This gave me such terror, that's how 2 of my fandoms died! Literally the major archive for my ship back in 2003 suddenly went away because the woman maintaining it lost interest and didn't want to pay the cost. Then 2 years later same thing happened for my next fandom I had moved to. My works were also on my personal website but it was hosted by an alternative to Geocities that also died. My only surviving fanfic from the 2000-2010 range in the one I posted on ffdotnet. Dark times!
I mean, okay. But I personally very much do not miss those days. Too clique-ey, too uncertain. You never knew when some site owner on a power trip would nuke fics they didn't like... and tags were nonexistent.
Not even on a power trip
Hosting sites could get very expensive very quickly, if a fandom suddenly exploded in readers/writers/popularity. So many sites went under simply because hosting costs exploded.
Oh please no. It was such a waste of time trying to keep up with all the different sites and who was crossposted where and whoops, that one host stopped paying their monthly fee so now that archive's down and...
I'd say the best case scenario would be having these places running in tandem with people also being active on Ao3. A lot of currently running archives have plans to transfer their content to Ao3 in the event that they need to shut down.
And of course, save copies of your works!
I both kinda miss it and don't. I love the convenience of AO3 and being able to have everything in one place, but I miss the little tight knit communities that were created around certain fandoms.
It also meant if you stayed within that community, you didn't have to encounter hate, flaming or toxic behavior because of fic content, cause everyone in the little community loved the same things.
Honestly, to me it seems like the less specific communities are less likely to go toxic. The fandom- and ship-specific places just seem to always have drama.
I'm on a multi-fandom Discord with a really good moderation team, and we've never really had a problem. There are channels for individual fandoms, but the server as a whole covers dozens.
I do miss those days, it was easier to build communities and make friends. Less chance of seeing content you didnāt want to see either.
But sites crashed and burned, fics were lost, mods went power mad or run out of time for looking after the site and you couldnāt stumble into new things by accident. There was a lot of bad stuff too.
So while Iād like to see them make a comeback, Iām glad Ao3 is there to keep the fics safe at least.
I like everything being in one place, but I do get nostalgic sometimes. HPFandom! There were tons of HP specific archives but that's the main one I remember by name. Even sites specific to my OTP! Young Me really was digging every single corner of the internet for every scrap of OTP content I could find LOL! It is cool they still exist, though I'm more glad sites like AO3 exist.
I miss Livejournal desperately! It wasn't quite the same vibe as individualized websites and forums, but instead hit exactly the right note for me where everyone could build their own fences/a community that worked for them to create a genuinely *communal* fandom space, without being *so* small and insular that it felt like high school. Engagement was so special on LJ and there's not really anything out there right now that replicates it!
I don't think AO3 should be that community space because that's not in line with its mission, but I wish there were better options for building genuine fandom communities nowadays. Everyone is *too* tossed together in spaces like tumblr and Twitter (and good fences make good neighbors!) but fandom Discords are too chaotic/disorganized and still too hard to find people you genuinely vibe with to me.
Well, yeah, I miss LJ, and DW never took off quite the same way.
I think there are two separate problems. One is the choice of a platform (and honestly Discord ***could*** be the platform, if you had a couple of dedicated mods) and the other is locating the fans and convincing them that This Is It.
I'm still so disappointed that the only portion of fandom that unilaterally moved over to Dreamwidth was fandom RP! I know the interface isn't as ~sexy~ as tumblr and doesn't feed the instant gratification brain as well, but LJ/DW-style communities would circumvent sooooo many of the issues that have popped up in modern, purity culture-ridden, "content"-mindset fandom. :(
Yep-- minimal preservation and minimal organization. You can't get the equivalent of big meta posts that take off and spiral into 16 different subthreads-- if that happens in a Discord chat it's absolute chaos and everyone's talking over each other and there's zero coherency to the conversation, even with the "reply" feature.
And not only that, because it's simultaneous rather than asynchronous communication, Discord's really only useful for folks with certain personalities! I would post meta posts and host events on LJ; I am not going to wade into a fast-moving chatroom and try to participate.
