Tolkien archives that existed in the mid-2000s, nearly all of them provided means for social interaction in more informal settings than public comments. Multiple sites had discussion forums, and nearly every site had a mailing list or journal community associated with it. These became ways to not only talk with each other but also to organize events and gatherings. I remember the Henneth-Annun mailing list being used to promote official events and challenges and informal gatherings like insta-drabbling sessions, as well as impromptu on-list challenges ("lobbing plotbunnies"). Even though I was not particularly active on the HASA archive, I made a lot of friends through these more informal social channels.
AO3 is not providing these features, and it is not fair to expect them to. AO3 is an archive, not a social site, and they are meeting their stated mission just fine. But they were never intended to be the only show in town. I remember early conversations, when the OTW was just getting off the ground and owners of small archives were worried about AO3 dominating the landscape, and reassurances from those working on the project that not only was that not their intent, but they planned to facilitate independent archives by making their codebase open-source (which they have indeed done, although last I checked, it is nothing that can be used out of the box and so is in fact of limited use to a fan wanting to start their own site).
I think it's important to keep in mind the historical context in which the OTW was founded and AO3 was built. This was a time when "fic fandom" occupied both large multifandom sites (usually Fanfiction.net) in addition to a wealth of smaller, fan-built options, often located on social media sites (like LiveJournal). The idea that AO3 was supposed to evolve us away from smaller, fan-run sites onto a single multifandom archive and that this was the intent of the founders or would have been construed by them as a positive development--much less an ideal--is not accurate, based on what I observed of the discussions around establishing the OTW (as well as having been active and a site owner myself at this period in time). I think that, had those founders been provided with a time machine to overhear some of the conversations I have where I essentially defend the right of my Silmarillion archive to even exist now that there is AO3, then that would have given them a big moment of pause in considering how best to go about the establishment of AO3.
Because lately there has been a movement that I can describe only as anti-small archive. Not "I'm not interested in using a site other than AO3"--there have always been authors in the Tolkienfic fandom who use only multifandom archives and are quite happy there, and if you can't follow your happiness in fandom, then where can you really?--but an attempt to devalue the worth of existing small archives and discourage fans who might want to build their own. In my own experience, this has taken the shape in protests against my hope of financing a Drupal module for a fiction archive. At the moment, it is difficult to build a small archive, since the only open-source option available (eFiction) is outdated and, as far as I can tell, not being actively developed anymore. My hope--which I have mentioned a few times on Tumblr--is to raise money across fandom to pay a Drupal developer to build an archive module. Since Russa has already modified the Book module to function as an archive on our Drupal test site, I have no reason to believe that this is an unattainable goal, and it would once again allow fans to set up an archive with almost no web design experience, in addition to having at their fingertips the hundreds of open-source Drupal modules that already exist (e.g., blogs, image galleries, video and multimedia capability, forums). Like AO3, eFiction was archive software; Drupal would allow fans to build archives that also have features that facilitate community.
Diversification
Perhaps foremost after community is diversification. I am not even talking about fandom cultures at this point--although I think this is important too and will discuss this later--but the same reason that stockbrokers tell their clients to diversify their investments. Or (because I'm scaring myself a little right now), to put it in my socialist hillbilly terms, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." (Seriously, I dropped a basket of eggs in the chicken pen the other week and it was a nasty mess.)
There is lately a sense that I find frankly disturbing that the OTW--and therefore AO3--are invincible. They're not. The irony is that one of the arguments trotted out against small archives is that they can fail. I remember when HASA closed and, on Tumblr, someone tagged one of the announcements about it along the lines of "this is the problem with small archives."
No, this is a risk for any and all--yes ALL--sites on the Internet. Since I first started using the Internet in the early 2000s, how many big sites have I seen collapse, close, or become graveyards? Let's see ... MySpace. Geocities. Remember when AOL was the service everyone used? Multiple LiveJournal clones (GreatestJournal, JournalFen, InsaneJournal) have closed or become obsolete. LiveJournal itself is a graveyard. Yahoo! Groups is a graveyard. These were once fandom hubs; ten years ago, imagining them desolate would have been unthinkable. Yahoo! itself is failing.
For that matter, let's go back even further into fandom history. How many people enthusiastically stapling zines at parties in the '70s and '80s would have imagined a fandom where zines were virtually nonexistent?
If I have learned anything in my years in fandom, it is that we have to proceed with the assumption that what is the center of our fannish world at any given moment might not be a decade from now--and might not even exist anymore.
AO3 is in no way immune to this. In fact, I fear it is more prone to failure than a smaller site. Look at how many small sites linger after going dead when a larger site would have folded long before ... because it costs a lot to run a large site. In 2016, AO3 cost just under $95,000 to run. When I renewed the SWG's hosting at the beginning of the year, it cost me a little over $150. I have been through spells of near-poverty in the decade of the SWG archive's existence and never not been able to pay that bill. Sometimes I haven't been able to pay for the full year at once! But the lights have been kept on for more than ten years by one person.
