Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom
Communities
CASEY FIESLER, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
BRIANNA DYM, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
When online platforms rise and fall, sometimes communities fade away, and sometimes they pack their bags
and relocate to a new home. To explore the causes and effects of online community migration, we examinetransformative fandom, a longstanding, technology-agnostic community surrounding the creation, sharing,and discussion of creative works based on existing media. For over three decades, community members haveleft and joined many different online spaces, from Usenet to Tumblr to platforms of their own design. Throughanalysis of 28 in-depth interviews and 1,886 survey responses from fandom participants, we traced thesemigrations, the reasons behind them, and their impact on the community. Our findings highlight catalysts for
migration that provide insights into factors that contribute to success and failure of platforms, including issues
surrounding policy, design, and community. Further insights into the disruptive consequences of migrations(such as social fragmentation and lost content) suggest ways that platforms might both support commitment
and better support migration when it occurs.
CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; Computer supported cooperative work.
Additional Key Words and Phrases: fandom; fanfiction; history; online communities; platform design; policy;social media; tumblr; usenet
ACM Reference Format:
Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym. 2020. Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW1, Article 42 (May 2020), 25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3392847

1

INTRODUCTION

Over time, patterns of use for online platforms rise and fall as both technologies and communities
change. Older online spaces where we once spent so much time–Friendster, LiveJournal, MySpace–have now largely fallen to the wayside in favor of Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Eventually,
these too will decline in favor of something new. Social computing scholarship considers thereasons for and impacts of leaving a platform at the individual level [4, 52], though these shifts
can also impact whole communities of people. As the number of platforms in our social ecosystemincreases, entire communities leaving and joining platforms might become more common. Common
examples of migrations of whole communities from one platform to another, however, are typicallysingle instances–e.g., when online games close [45] or when a group of people are forced to leave[9, 44]—that largely focus on the lead-up to an exit rather than relocation and resettlement. In thisAuthors’ addresses: Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Information Science, 1045 18th St. Boulder,
CO, 80309, USA, casey.fiesler@colorado.edu; Brianna Dym, University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Information
Science, ENVD 201, 1060 18th St. Boulder, CO, 80309, USA, brianna.dym@colorado.edu.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee
provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and thefull citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires
prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.
© 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
2573-0142/2020/5-ART42 $15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3392847
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42

42:2

Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym

paper, we look to an example of a community that has been through multiple migrations overtime, experiencing both exit and resettlement at large scales. As a result, this case provides insights
into not only consequences over a long period of time, but also patterns that go beyond a single
platform.
This specific community of digital travelers is transformative fandom, which Henry Jenkins once
referred to as “textual poachers” that “move across lands belonging to someone else” [32]. Lacking
direct access to typical means of cultural production, these “poachers” instead remix existing media
into fanworks that create new narratives [32]–from stories about a romantic relationship between
Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock to artwork depicting the unseen characters of the Harry Potter universe.
Over time, communities of media fans who create, share, and discuss these fanworks (or “fandom”)
have become critical to popular culture, as well as prolific contributors to online user-generated
content. To put the scope of this activity into context, there are more than 6 million stories and at
least 1.4 million authors on fanfiction.net, the oldest major fanworks archive [60] and as of January
2020, more than 2 million authors and 5.5 million works on Archive of Our Own, currently thefastest growing archive. These millions of creators and consumers not only move across different
media, but across another type of land belonging to someone else: online platforms.
Over time, fandom has frequented Usenet, LiveJournal, Tumblr—and even constructed a newplatform, “owning the servers” for themselves [20]. Few communities are both so long-lived and so
dependent on technology to connect; fandom therefore provides a unique opportunity to examine
the causes and effects of moving across platforms over time. What are the common factors thatlead to leaving one platform, or joining another? How do these moves impact communities? How
might these lessons deepen our understanding of how and when online platforms—or attempts atmoving between them—succeed or fail?
To investigate this phenomenon both in depth and at breadth, we began with a set of 28 semistructured interviews, and then used our findings from a thematic analysis to construct a survey
to examine themes at scale with nearly 2,000 additional participants. These combined analyses
uncover patterns of reasons for migration (platform-based and community-based) and consequencesof migration (technical and social). Causes of migration reveal nuances of online community
commitment and network effects, and findings further illustrate the resulting negative outcomesfor communities, including lost content and social fragmentation. In addition to concluding withbroader insights for success and failure of social platforms, we also suggest design principles that
could support migration in order to mitigate negative consequences and encourage community
growth. Finally, our findings suggest the importance of considering community as separate fromplatform, not only for design decisions, but in supporting commitment.
2
2.1

BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK
Online Fandom

The term “fandom” can apply to communities of media fans generally, from people who discussStar Wars on Twitter [1] to people who curate information about media properties on wikis [43, 63].
However, we use the term here to mean transformative fandom, the community constructed aroundpeople who create, share, and discuss fanworks based on existing media. Though fandom easily
existed without the support of the internet [32], today the relationship that fans have to technology
and online platforms is integral to the culture of these communities.
These multifaceted online communities also provide support and a safe space for members. The
primary goal of these communities remains to provide fans a place to share and archive fanworks,
as well as to support social interaction and discussion around these activities. However, fandom isalso a diverse space with a range of benefits to participation. Younger fans on the site FanFiction.net
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

42:3

have access to a strong network of mentorship for becoming better writers [8]. A group of womenlearned to code in order to create their own fanfiction archive [21]. Fans across Tumblr find aplace to be authentic and find positive social experiences [29], including community support for
exploring issues related to identity [13, 31], and fandom itself is known to be an important LGBTQ
support space [17].
The fact that fandom participants began creating their own online spaces is also a testament tofandom’s migratory nature. After several instances of fans feeling either overlooked or exploitedby the platforms they were using, they overwhelmingly decided they needed a space of their own[20]. In 2008, Archive of Our Own (AO3) launched as a not-for-profit platform to host fanworks.
Created and run by fans, the archive was specifically designed to host fanworks, after decades ofrepurposing existing platforms. Over a decade later, AO3 is now the fastest growing fanfiction
archive, with over 5 million users. However, because AO3 is an archive and not a social platform,
it still does not meet all needs. Therefore, platforms like Tumblr and Twitter still host large fancommunities and are only the latest in a long line of appropriated platforms for fandom activity.
2.2

Migration

The traditional definition for migration in the offline world is a “permanent or semi-permanentchange of residence” [38]. For our purposes, online migration entails changing primary use of one
online platform for a purpose to primary use of another online platform for that same purpose.
Importantly, this does not necessitate deleting accounts at the first platform, or even leaving it
behind entirely; if you move to a new city, you may visit your previous home every once in a while.
Migration might also occur over a long period of time, with some temporary overlap where both
platforms are in heavy use, before use of the first platform drops off. The end condition, however,is that the second platform becomes the new primary location for that purpose.
Traditional migration typically occurs because of a combination of push and pull factors–that
is, conditions at a current place that make someone want to leave, versus conditions at a newplace that make them want to join [38]. Though there are few examples of full migrations in priorsocial computing scholarship, we know more about what it means to leave a platform. For example,
newcomers might leave a platform because it doesn’t satisfy their needs [59], they have trouble
learning norms [36], or they don’t fit in [58]; longtime members might leave because (particularly inthe case of support communities) they feel that they don’t need it anymore [59], their relationships
in the community change over time [58], or they become disenchanted with some feature of theplatform [52].
Examples of full migrations in prior work often point to push-based factors (that is, what makesa community leave), though they may be either voluntary or “forced” (e.g., a platform shutting
down [45] or banning users [9]). As an example of one large-scale voluntary movement, the social
question-and-answer site Answerbag experienced a precipitous drop-off in users following an
unpopular redesign of the site [23]. Another example of a mass migration followed “community
unrest” on Reddit, causing some alternative platforms to see an uptick in users [42, 44]. A casestudy of the “life and death” of an online guild identified a constellation of factors that led todestabilization, including social, pull factors (key group members leaving for a new game) andtechnical, push factors (the game being hacked) [46].
Migration patterns in a number of offline contexts, from international immigration [15, 27] tochanging mobile phone providers [2] or cryptocurrencies [40], emphasize the important pull factorof network effects—that as the number of network connections in the new location increases, thecost of migration decreases [41]. Because the first migrants to leave for a new destination have nosocial ties to draw on, migration is costly–but the costs for their social connections left behind arethen substantially lowered [41], due to factors like social and informational support [15]. Once theProc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:4

Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym

number of migrants reaches a critical threshold, the probability of migration rises [41]. In otherwords, migrations are optimal when a lot of people move at once.
Though the cost-benefit analysis of a migration might change over time, there are always costs.
For example, in the case of physical migration, these are often financial [15, 27], and for technology,“switching costs” include factors like incompatibility and learning curves [40, 64]. Some costs
are exacerbated by coordination failures–for example, overcrowding [27], for which an online
equivalent might include increased server load for a new platform. Moreover, migrations thatare driven by network effects depend crucially on the cost of coordination, since coordination isrequired for the inertia of the first wave of migrants [40]. These costs not only impact whether amigration occurs, but also the consequences to a community following a migration.
Prior work about migrations also provides some insight into these consequences–for example,
challenges adjusting to the content or affordances of a new platform [23, 44]. However, mostexamples of community migrations from prior work are one-off examples, in a single context,
often for a single reason. Our findings will show some similar patterns with respect to migration
motivations, but also contribute a broader perspective of multiple migrations over time.
2.3

Ecologies and Commitment

As prior work emphasizes, “leaving” may not be a singular moment, but rather a process bywhich the possibility of return remains open [4]. This remains true even for migrations, where
community members resettle in addition to leaving; when it occurs over a period of time, a common
consequence is temporary overlap, where people use more than one platform at once. Increasingly,social computing research has pushed to study not just single platforms but entire ecologies of use.
A number of studies have shown that people do not use a single social media platform, and thatthe relationships between them can be complex [24, 61, 62].
People are also often part of multiple communities across a single shared technology platform.
Though the obvious drawback to overlap is competition for membership efforts [57], in somecases this effect may be outweighed by positive benefits such as communities learning from andsharing knowledge with each other [63]. Additionally, on a shared platform like Reddit, when
new communities emerge they bring with them membership from prior communities, though thatmembership in the parent community decreases over time [53]. However, the case of fandom ismore similar to overlapping use in distinct social media platforms (as opposed to sub-communities
on a single platform), where we know that relationship-based interaction on a new platform canlead to decreased interactions for that same relationship on a previous platform [61]. Particularly
in cases where the overlapping platforms fulfill a very similar purpose, the eventual outcome islikely to be one platform being discarded–which means that a migration has occurred.
These reasons for discarding platforms can also provide insights into failure modes, since somein our study are inactive, whether entirely out of use now or effectively so. Though there are anumber of challenges inherent in creating and maintaining successful online communities–fromsolving the critical mass problem to socializing newcomers to effectively regulating behavior–one
important factor in the context of potential migration is commitment [35]. Moving away fromone platform in favor of another signals the disintegration of commitment, not necessarily to thecommunity, but to the instantiation of it on that platform.
Kraut and Resnick’s 2014 book that examines the “critical design challenges” of successful online
communities lays out three types of commitment drawn from theories of group psychology: (1)affective commitment (based on feelings of closeness to the group or individuals); (2) normative
commitment (based on feelings of obligation or rightness); and (3) need-based commitment (basedon incentive structures and/or a lack of alternative options) [35]. These different orientations
have suggested strategies for encouraging commitment among members of a community, from
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

42:5

building closer bonds between individuals [54] to solidifying group identity [49] to ensuring thatthe community fills a specific ecological niche [57]. Our findings about both the causes of andbarriers to migration will provide further insights into specific forces that can break or solidify
these types of commitment to a community.
3

METHODSThis paper describes a sequential expository mixed method study, in which insights inductively
derived from qualitative data are examined at scale with a larger sample [12]. We began withinterview data collected as part of a broader research project about platform design in fandom, witha focus on AO3 [20]. Though the research questions for that study were not specifically related tocauses and consequences of migration, all participants spoke to this topic in the course of comparing
and contrasting experiences on different platforms. Therefore, we conducted a targeted, secondary
analysis of the interview data with new research questions in mind. Following this analysis, we
conducted a survey based on interview findings to broaden our understanding of the phenomenon.
3.1

Interviews

For the broader study of platform design in fandom, the interview sample included 28 fandom
participants with experience on AO3. Initial recruitment occurred in summer 2015 via social media
posts in online spaces that fans occupy, including Tumblr and Twitter, using appropriate tags
and hashtags (“fanfiction”, “AO3”, etc.) and encouraging sharing and reblogging. This recruitment
targeted AO3 users who were at least 18 years old, and stated a preference for those who had
used other fanfiction archives or online communities in the past. Our initial recruitment post was
reblogged over 700 times on Tumblr, and we received more volunteers than we had the resources
to interview; to ensure a broader range of experiences on different platforms we privileged those
who reported longer involvement in fandom and then chose randomly from that group. Most
participants reported having been in fandom for a decade or more.
During interviews, in addition to topics relevant to the broader study outside the scope of
this paper, we asked participants about their history in online fandom, what their experiences
and communities were like on each platform they used, and (because AO3 was formed in thewake of a significant fan migration) what their experiences were in moving between platforms.
Two researchers collaborated on a thematic analysis [3] of interview transcripts, first conducting
inductive, open coding and then converging on higher-level themes through discussion. They
iterated on themes that emerged from the data; some major themes were outside the scope ofthe current study and are explained in detail in previously published work [20]. One additional
important theme uncovered related to the causes and effects of platform migration.
Subsequently, we conducted a secondary thematic analysis of data related to migration identified
in the previous round of analysis. Informed by the new research questions outlined in the introduction of this paper, two researchers conducted open coding independently, meeting periodicallyto discuss the data, and together constructed a set of second-level themes. The resulting themes
accounted for: (1) common reasons for joining platforms; (2) common reasons for leaving platforms;
and (3) common consequences of or challenges associated with these transitions.
Though our interview participants spoke to a range of experiences on different platforms (often
spanning multiple decades), we recognized that our insights may have been limited by a focus on
AO3 as a current platform. We wanted to broaden our perspective to even more fandom platforms,
as well as to people who may no longer be active fandom participants (in order to help account forsurvivor bias). Therefore, our next step was a survey that allowed us to both study a larger sample
population.
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:6
3.2

Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym
SurveyFor the survey, we recruited participants via public postings on social media (Twitter, Tumblr, andFacebook) in early 2018. These posts had significant reach beyond the initial network (e.g., over
2,000 reblogs on Tumblr). We did not require that participants have experience with AO3, northat they be current fandom participants. However, because it was important that we capture asignificant snapshot of a person’s movement across platforms, we required that they had been
involved in transformative fandom for at least ten years, even non-consecutively. In the survey, we
collected demographic information in part because fandom demographics differ from other online
spaces in systematic ways (for example, having a large percentage of LGBTQ participants [17]). All
demographic questions (including gender and sexual orientation) emphasized the voluntary natureof answering, and were open-text responses.
We constructed the survey questions with two primary goals: (1) to examine themes from theinterviews at scale, which resulted in multiple choice questions where the options were derived
from interview findings (e.g., “Have you encountered any of the following issues when moving
across fandom platforms or sites?”); and (2) to collect additional qualitative data from a broader
sample, which resulted in open-response questions that were very similar to interview questions(e.g., “Does anything stick out in your mind about your transition to or from Usenet, such as
challenges, good experiences, specific reasons for this change, etc.?”). Multiple choice questions
and answers are included in Appendix A.
The survey maps out which platforms participants had used for fandom activities and when, in
addition to their experiences with transitioning across platforms. We asked participants to indicate
which platforms they had used from a list (derived based on findings from the interviews; see
Appendix A) and to write in any platforms that were not included on the list. For each platformthey indicated using, participants filled in a textbox with a year range. Participants then received alist of questions for each platform they indicated.
For each platform, participants provided non-mutually-exclusive multiple choice answers for:(1) the primary fandom-related activities on that platform; (2) what drew them to the site; and(3) what compelled them to leave. The open-ended questions allowed participants to describe
their experiences moving to and from sites, reflect on how it impacted their community, andprovide personal thoughts. For a few sites, we included questions unique to each platform based on
information from interviews (e.g., specific design features).
In the last section, we asked participants to identify from a checklist (again, based on findings
from interviews) of common experiences they encountered related to migrating across platforms(see Appendix A). We also included open answer questions about the negative and positive effects of
migration, and space to provide their thoughts on how migration has affected fandom in general. We
piloted the survey on a convenience sample of fandom participants from our own social networks,
and used their feedback to refine and clarify questions, including validation of the multiple choice
response options.
Our research questions about the causes and effects of migration were best answered witha mixture of qualitative analysis and descriptive statistics. In addition to using provided date
ranges to map platform use over time (see Figure 1), we used descriptive statistics for multiple
choice answers to illustrate the frequency at scale of concepts we uncovered in our interviews. We
conducted additional thematic analysis [3] of open-response questions; we began with codes basedon themes uncovered from interviews, deductively grouping survey responses under these themes,
but with authors also conducting open coding for new, emergent themes. During this process inwhich authors met to discuss and iterate, we were able to use interviews as a starting point, butboth expanded and teased out related themes based on the broader range of experiences in our
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

42:7

survey sample. The qualitative data discussed in our findings comes from both studies; anonymized
participant numbers quote from interview participants with [PI] and survey responses with [PS].
3.3

Participants

In the interview sample of 28 AO3 users, a majority of participants stated they were female andwhite, which are typical demographics for fandom communities [17, 19, 32]. They ranged in age
from 23 to 62.
Nearly 2,000 people participated in the survey, and after removing participants who stated they
were under 18 or had participated in fandom for less than 10 years, we were left with a final datasetof 1,886 responses. Tracking to interview demographics, 80% of survey participants stated they
were female; the next most prevalent were non-binary and transgender individuals, with the least
number of cisgender men.
Participants also identified overwhelmingly as non-heterosexual. Only 24% of respondents
recorded their sexual orientation as heterosexual or “straight.” Most prevalent was “bisexual”,
making up 34% of all participants. Also common was asexual (16%), lesbian (10%), queer (8%), andpansexual (6%). This was an open response, and the remaining 2% used a variety of other unique
identifiers (including one response that was simply:). In addition to a predominantly
female space, fandom has long been considered a queer-friendly space [14, 17], and Tumblr is also
a popular platform for queer youth [13].
The mean age of survey participants was 30 (sd 8). We also collected ethnicity and location fromthose comfortable disclosing; 77% of participants stated they were white, and the remaining 23%
scattered across a wide range of ethnicities, including variations on mixed-race identities. Though
the demographics of many transformative fandom communities are predominantly white, it isimportant to note that we may be missing important voices in this data [51], including from fansof non-Western media properties. Location also varied for participants, but 66% recorded theircountry of residence as the United States, followed by 7% in Canada, 5% in the United Kingdom,
and the rest from a range of other countries.
3.3.1 Limitations. Though this was not a participation requirement, our survey data samples
largely from current fandom participants, and required at least 10 years of participation (meanparticipation 15 years, sd 6) so likely skews older than the overall demographics of fandom. For
example, FanFiction.net users tend to be younger [8]. Additionally, because Tumblr had the largest
reach during survey recruitment it is likely overrepresented in our findings as a current site forfandom participation. Our findings may also be impacted by limitations such as survivor bias, inwhich our data may underrepresent individuals negatively impacted by an event [34]–in particular,
those who left fandom behind entirely and thus are less likely to have encountered our recruitment
materials. Therefore, though our sample could include people who have remained on a single
platform for a long period of time, it does not contain the perspectives of fandom novices who
might have different perspectives about the utility or challenges of current fandom platforms.
Our population might therefore be best described as older fans, most of whom have experienced
platform migration over time, with many landing on Tumblr–which may not accurately represent
all of fandom, but is appropriate for answering research questions about platform migration.
4

PLATFORM MIGRATION OVER TIME

In representing our findings, we begin with a description of the migrations themselves: for thenearly three decades since transformative fandom moved online, what platforms have been popular,
and when? Fan studies scholarship considers Usenet to be the first formal platform where fandomflourished online [6], and our interview participants confirmed this, with several noting that Usenet
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:8

Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym

Fig. 1. Platform use over time, illustrated by the number of survey participants who reported using a platform
in a given year, beginning in 1990 and ending in 2018.

was the first place they read and shared fanfiction. Usenet therefore became the earliest platformin our dataset, continuing to the current popular fandom platforms—notably Tumblr, Twitter, and
AO3. Participants had the option to provide additional platforms, but there were relatively few“other” responses; the most common were Discord (N=41) and Facebook (N=38). Figure 1 shows the
popularity of each platform by year—in other words, their rise and (usually) fall.
Qualitative data from interviews and surveys aid interpretation of this data, and in particular
the reasons for platform rise and fall, which we discuss in the next section. It is also important
to note that platforms serve different functions, and therefore, overlap significantly. For example,
FanFiction.net and AO3 serve archival functions, whereas Twitter serves a primarily social function;others are a combination of both. In other words, fans archive fanfiction on AO3, but talk about it
on Tumblr or Twitter. Fandom social spaces also become broader social spaces—for example, forsocial support [17], which cannot happen only in the comments sections of fanworks, which is
the only social affordance of AO3. Therefore, migration tends to occur between sites with similarfunctions—from one archive to another (e.g., fanfiction.net to AO3) and one social space to another(e.g., Tumblr to Twitter). Consequently, some platforms that serve both functions (e.g., LiveJournal)
were replaced by multiple platforms. Figure 1 also represents the relative popularity of each platform
among our survey participants now; for example, over 1,600 currently use AO3, whereas less than
50 currently use email lists.
5

REASONS FOR MIGRATION

Figure 1 shows at scale how platform use shifted over time. Here, we describe patterns of reasonsfor those migrations, and how they related to individual platforms. Though issues related to theplatform itself (e.g., technical affordances) intertwine with issues of community (i.e., interactions
that take place), we were able to pull apart patterns of responses that focus on one or the other.
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands
5.1