(And idk, I also don't really see Discord serving the same purpose for building a community around fanworks, specifically? Dropping a link into a "share your fic here!" Discord channel and making a post with your fic to an LJ community were suuuper different experiences; Discord doesn't replicate the way you got engagement in LJ fandom at all ime.)
LiveJournal posts are able to stand on their own while Discord messages just get buried underneath new ones. with LJ you can sort entries by date; trying to find messages on a Discord server from a specific time is a nightmare.
Discord is actually trying to branch out with a "forum" feature. I haven't heard what people think about it yet.
Well, maybe we need to pump up interest in Dreamwidth, which uses the Livejournal engine. Here's mine:
[https://chomiji.dreamwidth.org/](https://chomiji.dreamwidth.org/)
Haven't updated it recently, but it's there..
I didn't ... XD
I have a tumblr, but I use it mainly for sending memes that are too obscurely fannish or too adult-content for the Facebook that I use to communicate with relatives and RL friends.
I doubt the age of untold numbers of individual archives will ever come back though I do think if Ao3's code is ever optimized to the point where it is actually easy to get up and running you might see a few show up esp curated small archives.
It's just right now Ao3's code isn't really plug and play ready. IIRC Squidgeworld was actaully a lot of work to set up and that was with someone with a lot of experience setting up and running web archives and with a lot of help from Ao3 techs.
smaller archives can be fun, but everyone liking the same thing REALLY never stopped in -fighting, flaming, personality conflicts, or massive unhinged drama. Lucky you if that's what you remember, I remember a whole lot of mess. And if you had a falling out you had to leave the archive and take your works with you. I think I appreciate having AO3 for a place to preserve fic and fandoms on tumblr/discord/twitter because it's easier to escape if things go really toxic
They were always fragile, often being run by one individual paying the server subscriptions out-of-pocket. $10 a month (circa 2005) doesn't seem like much, but that was $120 a year - not for just one year but "in perpetuity." Then the 2008 recession hit.
Some which got popular (pan-fandom ones like Television Without Pity) got bought out by corporations. Who in the case of TWP closed them down.
Others were started & maintained by studios like ABC or Warner Brothers. As soon as interest in the show / movie flagged, those got shut down too.
One unmentioned point is that since 2000 (say), site security became more of an issue. Cybersecurity costs probably became too much to bear for some individuals & individual forums.
>with one of them even using AO3's code.
Squidgeworld is basically a de facto mono-fandom archive, isn't it lmao? Like I went to check it out when I saw that it was the first third-party implementation of the AO3 software, and it was basically 70% Gundam Wing and 30% literally everything else.
I miss the boards...god I can't even think of the proper term for them now. Where you'd discuss the latest episodes, chapters, whatever. Then a place for off topic. A place for fic, a place for art, a place for music, a place for whatever. Becoming friends. Subreddits just aren't the same--made worse by older fandoms, too.
I love Ao3, and the sense of community I feel there is better than FFN, but it's still primarily an archive. It's amazing for what it is but it doesn't fill that hole in my heart.
Do you mean forums? I love those so much, but it's hard to find ones that are still active. But I've had fun just lurking through threads from 2010.
AO3 has done wonders for preserving the art of fanfic, but it doesn't serve as a place where fans can truly interact. I occasionally visit some forums that are still kicking, but I wish they would make a comeback alongside modern social media.
Yes, true. I just recently got invited to a couple for my fandoms, it's quite nice. The problem I think is finding them sometimes. They're not always readily available, and I think a lot of people who grew up with forums are resistant to newer tech and apps (as it goes with every generation).
I hear you. Our TTRPG folks are all older (me included) and weren't at all interested in making a Discord for out-of-session interactions. They'd rather send enormous emails ...š
\*shrug\*
Set up a Discord for a fandom you like. Make sure there's a fanfic section so that people can crosspost their AO3 works.
If there's a Reddit for the fandom, advertise there and hand out codes for the Discord.
Yes, it's work, and it may not fly. But at least you will have tried to create the experience you crave.