Were I not able to afford it? Donations equaling 40¢ a day would do the trick. In comparison, using the 2016 figures, AO3 needs $260 a day to stay open.
How many of you can drop $260 right now to save a site you love from closing? How many of you can dig out 40¢ to give me, probably from the cushions on your couch?
For a site as popular as AO3, $260 a day is not a large lift. But look again at that list of sites above that have become obsolete or disappeared altogether. Many of them were live, beating hearts in fandom not very long ago. Some of them, like LiveJournal, were mismanaged into obsolescence, but others, including the zines, were simply victims of rapidly evolving technology that they couldn't keep up with. That the SWG is outdated gets brought up often in these discussions of AO3's superiority, again with a puzzling lack of awareness that, in ten years, AO3 will also be outdated. Where will fandom have moved in that time? What technology that we can't even imagine in this moment will have become commonplace and supplanted what are the live beating hearts of our fandom right now? Will AO3 be able to keep up with these changes? If not, if fans decide they'd rather exist elsewhere or doing something other than writing fic online, that near-six-figure annual bill becomes a bit more problematic.
Remember those eggs I dropped in the chicken run the other week and the mess they made? If the lights go out on a small site archiving a few hundred or thousand fanworks, that is a loss, don't get me wrong. As a fandom historian, I grieve the sites that have gone dark without warning (not least of all because they could have been saved with minimal expense and effort). But if we have chosen to put all of our fanworks on a single site and the lights go off? That is a loss of art, fan cultures, and fan history that is nothing short of tragic. Do you ever stop to think that, just like we study the Romantics and the Harlem Renaissance and the beat poets, literature students two hundred years from now well may study us? What we do matters; it deserves to have every possible chance to survive. This is why we diversify: Why we crosspost, even when it is a pain in the ass, even on sites where we don't get feedback. It is essential that we do not trust all of our fandom history in one place. It matters too much.
Staff and Policies
The point is sometimes made that AO3 has a larger staff and policies that guide use of the archive. I have to admit that this puzzles me because small archives also have policies and usually have staffs as well. I cannot think of a single Tolkien-specific archive that was run by a single person. The SWG currently has four moderators who have full access to the archive and server, as well as several volunteers who help out with other aspects of running the site.
We also have policies. Again, I cannot think of a single small group--I'm going to go beyond sites and even include groups like LJ communities and Yahoo! mailing lists--that do not have policies guiding what is acceptable on that group. Having been part of the building and management of multiple fandom groups, great care is taken in writing these policies and in making sure they are justly enacted for all participants. When, on occasion, there is a perception of unfairness, that group tends to go down in flames: witness the Tolkienfic fandom's Mithril Awards. The idea that small archives and groups are run solely on the whims of one person is patently false.
Now a site or group's policies may not be to your liking. As shocking as it may be to those for whom AO3 is their happy space, AO3's policies are not to everyone's liking. This is, again, an argument for diversification, not against it.
Putting my fandom historian hat on again, I'd make the case that our fandom's history shows that much of our fandom's progress away from gatekeeping and intolerance was facilitated in a large part by its fandom-specific sites. The first archives established in the era of the LotR film trilogy often had restrictive policies around what could be posted and gatekeeping measures, often aimed at keeping out film fans. Some of these policies were troubling: bans on slash or "Mary Sue" (which often equal bans on OFCs, which given the dearth of women in the legendarium, translates to a ban on women as characters). Gatekeeping policies were sometimes used to keep out interpretations of the text that were disfavored. (This is where my blog's name The Heretic Loremaster comes from, after a vocal group of us who self-styled as "heretics" for promoting in our stories and meta what were then divergent readings of the books.) I think it's important to note that these characteristics were not due to small archives, however, but a long-standing part of the Tolkien fandom when it was walloped by the simultaneous rise of home Internet use and the Jackson LotR films. The Tolkien fandom, until relatively recently (see below), has always had a conservative, exclusionary attitude, especially toward new fans and fans who bring atypical readings of the texts. (
heartofoshun has done research on this; see our New York Tolkien Conference presentation Borders of the Fictional World for more on this.) The early-mid-2000s were the fandom behaving as it always had, magnified by the Internet and the demographic boom brought about by the LotR films.