42:9

Platform-Based ReasonsInterview participants mentioned three major reasons related to the platform (as opposed to thecommunity of people there) that contributed to joining: features and design, values and policies,and content, which we reflected in survey questions. Nearly across the board, the pattern was
the same: respondents ranked content as most important, followed by features, and then values.
For nearly every platform, over 90% marked “the site had content I liked” as a reason for joining.
Dreamwidth and AO3 were the only sites for which a majority of participants stated values as areason for joining (63% and 65% respectively), which likely has to do with the unique circumstances
under which they were formed, discussed in more detail in section 5.1.2.
Similarly, common reasons given in interviews for leaving a platform were design changes, policychanges, technical problems, or just that there was a new platform that was better. We represented
these in survey questions, and Figure 21 shows for each platform the percentage of participants
who have left that did and indicated each reason. Note that for AO3, Tumblr, and Twitter, very few
participants have left; AO3 is not included because of over 1,500 survey participants who have used
the site, only 3 have stopped using it.
Generally, the most common reason for leaving a site is that there was another site that was
better (or “new and sparkly”), which points to largely positive experiences with the platforms.
However, the most notable exception is LiveJournal, where the majority of participants left forpolicy-related reasons. It is also worth noting that though participants indicated that “another site
was better” as a reason for leaving, the open responses reveal that there were often design or policy
issues at the heart of that “better.” For example, we heard from participants that the lack of simple
archival properties on email lists led to many fans leaving Yahoo Groups, and that better searchand tagging features was one reason for migrating to AO3. Sometimes they also simply spoke ofthe lure of something new; as PS1015 put it, “There were new sparkly online options that drew
EVERYBODY away.” While issues with any platform are more apparent in hindsight, reflections on
a platform’s problems and limitations highlight that there is often simply a better suited tool.
5.1.1 Design. Just as new affordances might bring in new users, changes in design or interface candrive people away; prior work has even described significant design changes as a kind of “attack”
against a platform’s users [23]. Though for every platform at least some survey participants noted
design changes as a reason for leaving, nearly all of the relevant qualitative responses (as well as
data from our interviews) were about LiveJournal. One often-cited example was a design decision
to remove the ability to add subject lines to threaded comments—a seemingly simple change that“completely broke” the ways the platform was being used for anonymous fanfiction exchanges.
They saw these changes not only as targeting a different audience, but as actively pushing themout:
It’s obvious that [fandom is] not the demographic they wanted to cater to, because
despite the fanfiction sect on LiveJournal being very local, they were like, ‘Well, these
are the changes we’re making. Deal with it.’ So, a lot of us migrated to other platforms.
(PI9)
5.1.2 Policy. Just as specific design decisions were interpreted by some as hostile to fandom,
policy changes or new enforcement mechanisms were even more consequential. Despite common
wisdom that people do not know or care about platform policy (and often, a lack of attention to the
1 Email lists and messageboards are not included in the visualization for Figure 2 due to missing data. However, our analysis

of free responses about leaving and joining those platforms show these same general patterns, and that the most common
platform-based reason for leaving was because a new platform came along that was better. For messageboards, morecommon reasons were community-based.
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:10Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym

Fig. 2. Percentages of responses from survey participants (who reported leaving a given platform) about aplatform-based reason for leaving.

importance of policy in the design of collaborative systems [30]), our data shows that it played
an important role–both with respect to bad policy leading to exodus or good policy encouraging
uptake. For example, participants mentioned LiveJournal’s policy changes after they were acquiredby a Russian company. One described “cracking down” in ways that were “not friendly to fandom”:
I left LJ during one of several rounds of crises in which people’s work...was being
deleted/removed/accounts closed in large swathes for ‘inappropriate content’ or whatever the policy term was–too much sex, basically. (PS62)
FanFiction.net also created and enforced policies that drove users to different platforms. Several
years after launching, they began enforcing policies against “mature” content, as explained in a site
policy that participants found difficult to find and interpret. They described a seemingly random
enforcement of policy that targeted adult content, deleting fanworks without warning.
I left [FanFiction.net] on September 12, 2002, after they went dark for a ‘moment ofsilence’ on the one year anniversary of 9/11, and then when they came back they werelike ‘[just kidding,] we went down to do database work that deleted everything explicit’and we’re no longer hosting that. (PS1060)
In addition to the open warning against adult content, Fanfiction.net to this day warns that it
will remove any fanworks based on works by authors who have requested fanwork of theirs not be
hosted online; Anne Rice in particular gained a level of infamy in fandom for policing fanworks
with the threat of legal action [5]. One participant complimented AO3 in contrast to FanFiction.net
for not incorporating rules based on external pressure from authors:
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

42:11[Using AO3] was like seeing joy. They didn’t exclude fandoms based on crappy author
behavior (Anne Rice fandom), they were created by adults, with great design principles,
stable code, useful features, and, most importantly, easy to save. (PS1725)
This comment reflects an appreciation for sites with policies that protect the interests of fancreators. As Figure 2 shows, a significant number of FanFiction.net participants left the site due topolicy reasons, but the largest single factor in migration away from LiveJournal was their policychanges. Similarly, Dreamwidth and AO3 (which were both formed partly in response to the
LiveJournal controversies [20]) both show many users joining them because of positive values orpolicy.
AO3 came out and was not censoring you and said ‘You can post whatever you want.
We don’t have to like it, but you can post it.’ That was a huge contribution to why
people started flocking to AO3. FanFiction.net was well known for deleting and taking
down your work, and they may not give you any warnings. (PI11)
Participants also noted that leaving LiveJournal for policy-related reasons was possible in part
because there was immediately another platform that responded to the problem. This “viable option”
requirement also potentially explains why FanFiction.net did not have as quick a drop-off in use,
despite similar policy complaints; as PI11 notes above, it may have taken the creation of AO3 tomotivate movement from FanFiction.net.
5.1.3 Content. Sitting between issues of values and design, there are also reasons for leaving asite related to protection of content. These often relate to trust in the platform–either conceptually,or not trusting the technology. Fan platforms, particularly the smaller ones, have always been
vulnerable to content disappearing, both intentionally (a web host shutting down a site for TOS
violations) and incidentally (a web host folding).
For example, some participants mentioned receiving cease and desist letters for fanworks,
prompting worry about their work being removed from a platform. Because copyright law asapplied to fanworks is notoriously gray and a source of confusion, chilling effects (when an
action is suppressed due to worry over legal consequences) are common within fan communities[19]—particularly when they do not trust the platform to support them. For example, many fans
who create fanvids (remix videos of media content, set to music) have fled from YouTube for fear of
takedown notices [19]. Participants mentioned being afraid that other platforms would also cave tocopyright owners, but felt comfortable with AO3 as a contrast, since its policies emphasized their
dedication to copyright advocacy [55]:Archive of Our Own came onto the scene and they had the specific copyright where
it would protect your fannish material...AO3 coming out with that protection was areally, really big attractor to a lot of people. (PI8)
In addition to fearing legal ramifications, many fans described concern over uploading content
onto a site that may no longer exist in the future. This was especially a problem when fandom
was even more disperse, and fandom-specific archives or individual email lists may come and go.
Notably, many archives were hosted on Geocities, which one day disappeared in 2009 when Yahoo
shut down the site, resulting in a "tragic" amount of lost content in both fandom and beyond [37].
This problem was so pronounced that one of the goals of AO3 as an archive was to help preserve
fandom history, and as part of its design implemented an “open doors” system to easily importentire archives of fanfiction as well as the ability to “orphan” works to discourage users fromdeleting content [20].
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:12

Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym

Fig. 3. Percentages of responses from survey participants (who reported joining a given platform) about acommunity-based reason for joining (“I joined a new fan community” versus “my fan community started
using it.”).

They couldn’t make it all disappear. Geocities exodus wouldn’t happen again, because
the servers would belong to us. It wouldn’t matter because no one could buy it out
from under us. (PS709)
In addition to content vanishing for technical reasons, spaces such as FanFiction.net and LiveJournal also suffered from site administrators tightly regulating content. One participant described
LiveJournal as having a “craven lack of concern for users” that made them feel uncomfortable. This
concern extended beyond specific actions; it took form in the perception of the company itself
being “intolerable,” which impacted how safe their content felt. Here, we see distrust not for thetechnology but for the people or company managing the platform.
I miss LJ 2005 SO MUCH. Strikethrough ’07 [when LiveJournal deleted journals without
notice] was the mark of the end, though; it never got better after that. They neverapologized, never even explained their mistakes. (PS158)
5.2

Community-Based Reasons

Most often, participants expressed multiple reasons for leaving a platform–usually, a combinationof platform-related and community-related issues. Unsurprisingly, for the earliest platforms (e.g.,
Usenet), community-based reasons for joining were more often to join a new community; for later
platforms (e.g., Tumblr) reasons for joining were more often to follow a previous community (seeFigure 3).
Similarly, reasons for leaving a platform might also include joining a new community (elsewhere),
not wanting to be a part of the current community, or because their previous community left.
Sometimes communities change, and sometimes people change. For example, one participant
described that as she got older, it felt like she had outgrown the FanFiction.net community (whichtends to have younger participants [8]).
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

