Something that's been confusing me about 'recent' changes in fandom:

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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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>THough I enjoy LJ fandom, having come rather late to the active participation in fandom (after ten years as lurker) I do agree with some of your points. Especially the notion of the archive. TO compromise, I've set up an index post to my own writings, and put that on my LJ userpage. I guess that is akin to having a personal webpage, which has also been part of fandom for awhile, so that isn't so different than the old days.

You're right, that is basically the same as a website. And if everybody did that, and all those individual LJ fic indices were properly collected in a central place, I could live with that, too.

>I personally hate the format of conversations on email listservs and have always found it confusing, both in "real time" and when playing catch-up, so LJ seemed far superior to that.

I agree. Not a particularly big fan of lists; never was. As I said above to pat_t, they share a lot of the defects of LJ - with none of the advantages of LJ.

>That said, even having never actively experienced the forum format, I do have to say I agree with your point about conversations being more public and getting bumped to the top.

IMO, there's still nothing that beats a good, well-moderated forum for proper, in-depth fannish discussion. I've been very annoyed at Life On Mars fandom in recent weeks, but I do *adore* that the threads that so annoy me on the forum in question in that fandom are still active after, what, six weeks? There are discussions there that have 40+ pages by now... and there are *still* new participants arriving, adding their views and voices.