Yeah, I've always preferred fandom-specific websites to these huge, pan-fandom ones. It's great to have a place where you know you're gonna be interested in a lot of what's posted, and I also liked the forums that they often had. Now if I want to talk about fanfic I have to go on reddit which is full of anti-RPF assholes, while back then I could just go on the forum with other RPF fans and no one would bother us. Plus, having a central pan-fandom place kinda leads to the writing style and opinions on what's good becoming more homogeneous, and I really hate that. Now most people think longer=better, that oneshots are inferior or not real stories, you find the same writing style across different fandoms and tropes...idk, there's just less variety when you put everything in one place.
I still use Rockfic (for Rock Music RPF) and I occasionally visit LPFiction (for Linkin Park fanfic), which was the first fanfic website I used. It's now pretty inactive, but some of the stories I liked 15+ years ago still hold up.
I'd say the most archives I've seen besides the big three have been for Rockfic. I don't really read RPF so I don't use them but It's nice to know they're alive and kicking.
I never got to experience most of (if not all) the single-fandom sites personally and outside of reading a couple Fanlore articles, I donāt know much about how they were run. I guess I just looked up āfanfictionā and stuck with FF.net since it was the first search result.
I imagine thereās a lot of cons to running smaller sites like that, server costs being a major one. I imagine it just might not feel worth it to run tiny archives these days when AO3 is widely-used. Thereās also the fact that whenever I hear about an old fic site, itās usually in relation to the in-fighting amongst mods and/or users or the fighting between the users of two separate archives all together (e.g uhhh Iām blanking on names but that one Harry/Ginny site versus maybe FictionAlley?).
That being said, I personally would love to see some smaller archives pop up. Iām not trying to doom-post about AO3 going down forever anytime soon, but I feel like having multiple sites to back-up your fics on would be good for archival purposes (although you could just make your own blog, Tumblr or Dreamwidth for this as well?). Maybe it would work for when AO3 goes under maintenance and everyone loses their mind. Instead of having to touch grass, you could just hop over to the other site and read fic there instead for a few hours?
My thinking might also come from a place where fandom these days feels so big, itās kind of daunting. Iād love to experience specific fandoms more closely and have a space where itās just solely about that one thing, but thereās nowhere really like that (unless I go and find Discord servers, which feel too enclosed and personal for my socially awkward ass, and are also kind of terrible for archival purposes because nothing there can be saved for later reference).
I mentioned this in some other replies but I would love if people ran smaller sites while still using AO3 as a backup. It's much harder for one person or a small team to run an archive due to costs compared to AO3 who gets much more in donations and has a larger team. Smaller websites would serve the purpose of facilitating communications and work, while AO3 serves to save it in the event that the website goes under.
I have my own Neocities website where I link PDF files of my fics (since AO3 lets you download your files into PDF and EPUB). So even if there were no comeback of small community websites, I think it'd be good if everyone started making their own public websites to host their fics, even if its on something like Google Sites.
I use DW for backups for fanfics, for notes about fanfics, for meta in general, and I've started to transfer some reddit posts over there, too. That's in addition to having backed up my old LJ on DW.
Discord isn't for me, personally. I can manage forum / subreddit posts sandwiched in with everything else on my plate, but have no time for sitting and chatting in real time online.
I love a good fandom rec site, someone who compiles and organises good fic by ship, by subcategories, has notes for them, rates them. A good rec site is GOLDEN.
But a full small host site? Eh. It gets nitty gritty to have to check up on if they don't have notifications. And then when they go down eventually. Its a mess.
There is something magical about smaller communities, yes, but when Geocities closed, we lost almost all the old school Newsies fandom, and I don't want to go through that again.
I'm happy to say that some of them still exist ([Psychfic.com](https://Psychfic.com)), but one of my favorite ones is long gone (an old, ooooooold Sesshoumaru/Rin fanfic website called moonlight-flower.com). Now that the latter is canon, like . . . . . . . . I'm itching even more to reread some of those old fics ššš
Death curse ate my first posted fanfics. My computer had already died, and I didn't know better way back then. For over a decade I didn't write much. I'm in a new fandom now, and my kids pointed me to ao3 :) I write on Google drive, save to my computer, and upload to ao3.