42:13[Leaving FanFiction.net] was partially that the aggregate age there was lower than on
LJ...FanFiction.net didn’t quite feel like my audience and my community anymore due
to age-difference purposes. (PS329)
Following a community elsewhere as a reason for migration is also more common with earlier
platforms, whereas on newer platforms it is uncommon–both because fewer people have left andbecause there may be nowhere else for a community to go:
The communities are here [on Tumblr]. And until such time that a community starts toleave, I will be here. I’m sure there will be another migration at some point, but there
is no platform coming into view at the moment. (PS1349)
These findings underlie that a huge contributor to migration is that people follow their friends
and communities. Something of a chicken-and-egg problem, these movements tend to be tied toother reasons (i.e., those listed as platform-based reasons). However, this factor is also necessary
for large scale migration due to the critical impact of network effects on migration decisions [41],and causes a snowball effect even among those who may not care about the underlying reasons. Of
course, whereas this snowball effect was ultimately successful for some platforms, others might
have struggled with getting this critical mass–the point at which there are enough users to create
the content that would attract others [35]. In other words, this is a collective action problem, andas one participant described, this creates a game of chicken:
Most of my friends were very adamant that they were not going to move to a newplatform until their entire [network] did. So you had this game of static chicken where
no one was willing to move first. (PI3)
Though not an exhaustive list of the motivators we uncovered in our interview and survey
data, these platform and community-based reasons represent major themes, and also speak to thecomplexity of migration decisions, particularly when a number of these factors are intertwined.
6

CONSEQUENCES AND CHALLENGES OF MIGRATION

Regardless of why platform migration occurs, participants also spoke to the consequences of movement across platforms and the resulting challenges, both for them personally and for communities
as a whole. Some challenges are based in the technology/platform itself, and others are more
about social ties and the community. Though these factors are intrinsically related and this isa sociotechnical problem, for the purposes of organization we are able to extract each theme’s
emphasis on either the social or the technical.
With respect to multiple choice responses we constructed from interview data, only 40 survey
participants chose an “other” option, suggesting that these were fairly comprehensive. The responses
were evenly distributed, with at least half of participants stating that they had experienced eachone, which included: people losing track of each other (N = 1518); losing community members(1207); content disappearing (1141); norms or values changing (1092); difficulty fitting into a newcommunity (1066); and difficulty learning a new platform (814). When examining descriptionsof individual platform migrations as well as open-ended answers, we found that participants
were acutely aware of these consequences, but also accepted them as an unwavering reality ofparticipation in fandom over time.
6.1

Technical Challenges

When moving to a new social platform (e.g., migrating from Facebook to Google+), the loss ofcontent from the previous site may be frustrating, but likely not debilitating, depending on how one
used the site. In the case of fandom platforms, many serve archival purposes. As a result, moving
means managing content, and as one participant says, something always ends up lost:
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:14

Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym
Regardless of whether the platform change is positive or negative, you end up withsome content getting lost...If certain fan content is very important to you, you have tosave it yourself, because you can never be 100% sure the link isn’t going to suddenly
stop working one day. (PI8)This loss is particularly troubling to many fandom participants because, as we described earlier
with respect to anxieties around content lost, fandom history is an important value. As a result,preservation was one of the important values that drove AO3’s design decisions [20]. Loss has
a cost, particularly in the context of women and other traditionally marginalized voices whose
creative contributions are often overlooked or even erased entirely [11], as one participant notedin the context of their own identity:[Migration] has really messed with our collective sense of fandom history. As a queer
person, that stings maybe a little bit extra. (PS937)
As a result of interview participants voicing these concerns around content loss, we integrated
questions on the topic into the survey (see Appendix A). Across all platforms, for the majority ofparticipants who had stopped using a platform, their content is still there; for example, only 20%
of LiveJournal users deleted their account. Most frequently, users kept old content on a platformthey no longer use, but were not adding new content. However, some had content on both the oldand new platform (cross-posting or “mirroring”, which 20% of LiveJournal users who started using
another journal site did). Some platforms also have technical features to help this process; 60% ofparticipants who started using Dreamwidth imported content from their LiveJournal. The resultof content remaining in multiple places (and in some cases, ongoing mirroring or cross-posting)is overlap and redundancy, which can be both arduous for content creators and confusing for
consumers.
Another problem inherent in joining any platform is that it requires learning to use it. For
example, many participants mentioned difficulty with the design of Tumblr, particularly because
the style of interaction was so different than on previous platforms. Sometimes these technicalproblems seem insurmountable; some participants indicated that they simply gave up:
I think [moving to Tumblr] killed the fandoms I was in...I don’t know anyone or how
to use the platform so I left fandom. (PS144)
6.2

Social Challenges

Though social consequences may be shaped by technical ones, the act of migration also results inpatterns of social changes and subsequent challenges. Many participants spoke of how communities
inevitably splinter, because some members will refuse to move, or because old friends become
difficult to find. Beyond losing content in a technical sense, this also means losing social connections.
The decline of communities over time reveals the impact of network effects, as the cost of leaving
decreases. For example, those who attempted to stay on Usenet found that the community dwindled
as time went on, and even those who lingered moved on eventually:
Usenet’s decline was a lot like watching a shopping mall slowly go out of business. Like,
when it’s still open, but a lot of shops are leaving, and the ones that stay see less and lessactivity, and there’s less and less to keep you returning, and it just gradually succumbs
to entropy. I enjoyed Usenet, but it just became less active and less interesting. (PS956)
One consequence of the deserted mall metaphor is simply more migration, but sometimes there
are breakdowns in that process. A commonly used term for this consequence was “fragmented”–
when some people move and some people don’t, the community necessarily splinters, or even“disintegrates” all together.
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

42:15

Some fandoms have disintegrated because they have left one platform but not reallylanded anywhere as a whole, different people going off to different platforms and notcommunicating. (PS67)
Somewhat opposite of fragmentation, another source of problems is when communities thatmight have been more isolated are thrown together—an issue that has come into focus with theincreased centralization of fandom on platforms like Tumblr and Twitter. Previously popular online
spaces like email lists, fandom-specific archives, or even LiveJournal communities or Usenet groups
were self-contained to sub-groups–e.g., Harry Potter or Star Trek or even specific aspects of each.
Though broader fandom does have a stable set of social norms [19, 20], there may be still be different
norms and practices in subcommunities–particularly those with distinct demographic differences(for example, Blake’s 7 fandom skews much older than My Little Pony fandom).
As prior work has shown, when people with different ideas of what norms are interact in thesame space, this can be a source of conflict [22]. For example, on Tumblr (which as a platform overallskews younger [13] than most of our participants), many described either feeling unwelcome onthat platform or “get off my lawn!” with respect to the younger generation of fans.
Fandoms have gotten younger over the years, and for older fans changing platforms(especially LiveJournal to Tumblr between 2008-2012) there’s a lot of stigma in still
participating in fandom from the younger members. (PS294)
I think fandom has sort of splintered by demographic. Fandom isn’t being handed
down like it was in my youth...Older fans are sometimes alienated by younger fans’zealous attitudes...They don’t know the history, by and large. And that shows. We havelost our commonalities. It hurts. (PS876)
However, a broader issue is not just that older fans and younger fans (or Star Trek fans and Star
Wars fans) interact, but that all of fandom is embedded within the overall ecosystem of Tumblr.
Many participants feel that this has changed the culture of fandom, which again, some describedas positive and some as negative.
I am also always curious how Tumblr became the fertile ground for social justicediscourse around fandom. I never encountered that anywhere else, and I’m not sure if
the fact that it is now so intimately connected to fandom is a byproduct that can betied specifically to Tumblr. (PS1874)
In other words, one social consequence of an existing community moving to a broader platform
is that the culture and norms of that community will inevitably shift in reaction to the broader
culture of that platform. Overall, these kinds of social changes were the most commonly citedconsequence of migration by our participants—both for the good and the bad.
7