But if you look at the archives that were built in 2004 onward, they represent a perceptible backlash against these kinds of policies. LotRFanfiction.com was the first and was established as a place that would accept what was either against the rules on other archives or unlikely to make it past the gatekeepers. Faerie--which was built as a reaction to LotRFF being sold--maintains this culture of openness. The SWG was also founded on policies of openness and "don't like, don't read" that gave it the teeth to crack down on the bullying of authors that was happening on other sites. Many Paths to Tread (MPTT) positioned itself as a genfic site actively trying to avoid the whiff of homophobia present on other genfic and het sites that were anti-slash. None of these sites used gatekeeping practices, and all of them were to varying degrees responding to the policies on other sites that their founders found problematic to the extent that they wanted to work to change them.
With the exception of LotRFF, all of these sites are among the few Tolkienfic archives still active today.
The reason the rush of fans who came into the fandom with the Hobbit films found a fandom that wasn't mean-minded, canatic, and intolerant--which is what the fandom was often like when it was found by LotR film fans like me--is in a large part because of these sites and their leadership in believing in and showing a different way that the fandom could operate. There was a long history of intolerance and exclusivity, but we shook that off by building sites that showed a better way. With the exception of the founder of LotRFF, I know all of the founders and mods on those post-2004 sites, and all of them are committed to a fandom that is welcoming and open to all, even when the "all" are bringing ideas and fanworks that are contrary to their own personal tastes and beliefs. But this is the power of owning and controlling your own spaces: You build to your ideals and members choose based on their own ideals. An an archive owner myself, my research into Tolkienfic archives has been humbling in this regard. It is the members of sites who determine the site's culture more than its admins (who determine its policies). The dystopian vision of a Tolkien fandom fragmented into a bunch of quibbling cliques would come to pass only if we allowed it to. And if it did? If we returned to earlier attitudes of intolerance and exclusivity? Then we have a bigger problem than where to archive our work.
Accountability
The Tolkienfic fandom is one of the oldest fandoms in existence. Tolkienfic existed before Star Trek "invented" fanfic. The Tolkienfic fandom is also unique in many ways from the media fandoms that scholars are usually talking about when they discuss fanfiction and fandom. Part of this is because we are not only a book-based fandom but one that is driven by an extraordinarily complex canon in the way that media fandoms and even most other book-based fandoms are not.
We have unique fan cultures, and we also have unique needs. We deserve to have those cultures respected and needs met.
Accountability ties in somewhat with the issues surrounding policies and, in particular, the mistaken idea that small archives are run like mad power-hungry monarchies at the whim of a single owner. This ties in too to my humbling discovery in my research that my site is more driven by its members than it is by me. All of this--our culture and needs and the power of a site's members--ties together into accountability.
As a small archive owner, I am extremely accountable to my members because the SWG does not exist without them. If I mess up, if I fail to respond to their needs, then they will take their stories and their community elsewhere. I have no delusions that they need me; rather, I need them.
The problem with larger sites is that this power dynamic is reversed. AO3 does not need any one of us, or even any single fandom. Therefore, they have little compelling reason to respond to our needs. However, I would say that there are definitely fans who are at the point where they would say they have a need for AO3. Their fannish experience would be significantly diminished without it. They will put up with less than ideal conditions or decisions they don't agree with because they lose more by leaving AO3 than they do by settling.
This is similar to the present situation with Facebook and the revelations of how much user data they have sold for skeevy purposes. How many people are utterly disgusted and enraged with Facebook right now ... but continue to use Facebook because the loss they would experience if they left is unthinkable?
Again, this is to be expected with large sites. I do not think it is a liability of AO3 in particular, and I certainly don't think that it is anything that they would use nefariously. However, when you have a fandom with a culture as deep and unique as ours, we stand to suffer losses if we consolidate onto a single site that can't respond to our culture, history, and needs. And AO3 sometimes simply can't. There are thousands of other fandoms on that site, and its governance cannot be guided by the needs of one.
As far as I can tell, the Silmarillion fandom asked AO3 to respect our autonomy just once, in considering how characters would be tagged, or the infamous piped tag controversy. Not only are the tags almost impossible to read, but they were unfriendly to newcomers to the legendarium, and as I touch on above, our fandom has an ugly history where our behavior toward newcomers is concerned. But AO3 either ignored or was ignorant of that history. They did what they wanted, which they would ostensibly defend as the best choice for the site. It was not, however, the best choice for our fandom. But we could do nothing about it. What we wanted simply didn't matter to them.
I think this is where it comes down, for me, to a key philosophical difference. Some people feel comfy and safe when they think of massive entities. I just don't get this. I like having a voice. I like being part of decisions made in communities that matter to me. I know I won't always get my way, but I want to know that I have a chance to be heard. I like to know that what I value has a chance to shape my community, if others feel the way I do. This simply cannot be accomplished in large organizations, in all but the rarest of instances. Certainly, as a member of a small fandom, I don't expect that I matter to AO3. Even larger multifandom initiatives, like Long Live Feedback, have struggled to effect meaningful change with the AO3 admins. Again, this is not to denigrate AO3, but they are a massive site trying to serve and keep happy tens of thousands of users. Simply put, they are not accountable to us, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to hand over the entirety our fandom's culture and history to them.
