Something that's been confusing me about 'recent' changes in fandom:
fandom seems to have moved to livejournal almost completely, even for those things that aren't necessarily best served by LJ. In fact, very little except the pure socialising part of fandom - which is, of course, an important part, no contest about that! - is *really* best served by LJ. Forums are better suited for discussion, since they allow
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Well, it's not *much* less accessible to people who are active in LJ fandom, know the communities, have some people from the fandom friended etc. But a *lot* of readers simply aren't active in LJ fandom (and I mean *really* a lot; we just don't see them because, well: they're not on LJ. But they're out there, in their ten and hundred thousands), don't know the right communities for the fandoms they're interested in, etc.
Speaking just from my own experience: I'm active in quite a few fandoms, and those that I'm really active in I also have a fairly good overview of on LJ. So, no problem there, or at least not *much* of a problem. *However*, I also enjoy reading in about ten or so other fandoms occasionally - not enough to investigate their structure and organisation in detail, but enough to check out central archives on a semi-regular basis. Anything that goes beyond that occasional checking of archives is, franky, too much work for fandoms I have only a marginal interest in. But I'm always aware that with the way fandom is organised now, I'm probably missing out on most of the really interesting fic in those fandoms (and I have fairly specific reading kinks in all of them, too, so only an extremely small percentage of fics suit my interests there to begin with). You say why don't I check LJ communities for those fandoms instead of checking archives? Simple: a bi-annual visit to a central archive affords me the opportunity to use the search function and check specifically for fics that fit my criteria. True, a *really* well-organised community that makes good use of tags and memories will have a comparable level of searchability. But for the time being, most archives still beat most communities in terms of navigability and searchability. Also, identifying *the* central fic community/ies in a big fandom you're not familiar with and only want to check for a certain type of fic every now and then is considerably more work than entering 'BigFandomName fanfic archive' in Google.
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I'd put money on there being a comparable number of people who don't know the archives for the fandoms they're interested in. I should know, I'm one of them; I've gotten into new fandoms, checked Google to see if there was a fandom-specific archive, failed, and floundered helplessly.
And then gone to LJ, typed in the fandom of my choice into "Interests", and found communities dedicated to it. As far as I know, there isn't a Black Donnellys-specific archive around, and the FFN pickings are laughable to say the least; donnellysfic, on the other hand, was easy for me to find, it remains easy to navigate, I can sort through it by the characters I want, the pairings I want, the ratings I want, or the authors I want, and when I post my fic there I can be reasonably confident that a good chunk of the fandom is going to be offered the choice of reading it.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just horribly, horribly biased because I tend towards small fandoms. My biggest fandom is probably Doctor Who, which does have a "main" fic archive, whofic.com--but I don't trust the quality there, I have difficulty navigating the site, and most of the interesting fics will pop up on dwfiction or who_daily sooner or later.
In short: I've actually found LJ to be easier to use than most of the archives...for those of my fandoms that have fandom-specific archives.
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By this, I did not mean age, but rather the style of fandom you got used to when you joined fandom. I'm still very influenced by older formats and ways of 'doing fandom' (joined fandom in 1998). Just thought I should clarify that.
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I do think it's an experience thing, though; I've been lucky enough to wind up mostly in well-run communities-as-archive in my LJ fic experience. Were I in an overwhelmingly big fandom (like, say, Harry Potter, which scares the hell out of me) my experiences might (would...) be incredibly different.
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