DISCUSSION

In some ways, fandom is a unique online community due to its longevity and its lack of ties toany particular platform. In other ways, it is the prototype example. Though “much ink has been
spilled” in trying to define the concept [48], one explanation of community that emerges is that“the cumulative impact of interactions among individuals adds value over pairwise interactions”[26]. This definition seems appropriate, since fanworks by their very nature are created within acommunity of fans [10]. Therefore, though some of the nuances of interaction and impact may
be unique to fandom, there may also be broader lessons that can inform the study and design of
online communities–particularly since there have thus far been so few opportunities to examine
platform migration in any community over this amount of time and at this scale.
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:16
7.1

Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym
Motivations and Barriers to Migration

By laying out the reasons that fans left platforms in order to join others, this work illustrates anumber of potential failure modes for online platforms, as well as factors that contribute to success.
Our findings support some of the known “critical design challenges” for online communities [35],but also provide nuance with respect to how they relate to migration of an entire online community,
particularly when considered in relationship to important features of offline migration such as
network effects and coordination. For example, the “critical mass” problem for starting an online
community looks very different when the community itself is not starting from scratch but rather
relocating onto a new platform. Though network effects are critical for initial adoption of technology
as well (what use is any social platform, or a fax machine, with one user? [35]), adoption costs arequite different than switching costs, which require more coordination [40, 64]. In other words, the“game of chicken” that a participant described represents the critical early stage of network effects
for migration, in which individuals must coordinate with each other to encourage contribution in
the new community. Some of these specific challenges suggest design principles (discussed in thenext section), but our findings also help illuminate the concept of commitment (or why someone
might want to remain either in a community regardless of its embodiment, or on a platform), whichhelps explain both why migrations happen and why they don’t happen.
One might interpret our data about migration as suggesting that it is common, or easy–that
despite the potential for negative consequences, people are leaving and joining platforms and it has
not brought an end to this community. However, our survey data covers a span of over two decades
in which many new platforms, and entire technologies that drive platforms, have been born andalso died. One important lesson from this work is exactly what it takes to leave a platform–that is,
to break a commitment to it.
7.1.1 Social Motivations (Affection and Normative Commitment). The feeling of wanting to remaina member of a community signals affective commitment, and there are two major bases for this: (1)identity-based, feeling that you are part of the community; and (2) bond-based, feeling like you areclose to other members of the group [35]. Closely related is normative commitment, feeling as if
you have an obligation to the community–often because of feeling strongly about the purpose thatthe community serves [35]. The community of fandom, beyond any specific platform, is notablefor having strong social norms around issues like attribution and credit [28], copyright [19], andpositive feedback [8], which likely both stem from and subsequently contribute to a sense of group
identity [19, 49]. Additionally, the group identity includes elements of commitments to a cause or
mission, with advocacy groups having spun out of fandom around issues such as LGBTQ rights[17] and copyright-related legal advocacy [56].
Our findings highlight that the role of commitment in community migration can be very different
from its role in staying at or leaving a platform. In the case of fandom, both affective and normative
commitments to the community contributed to abandoning platforms in favor of following membersof that community. In fact, the importance of these types of commitment were enough to overcome
barriers to changing platforms, such as lost content or steep learning curves. This nuance suggeststhat understanding movements across platforms requires distinguishing between community andplatform when it comes to commitment. After all, communities are not reducible to factors foundsolely in the technology through which they primarily embody themselves [46].
With respect to the platform itself, our findings reveal that value clashes (sometimes triggeredby policy changes) can also have a large role in reducing feelings of obligation for–and therefore
commitment to–a particular platform. Similarly a new platform can be a pull factor for migration if
it signals a stronger sense of group identity and/or a stronger commitment to the cause or purposeof the group (e.g., the pull from AO3 was even stronger than the push from LiveJournal). By having
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

42:17

strong statements of values, and moreover by building values into the design of the platform,
AO3 created a strong sense of both affective and normative commitment among community
members—which explains why, after a decade of use, so few of our respondents have left.
7.1.2 Barriers to Migration (Need-Based Commitment). Need-based commitment depends on the
net benefits that people experience from the community, as well as the cost of leaving [35]. Recommendations for increasing need-based commitment involve not just surfacing the value of thecommunity, but also making it more difficult for members to leave (for example, by making it difficult to export assets to another platform) [35]. Platforms like AO3, where users have strong feelings
about the value and utility of the site, inspire need-based commitment due to the net benefits. Other
platforms seem to inspire need-based commitment due to the difficulty in leaving–providing us
insight into what the barriers to migration are. For example, our survey data is full of people who
say that they hate Tumblr:
God, I hate Tumblr. It is terrible for conversations. You can reblog and reply, but there’s
no guarantee the original poster sees your reply. I HATE TUMBLR. DIAF TUMBLR.
(PS361)I HATE TUMBLR. I think that’s almost de rigeur for fandom olds, though, isn’t it? I
mean, we’ve been bitching about Tumblr since it started, and still do. (PS275)
I hate [Tumblr] but there’s nothing better. (PS1346)
As the last quote reveals, the answer to “so why don’t they just leave?” is that the perception isthat there is nowhere appropriate to go. As one participant put it, she hopes there will be “anothergreat migration” at some point, but “until such time that a community starts to leave, I will behere.” Though most Tumblr users in our data also use AO3 for archiving their fanfiction, AO3
does not provide affordances for the social interaction that is critical for fandom and currently
largely concentrated on Tumblr [17]. Since the time of our data collection in early 2018, this unrestwith Tumblr has become even more pronounced, in the wake of a new policy implemented in
December of that year. In a move that in some ways mirrored the policy changes by LiveJournaland FanFiction.net that we described, the platform announced that it would no longer host “adult”
content. The outcry against this change led to speculation about whether the fandom community
on Tumblr would find a new home, and where that might be, given the lack of a single obvious
alternative [39].
Figure 1 provides some historical insight into this problem as well. As shown in Figure 2,
the primary reason that survey participants reported leaving LiveJournal was because of policy.
However, these policy changes took place mostly in 2007–and Figure 1 shows that LiveJournal
use does not begin to noticeably drop off until 2010/2011. If policy change was the catalyst, why
did they not stop using LiveJournal sooner? There is a constellation of answers to this question(including, for example, that some may have been cross-posting to LiveJournal or reduced theiractivity gradually over time), but the overall patterns and our qualitative data support the conclusionthat a significant problem was the lack of viable alternatives.
Tumblr officially launched in 2007. AO3 went into open beta in 2009. Many participants describe
them as having a kind of symbiotic relationship when used together—that the archival qualities
and searchability of AO3 make up for the ephemerality of Tumblr, and that affordances for social
interaction on Tumblr make up for the lack of socializing features on AO3. Figure 1 shows that asuse of those platforms rise, LiveJournal’s falls. Therefore, our findings confirm an intuitive principle:
For a migration to occur, there has to be both a compelling reason to leave and a viable alternative
option. Need-based commitment can serve as a pull factor to bring people to a new platform that
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:18Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym

better serves their needs, but it can also be a barrier if there is a lack of a better option, making thecost of leaving too high.
It is also important to note that viable does not only refer to the technical, but also the social.
It means that the new platform must both be socially appealing (e.g., reflect the values of thecommunity) and also not incur social costs. Non-use of any platform has opportunity costs [47].
On a platform like Facebook, this could be anything from not being invited to parties to missingout on important organizational communication to, in some parts of the world, not having accessto a major avenue for getting online [16]. For fans, this might mean losing friends or content
Moreover, our findings support the importance of network effects, showing that migration can only
be successful if enough people take the leap (and aren’t playing “chicken” over who will leave first)
to bring everyone else with them. These factors complicate what constitutes a “viable” alternative.
In some ways, it has to be perfect, which is perhaps why AO3, built by the fans themselves, wassuch a successful migration.
7.2