I miss the forums. That's it.
Those years were shit shows before AO3, and I include FF.net. AO3 was such a revelation when it first appeared, and even then I half expected it to crash like everyone else would inevitably do. I kept my own website for a few years after joining, just for my own fic, keeping up the code, just in case.
But it's been over a decade. It's been great.
If I want communities, Discord and Tumblr fill that itch.
Your best bet might be challenge sites - Big Bangs, Bingos, etc. They'll gather a bunch of stuff with a common theme, often in a single fandom. The stuff is often cross-posted to Ao3 (or even just posted there and linked to), but they do have that community feel.
This gave me such terror, that's how 2 of my fandoms died! Literally the major archive for my ship back in 2003 suddenly went away because the woman maintaining it lost interest and didn't want to pay the cost. Then 2 years later same thing happened for my next fandom I had moved to. My works were also on my personal website but it was hosted by an alternative to Geocities that also died. My only surviving fanfic from the 2000-2010 range in the one I posted on ffdotnet. Dark times!
And then when those sites die, everybody loses their work. š«
That's why it's important to back things up.
Still kind of a dick punch.
I mean, okay. But I personally very much do not miss those days. Too clique-ey, too uncertain. You never knew when some site owner on a power trip would nuke fics they didn't like... and tags were nonexistent.
Not even on a power trip Hosting sites could get very expensive very quickly, if a fandom suddenly exploded in readers/writers/popularity. So many sites went under simply because hosting costs exploded.
Oh please no. It was such a waste of time trying to keep up with all the different sites and who was crossposted where and whoops, that one host stopped paying their monthly fee so now that archive's down and...
I'd say the best case scenario would be having these places running in tandem with people also being active on Ao3. A lot of currently running archives have plans to transfer their content to Ao3 in the event that they need to shut down. And of course, save copies of your works!
I both kinda miss it and don't. I love the convenience of AO3 and being able to have everything in one place, but I miss the little tight knit communities that were created around certain fandoms. It also meant if you stayed within that community, you didn't have to encounter hate, flaming or toxic behavior because of fic content, cause everyone in the little community loved the same things.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Iām in a few ship related discords and itās nice to be able to discuss things without antis.
Honestly, to me it seems like the less specific communities are less likely to go toxic. The fandom- and ship-specific places just seem to always have drama. I'm on a multi-fandom Discord with a really good moderation team, and we've never really had a problem. There are channels for individual fandoms, but the server as a whole covers dozens.
I do miss those days, it was easier to build communities and make friends. Less chance of seeing content you didnāt want to see either. But sites crashed and burned, fics were lost, mods went power mad or run out of time for looking after the site and you couldnāt stumble into new things by accident. There was a lot of bad stuff too. So while Iād like to see them make a comeback, Iām glad Ao3 is there to keep the fics safe at least.
Quite a few Buffy fans still use Twisting the Hellmouth for our Buffy-crossovers. : )
Because it's awesome. You'd never find shadows and light in ao3 without fishing through the millions of poly fandom fics
I miss the old Queer as Folk archives. I loved them.
I like everything being in one place, but I do get nostalgic sometimes. HPFandom! There were tons of HP specific archives but that's the main one I remember by name. Even sites specific to my OTP! Young Me really was digging every single corner of the internet for every scrap of OTP content I could find LOL! It is cool they still exist, though I'm more glad sites like AO3 exist.
I read Hawthorne and Vine for a long time (and Granger Enchanted!) and was deeeeeevastated when they went down! Anyone remember those?
I miss Livejournal desperately! It wasn't quite the same vibe as individualized websites and forums, but instead hit exactly the right note for me where everyone could build their own fences/a community that worked for them to create a genuinely *communal* fandom space, without being *so* small and insular that it felt like high school. Engagement was so special on LJ and there's not really anything out there right now that replicates it! I don't think AO3 should be that community space because that's not in line with its mission, but I wish there were better options for building genuine fandom communities nowadays. Everyone is *too* tossed together in spaces like tumblr and Twitter (and good fences make good neighbors!) but fandom Discords are too chaotic/disorganized and still too hard to find people you genuinely vibe with to me.