Empowerment
Here, I need to take a brief moment to acknowledge also that the ability to build and manage your own fandom space is empowering. As noted above, many of us in the Tolkienfic community did just that to protest and eventually overcome aspects of the fandom culture with which we disagreed. I sometimes remark, only half-joking, that there was a period in time where every Tolkien fandom group was created at least partly to respond to the shortcomings of another Tolkien fandom group.
The impact on my own life of having the privilege to build and own my own site cannot be understated. I was underconfident and shy when I started the SWG. I probably should have never started the SWG--I was ridiculously unqualified in so many ways--but I did, and in the past twelve years of running it, I have learned so much about leadership, innovation, and collaboration. I have ultimately gained confidence enough to bring those skills into my real life work, where I have made a real difference in the lives of the children and families I serve. Participating in fandom has given much to me, but it is building and running the SWG that has allowed me to become the person I am today.
There is something empowering--almost magical--about being able to stand up and say, "What I do matters. It matters so much that I and my community deserve our own space and self-governance to make our community what we imagine and hope it to be." This is why, even though we solved the archive problem on Drupal for the SWG, I want to see a specific Drupal fiction archive module built: because I want others to have that same opportunity to build something that shows that what they do matters.
Culture
And speaking of culture ... that is the last point in my manifesto, for now anyway.
heartofoshun and I did a presentation two years ago at the New York Tolkien Conference about the cultures on Tolkienfic archives. Earlier in the year, while working on survey data for my article "Attainable Vistas," I'd had a true moment of serendipity. No, it wasn't quite the importance of discovering penicillin, but it did start me down a new path of inquiry that I might otherwise have never taken. In short, when running data where I thought I knew the outcome, I discovered that the outcome varied quite a bit based on the archive a participant used. When Oshun and I did our presentation, I explored this more fully and discovered that nearly all of the major Tolkienfic archives (defined as a site used by 5% or more of participating authors, fifteen sites in total) had unique cultural characteristics.
This research quantified what I'd always felt as a member of and visitor to those sites. Some places were a good fit for me and others weren't, for reasons that I couldn't always put my finger on why. MPTT, for example, was a site where I heartily approved of its mission. I was the tech mod there for years and considered my comods and many of the other members there to be friends. But I never felt like my work fit there.
Even as I knew different sites "felt" different, I never expected to quantify that. That has been the biggest surprise and delight of my research to date.
I also strongly believe that all of those different cultures matter. They deserve to be honored and preserved, allowed spaces where fans can totally geek out and squee with other fans who love what they love. I hear concerns over fragmentation, but as a Tolkien fan who has always had a niche interest (The Silmarillion), the joy and relief at being able to create and write freely about what interests me, without worrying that I am boring almost everyone around me or making a nuisance of myself with something that doesn't interest most people, is impossible to understate. Nor do I think that fragmentation is an unsurpassable obstacle. The Tolkien fandom was "fragmented" for most of its existence and, to an extent, still is. You visited and read and chatted on sites that matched your interests and where you felt comfortable with the culture.
I don't think anyone reading this would agree that diverse cultural groups should be thrown together in a setting where that culture cannot survive. Yet that is precisely what some would like to see happen in our fandom, to our distinct cultural groups. Who benefits from that?
And furthermore, something that may come as a surprise to those who see AO3 as a neutral space that equally welcomes everyone: It's not. In my research, AO3 had its own culture, just like the Tolkien-specific sites did. If you're comfortable in that culture, you probably don't see it, just like I don't see the culture in the SWG in the same way that many others do. AO3's policies may welcome everyone, but remember too that humbling lesson from my research: Policy only does so much. It is the members of a site who ultimately determine its culture.
This brings me back to my vision at the beginning of this manifesto. Fandom needs both the large and small. I appreciate the need for a centralized multifandom archive. We have always had that, since fanfic moved online, and I think it is very important that it continue to exist. And I think it is even more important that it continue to exist via the OTW, as a nonprofit entity. I absolutely understand why people like and need AO3. They have my wholehearted support.
But we need our small archives too, and I would ask, if not for their support, then at least their respect in understanding why we want to continue to exist. Small archives meet needs that AO3 does not and frankly cannot. And just as an ecosystem is healthiest when diverse and not a monoculture, our fandom is healthiest when we have diverse options, even if everyone will not utilize them. (That's okay!) For this reason, I will continue to fight for the recognition of the value and survival of the Tolkienfic fandom's independent sites and archives, and I will continue to work to make it possible for people who want to build fandom sites and archives to have the tools available to do so.
This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/430199.html