Designing for Community Migration

Though our findings might suggest guidance for the design of platforms for the specific communityof fandom users, they also suggest some principles relevant to online communities more generally:(1) “Leaving” a platform does not necessarily mean leaving a community, and may be more about
relocation than exiting; (2) Users often join new platforms with deep experiences in others, which
can impact their expectations for and subsequent experiences of a new platform; and (3) There
are opportunities for the creation of new platforms that take advantage of the shortcomings ofor attrition from others. Taken together, these also suggest the importance of designing with
migration in mind. Though fandom has provided an early example of many migrations over time, it
is also likely that as the number of platforms in our social ecosystem continues to increase, wholecommunities leaving and joining platforms will become more common.
We already know that technology can provide support for offline community disruption–for
example, an online platform might consider providing communication tools that reconnect communities, facilitate information sharing and gathering, and support community organization [50].
What similar role might platforms play in supporting communities during online disruptions that
implicate those platforms? If we know that communities will migrate (which is at least the case forfandom), what could platforms do to support users and mitigate the kinds of negative consequences
revealed by our data?
It is worth noting that there are two types of platforms implicated in a migration–the platformthat users leave and the platform that users join. We recognize that in a practical sense there is
likely little motivation for the abandoned platform to make it easier for users to leave. Therefore,
we focus more on support for new arrivals, though there are design opportunities on both sides.
7.2.1 Designing for Overlap and Platform Ecologies. We found that it is common for a migration toresult in a period of overlap between platforms, where users are still engaged with both. Overlap canbe both arduous for content creators and confusing for others when it is not clear where someone’s
desired platform for interaction is. Because overlap is likely to happen, one design strategy formaking it less arduous is to include functionality for cross-posting content. For example, after its
launch Dreamwidth included easy functionality for also posting new content onto LiveJournal; asa result, many users kept posting content to LiveJournal for a long period of time despite rarely ornever visiting the site.
However, this also suggests a broader design principle: platform designers should take into
account the entire ecology of platforms rather than their own in isolation, which has also been
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

42:19

suggested by studies of tool use in other contexts [24]. Recognition of overlap and support for crossposting via Dreamwidth is one example, though a less extensive version is AO3’s support for posting
its content on Tumblr (or Twitter), by providing a formatted embedding link [20]. Considering
the prevalence of seeking the “new and sparkly” as a reason for leaving a site, recognizing andsupporting that a platform might be used in conjunction with others also might encourage users
to stay (and use both) rather than leave (and migrate entirely to the newer platform)–therefore
facilitating optimal use of both platforms. Such complementarity between multiple platforms might
encourage the benefits of membership overlap revealed by previous work, while decreasing the
drawbacks of direct competition [63]. However, designers must also have an understanding ofwhen platforms complement versus compete; for example, many of our participants use AO3 andTumblr simultaneously (for archiving and socializing respectively), but LiveJournal and Dreamwidthshare essentially the same function, so even cross-posting eventually faded in favor of a complete
migration to the newer platform.
It is also critical that any connection between two disparate platforms is designed carefully (andnot implemented as a default), particularly in the context of fandom. As with other potentiallysensitive contexts (such as people going through gender transition [25]), fandom has strong privacy
norms that often involve maintaining separate identities on different platforms [7, 17, 19].
7.2.2 Designing for Loss Prevention and Resettlement. One of the most consequential negative
outcomes of migration for many participants was loss of content or friends. Therefore, a significant
barrier to migration is the fear of leaving something behind. Again, there is likely not a strong
motivation for the platform being abandoned to support users taking content with them; infact, one suggested strategy for encouraging commitment is to make it difficult for members
to export or transfer assets [35]. However, there is significant motivation to help users join aplatform. For example, both AO3 and Dreamwidth (designed specifically with migration in mind)
had functionality for directly importing content from other platforms. Dreamwidth also had
functionality for importing a list of LiveJournal friends to automatically add any Dreamwidth users
with those same usernames.
The broader design principle is that platforms–especially new ones–should consider potential
users who are not joining from nothing, but instead may have with them bags packed from
elsewhere. Supporting importing content and social structures (e.g., lists of friends or organizationof subcommunities) could overcome a major burden of migration and thus encourage new users
to join. However, as with any other potential connection between otherwise separated platforms,
such a feature would have to account carefully for context. A link between, e.g., Facebook andTumblr (even a “people you know” feature) could in many cases be as obviously problematic forfandom as it would be for someone going through gender transition [17, 25] due to the connectionof real names to pseudonyms, but even connections between fandom-specific platforms could
also be upsetting or instigate context collapse for someone who is purposefully shifting between
communities within fandom. Though such features could also be helpful, they should be designed
to give migrants complete control.
This kind of support can also be critical for preservation efforts, in cases where the originalcontent would be lost entirely. For example, when Geocities closed, a great deal of content was justerased from the web [37], including a large number of fandom-specific archives. As part of its goal
to support migration and preserve history, one design feature of AO3 is the "Open Doors" initiativethat imports stories from smaller archives that might otherwise be abandoned [20].
However, even lighter weight ways to simply make new users feel welcome can be helpful; forexample, when another site became a frequent landing place for ex-Answerbag users, that site
noticed the traffic spike and reacted, creating a welcome message and support for finding other
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:20Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym

migrants [23]. These structures are also helpful for mitigating the inherent coordination costs
incurred by a migration. Smooth coordination can be difficult, particularly when different people
would prefer slightly different outcomes. However, research in other contexts has shown thatstandard setting can be critical for reducing these costs, particularly for technology adoption [18].
New platforms that share “standards” with previous ones reduce these costs as well—for example,
how some parts of AO3’s design are based on conventions from LiveJournal [20].
Support for a seamless transition could be one characteristic of a viable alternative, which might
be through design supportive of loss prevention, but could also be culture or policy-based. Giving
communities ways to preserve their norms and practices can be valuable, so that not everythingfeels new. When a new platform performs a similar function to a previous one, users will comewith prior experience, which if well-supported can result in higher initial retention of newcomers[33]. However, if the design or utility of the platform seems too different, the learning curve mightturn users away–but the “new and shiny” of a platform with better features can pull users in.
Therefore, there is an important line to walk between familiarity and improvement, which canlikely be best navigated with user feedback–as with the design of AO3, where extensive input wassought in the very early stages to determine what features of previous platforms to keep and whichto discard [20]. In the best case scenario, if one is designing for a particular group of migrants,
norms can be built into the design–for example, the way that AO3’s content headers mimicked
existing conventions on LiveJournal [20].
Moreover, resettlement of an entire community brings up the challenge of not just socializing
newcomers into a community [35], but of socializing an entire community into a new platformthat may be home to existing communities. One option is allowing space for a community to asremain such rather than forcing integration into a broader platform, which means designing for
subcommunities. For example, when AO3 imports existing archives (often small archives that would
otherwise be shuttered), they turn into “collections” that can be both self-contained and part ofthe broader ecosystem. In contrast, a common complaint about Tumblr was that subcommunities
are not possible, which makes it difficult for a smaller community to maintain distinct norms.
Preservation of community spaces is one way of maintaining continuity for migrants.
8

CONCLUSION

As our digital communities grow more and more complex, we should try to better understandwhat connects an online community beyond the platform where it is embodied. Communities
rarely emerge in a vacuum, carrying with them a history of previous relationships and community
memberships [53]. Fandom is a unique domain with which to study this phenomenon, since thecommunity has existed across so many different online spaces over a very long period of time,demonstrating how communities can exist separate from and across platforms simultaneously, andultimately survive beyond them.
Our findings about platform migration suggest common motivations for leaving as well as
joining, and suggest that policy and values based problems can be particularly important, but thatthese alone may not be enough to inspire a mass exodus. Just as a “new and sparkly” alternative
can draw people away from a platform that is serving them well, that same viable alternative must
be available to draw them in. Subsequently, the network effects that occur when users follow theirfriends and communities (or flee empty shopping malls) can lead to a new platform becoming ahome. Why don’t people just leave Facebook, in the wake of so many complaints about it? The
same reason fans don’t just leave Tumblr. They need somewhere to go first, and that place must
importantly support both their technical and their community needs. In other words, without agood enough place to go, migration becomes a collective action problem.
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