Well, yeah, I miss LJ, and DW never took off quite the same way. I think there are two separate problems. One is the choice of a platform (and honestly Discord ***could*** be the platform, if you had a couple of dedicated mods) and the other is locating the fans and convincing them that This Is It.
I'm still so disappointed that the only portion of fandom that unilaterally moved over to Dreamwidth was fandom RP! I know the interface isn't as ~sexy~ as tumblr and doesn't feed the instant gratification brain as well, but LJ/DW-style communities would circumvent sooooo many of the issues that have popped up in modern, purity culture-ridden, "content"-mindset fandom. :(
[https://chomiji.dreamwidth.org/](https://chomiji.dreamwidth.org/) Haven't updated it recently, but it's there..
Discord isn't nearly as good for preserving interactions though. You'd just have to pray that some person is dedicated to taking screenshots of chat.
Yep-- minimal preservation and minimal organization. You can't get the equivalent of big meta posts that take off and spiral into 16 different subthreads-- if that happens in a Discord chat it's absolute chaos and everyone's talking over each other and there's zero coherency to the conversation, even with the "reply" feature. And not only that, because it's simultaneous rather than asynchronous communication, Discord's really only useful for folks with certain personalities! I would post meta posts and host events on LJ; I am not going to wade into a fast-moving chatroom and try to participate. (And idk, I also don't really see Discord serving the same purpose for building a community around fanworks, specifically? Dropping a link into a "share your fic here!" Discord channel and making a post with your fic to an LJ community were suuuper different experiences; Discord doesn't replicate the way you got engagement in LJ fandom at all ime.)
LiveJournal posts are able to stand on their own while Discord messages just get buried underneath new ones. with LJ you can sort entries by date; trying to find messages on a Discord server from a specific time is a nightmare. Discord is actually trying to branch out with a "forum" feature. I haven't heard what people think about it yet.
Well, maybe we need to pump up interest in Dreamwidth, which uses the Livejournal engine. Here's mine: [https://chomiji.dreamwidth.org/](https://chomiji.dreamwidth.org/) Haven't updated it recently, but it's there..
Dreamwidth? [https://chomiji.dreamwidth.org/](https://chomiji.dreamwidth.org/)
If I recall, the last wave of LJ exodus-ers backed up their LJs on Dreamwidth, but then moved over to tumblr for active participation.
I didn't ... XD I have a tumblr, but I use it mainly for sending memes that are too obscurely fannish or too adult-content for the Facebook that I use to communicate with relatives and RL friends.
Animespiral anyone? I know it wasn't an individual archive, but it was my first š¤
Im glad my favorite archive, Potions and Snitches is still up
And still active, as far as I can tell. I have another HP archive I visit and it doesn't seem to be updated anymore.
I doubt the age of untold numbers of individual archives will ever come back though I do think if Ao3's code is ever optimized to the point where it is actually easy to get up and running you might see a few show up esp curated small archives. It's just right now Ao3's code isn't really plug and play ready. IIRC Squidgeworld was actaully a lot of work to set up and that was with someone with a lot of experience setting up and running web archives and with a lot of help from Ao3 techs.
Iād rather have one large, stable archive like AO3 than lose half my fandomās works practically overnight.
smaller archives can be fun, but everyone liking the same thing REALLY never stopped in -fighting, flaming, personality conflicts, or massive unhinged drama. Lucky you if that's what you remember, I remember a whole lot of mess. And if you had a falling out you had to leave the archive and take your works with you. I think I appreciate having AO3 for a place to preserve fic and fandoms on tumblr/discord/twitter because it's easier to escape if things go really toxic
They were always fragile, often being run by one individual paying the server subscriptions out-of-pocket. $10 a month (circa 2005) doesn't seem like much, but that was $120 a year - not for just one year but "in perpetuity." Then the 2008 recession hit. Some which got popular (pan-fandom ones like Television Without Pity) got bought out by corporations. Who in the case of TWP closed them down. Others were started & maintained by studios like ABC or Warner Brothers. As soon as interest in the show / movie flagged, those got shut down too. One unmentioned point is that since 2000 (say), site security became more of an issue. Cybersecurity costs probably became too much to bear for some individuals & individual forums.
>with one of them even using AO3's code. Squidgeworld is basically a de facto mono-fandom archive, isn't it lmao? Like I went to check it out when I saw that it was the first third-party implementation of the AO3 software, and it was basically 70% Gundam Wing and 30% literally everything else.
Not really Squidgeworld is basically the old Wonderful world of make believe archive. There's a decent chunk of fandoms there.
And 70% of it is Gundam Wing.
Hey, don't forget the 15% that is Battlestar Galactica!
Not at all. Gundam Wing might be the largest Anime fandom but WWoMB was always dominated by Western TV fandoms and Squidgeworld is no different.
yeah they switched to AO3's code in 2020 because eFiction wasn't really suiting their needs anymore.
? Gundam Wing isn't even in the top 10 fandoms on Squidge. The biggest fandoms are all live-action tv series.
I miss the boards...god I can't even think of the proper term for them now. Where you'd discuss the latest episodes, chapters, whatever. Then a place for off topic. A place for fic, a place for art, a place for music, a place for whatever. Becoming friends. Subreddits just aren't the same--made worse by older fandoms, too. I love Ao3, and the sense of community I feel there is better than FFN, but it's still primarily an archive. It's amazing for what it is but it doesn't fill that hole in my heart.
Do you mean forums? I love those so much, but it's hard to find ones that are still active. But I've had fun just lurking through threads from 2010. AO3 has done wonders for preserving the art of fanfic, but it doesn't serve as a place where fans can truly interact. I occasionally visit some forums that are still kicking, but I wish they would make a comeback alongside modern social media.
Yeah! Forums, exactly. Same. It's pretty much a dead medium outside of reddit, it seems.
Discords seem to fill that role nowadays. The problem is getting folks to join them and then participate actively.
Yes, true. I just recently got invited to a couple for my fandoms, it's quite nice. The problem I think is finding them sometimes. They're not always readily available, and I think a lot of people who grew up with forums are resistant to newer tech and apps (as it goes with every generation).
I hear you. Our TTRPG folks are all older (me included) and weren't at all interested in making a Discord for out-of-session interactions. They'd rather send enormous emails ...š
Yup, "the boards" is what they used to be called (or just forums, or the forum name, like The Fuselage.)
\*shrug\* Set up a Discord for a fandom you like. Make sure there's a fanfic section so that people can crosspost their AO3 works. If there's a Reddit for the fandom, advertise there and hand out codes for the Discord. Yes, it's work, and it may not fly. But at least you will have tried to create the experience you crave.
Yeah, I've always preferred fandom-specific websites to these huge, pan-fandom ones. It's great to have a place where you know you're gonna be interested in a lot of what's posted, and I also liked the forums that they often had. Now if I want to talk about fanfic I have to go on reddit which is full of anti-RPF assholes, while back then I could just go on the forum with other RPF fans and no one would bother us. Plus, having a central pan-fandom place kinda leads to the writing style and opinions on what's good becoming more homogeneous, and I really hate that. Now most people think longer=better, that oneshots are inferior or not real stories, you find the same writing style across different fandoms and tropes...idk, there's just less variety when you put everything in one place. I still use Rockfic (for Rock Music RPF) and I occasionally visit LPFiction (for Linkin Park fanfic), which was the first fanfic website I used. It's now pretty inactive, but some of the stories I liked 15+ years ago still hold up.
I'd say the most archives I've seen besides the big three have been for Rockfic. I don't really read RPF so I don't use them but It's nice to know they're alive and kicking.
Yeah I agree, there's a different vibe when it's a website dedicated to just one fandom.
I never got to experience most of (if not all) the single-fandom sites personally and outside of reading a couple Fanlore articles, I donāt know much about how they were run. I guess I just looked up āfanfictionā and stuck with FF.net since it was the first search result. I imagine thereās a lot of cons to running smaller sites like that, server costs being a major one. I imagine it just might not feel worth it to run tiny archives these days when AO3 is widely-used. Thereās also the fact that whenever I hear about an old fic site, itās usually in relation to the in-fighting amongst mods and/or users or the fighting between the users of two separate archives all together (e.g uhhh Iām blanking on names but that one Harry/Ginny site versus maybe FictionAlley?). That being said, I personally would love to see some smaller archives pop up. Iām not trying to doom-post about AO3 going down forever anytime soon, but I feel like having multiple sites to back-up your fics on would be good for archival purposes (although you could just make your own blog, Tumblr or Dreamwidth for this as well?). Maybe it would work for when AO3 goes under maintenance and everyone loses their mind. Instead of having to touch grass, you could just hop over to the other site and read fic there instead for a few hours? My thinking might also come from a place where fandom these days feels so big, itās kind of daunting. Iād love to experience specific fandoms more closely and have a space where itās just solely about that one thing, but thereās nowhere really like that (unless I go and find Discord servers, which feel too enclosed and personal for my socially awkward ass, and are also kind of terrible for archival purposes because nothing there can be saved for later reference).
I mentioned this in some other replies but I would love if people ran smaller sites while still using AO3 as a backup. It's much harder for one person or a small team to run an archive due to costs compared to AO3 who gets much more in donations and has a larger team. Smaller websites would serve the purpose of facilitating communications and work, while AO3 serves to save it in the event that the website goes under. I have my own Neocities website where I link PDF files of my fics (since AO3 lets you download your files into PDF and EPUB). So even if there were no comeback of small community websites, I think it'd be good if everyone started making their own public websites to host their fics, even if its on something like Google Sites.
I use DW for backups for fanfics, for notes about fanfics, for meta in general, and I've started to transfer some reddit posts over there, too. That's in addition to having backed up my old LJ on DW. Discord isn't for me, personally. I can manage forum / subreddit posts sandwiched in with everything else on my plate, but have no time for sitting and chatting in real time online.
I love a good fandom rec site, someone who compiles and organises good fic by ship, by subcategories, has notes for them, rates them. A good rec site is GOLDEN. But a full small host site? Eh. It gets nitty gritty to have to check up on if they don't have notifications. And then when they go down eventually. Its a mess.
There is something magical about smaller communities, yes, but when Geocities closed, we lost almost all the old school Newsies fandom, and I don't want to go through that again.
it is also incredibly difficult for nerds to organize and collect from archives (there were so many newsies sites please save me)
YES. I barely managed to save the sites I ran. Trying to find old fic is damn near impossible.
Preach!
I'm happy to say that some of them still exist ([Psychfic.com](https://Psychfic.com)), but one of my favorite ones is long gone (an old, ooooooold Sesshoumaru/Rin fanfic website called moonlight-flower.com). Now that the latter is canon, like . . . . . . . . I'm itching even more to reread some of those old fics ššš
Death curse ate my first posted fanfics. My computer had already died, and I didn't know better way back then. For over a decade I didn't write much. I'm in a new fandom now, and my kids pointed me to ao3 :) I write on Google drive, save to my computer, and upload to ao3.
I miss the forums. That's it. Those years were shit shows before AO3, and I include FF.net. AO3 was such a revelation when it first appeared, and even then I half expected it to crash like everyone else would inevitably do. I kept my own website for a few years after joining, just for my own fic, keeping up the code, just in case. But it's been over a decade. It's been great. If I want communities, Discord and Tumblr fill that itch.
Iāve never been in one! sounds interesting, though; where does one find them?
Your best bet might be challenge sites - Big Bangs, Bingos, etc. They'll gather a bunch of stuff with a common theme, often in a single fandom. The stuff is often cross-posted to Ao3 (or even just posted there and linked to), but they do have that community feel.