42:21

One of the lessons of this work is how one might make that alternative good enough, an
accounting for what factors contribute to viable alternatives and successful migrations, as illustrated
by data about thousands of individual moves across platforms. These findings have the potential toassist platform designers in mitigating the challenges of users leaving and joining new platforms.
Moving across lands need not stymie creativity and fracture communities if we build better paths
to travel on.
9 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The interview study described here was supported by NSF IIS Award 1216347; thank you to Amy
Bruckman and Shannon Morrison for their incredible support and assistance with that study.
Our thanks to both colleagues and reviewers who provided valuable feedback that helped shape
this work, with special thanks to Jed Brubaker, Blake Hallinan, and Aaron Jiang. And finally, ourimmense gratitude to the fanfiction and AO3/OTW community, not only to our research participants
but also those who volunteered, shared our call for participation, or provided feedback and thoughts
on our initial findings.
REFERENCES[1] Morten Bay. 2018. Weaponizing the haters: The Last Jedi and the strategic politicization of pop culture through social
media manipulation. First Monday 23, 11 (2018).
[2] Daniel Birke and G.M. Peter Swann. [n. d.]. Network Effects and the Choice of Mobile Phone Operator. Innovation,
Industrial Dynamics and Structural Transformation ([n. d.]), 109–128.
[3] Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3,
2 (apr 2006), 77–101.
[4] Jed R. Brubaker, Mike Ananny, and Kate Crawford. 2014. Departing glances: A sociotechnical account of ‘leaving’
Grindr. New Media & Society (2014), 1461444814542311.
[5] Kristina Busse and Shannon Farley. 2013. Remixing the remix: Fannish appropriation and the limits of unauthorizeduse. M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 16, 4 (2013).
[6] Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson. 2006. Introduction. In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet,
Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (Eds.). McFarland & Company, Jefferson, NC, 5–15.
[7] Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson. 2012. Identity, Ethics, and Fan Privacy. Fan Culture: Theory/Practice (2012), 38.
[8] Julie Ann Campbell, Sarah Evans, Cecilia Aragon, Abigail Evans, Katie Davis, and David P Randall. 2016. Thousandsof Positive Reviews: Distributed Mentoring in Online Fan Communities. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference
on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 691–704.
[9] Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Anirudh Srinivasan, Adam Glynn, Jacob Eisenstein, and Eric
Gilbert. 2017. You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech. Proc. ACM
Hum.-Comput. Interact.: CSCW 1, 2 (2017).
[10] Francesca Coppa. 2017. The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor,MI.
[11] Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet. 2011. How to suppress women’s remix. Camera Obscura 26, 2 (2011), 131–139.
[12] John W. Creswell and Vicki L. Plano Clark. 2017. Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research. SAGE Publications.
[13] Avery Dame. 2016. Making a name for yourself: tagging as transgender ontological practice on Tumblr. Critical Studies
in Media Communication 33, 1 (2016), 23–37.
[14] Abigail De Kosnik. 2016. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. MIT Press, Cambridge.
[15] Sarah Dolfin and Garance Genicot. 2010. What Do Networks Do? The Role of Networks on Migration and “Coyote”
Use. Review of Development Economics 14, 2 (2010), 343–359.
[16] Michaelanne Dye, Annie Anton, and Amy S. Bruckman. 2016. Early adopters of the internet and social media in Cuba.
In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 1295–1309.
[17] Brianna Dym, Jed R. Brubaker, Casey Fiesler, and Bryan Semaan. 2019. “Coming Out Okay”: Community Narratives for
LGBTQ Identity Recovery Work. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, CSCW (2019), 154:1–28.
[18] Joseph Farrell and Paul Klemperer. 2007. Coordination and Lock-In: Competition and Switching Costs and Network
Effects. Handbook of Industrial Organization 3 (2007), 1967–2072.
[19] Casey Fiesler and Amy S Bruckman. 2019. Creativity, Copyright, and Close-Knit Communities: A Case Study of Social
Norm Formation and Enforcement. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, GROUP (2019), 1–24.
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:22

Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym[20] Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman. 2016. An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist
HCI and Values in Design. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. San
Jose, CA, 2574–2585.
[21] Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, Ben Shapiro, and Amy Bruckman. 2017. Growing Their Own: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation for Computational Learning in an Online Fandom Community. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference
on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 1375–1386.
[22] Katie Gach, Casey Fiesler, and Jed R. Brubaker. 2017. “Control your emotions, Potter”: An Analysis of Grief Policing
on Facebook in Response to Celebrity Death. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, CSCW (2017),
47:1–13.
[23] Rich Gazan. 2011. Redesign as an act of violence: Disrupted interaction patterns and fragmenting of a social Q&A
community. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2011), 2847–2856.
[24] Joseph Gonzales, Casey Fiesler, and Amy S Bruckman. 2015. Towards an Appropriable CSCW Tool Ecology: Lessons
from the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference
on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Vancouver, BC, Canada, 946–957.
[25] Oliver Haimson. 2018. Social media as social transition machinery. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer
Interaction 2, CSCW (2018), 1–21.
[26] Caroline Haythornthwaite. 2007. Social networks and online community. In The Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology,
Adam Joinson (Ed.). Oxford University Press, Oxford, 121–138.
[27] Alex Heitmueller. 2006. Coordination Failures in Network Migration. The Manchester School 74, 6 (2006), 701–710.
[28] Karen Hellekson. 2009. A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture. Cinema Journal 48, 4 (2009), 113–118.
[29] Serena Hillman, Jason Procyk, and Carman Neustaedter. 2014. ‘alksjdf;lksfd’: Tumblr and the Fandom User Experience.
In Proceedings of the ACM DIS Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. 775–784.
[30] Steven J Jackson, Tarleton Gillespie, and Sandy Payette. 2014. The Policy Knot: Re-integrating Policy, Practice and
Design in CSCW Studies of Social Computing. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work & Social Computing. Baltimore, MD, 588–602.
[31] Samantha Jaroszewski, Danielle Lottridge, Oliver L Haimson, and Katie Quehl. 2018. “Genderfluid” or “Attack
Helicopter”: Responsible HCI Practice with Non-Binary Gender Variation in Online Communities. Proceedings of the
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2018), 307:1–15.
[32] Henry Jenkins. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge.
[33] Raghav Pavan Karumur, Bowen Yu, Haiyi Zhu, and Joseph A. Konstan. 2018. Content is King, Leadership Lags: Effectsof Prior Experience on Newcomer Retention and Productivity in Online Production Groups. Proceedings of the ACM
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2018), 506:1–13.
[34] Charles Kiene, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2016. Surviving an “Eternal September”: How an
Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems. 1152–1156.
[35] Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick. 2014. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. MIT
Press, Boston, MA.
[36] Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick. 2004. Slash (dot) and burn: distributed moderation in a large online conversation space.
Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2004), 543–550.
[37] Matt Law and Colleen Morgan. 2014. The Archaeology of Digital Abandonment: Online Sustainability and Archaeological Sites. Present Pasts 6, 1 (2014), 1–9.
[38] Everett S. Lee. 1966. A Theory of Migration. Demography 3, 1 (1966), 47–57.
[39] Paige Leskin. 2018. Tumblr users are leaving in droves as it bans NSFW images. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tumblr-alternatives-that-allow-nsfw-2018-12[40] William J. Luther. 2016. Cryptocurrencies, Network Effects, and Switching Costs. Contemporary Economic Policy 34, 3(2016), 553–571.
[41] Douglas S. Massey, Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor. 1993. Theories
of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal. Population and Development Review 19, 3 (1993), 431.
[42] J Nathan Matias. 2016. Going Dark: Social Factors in Collective Action Against Platform Operators in the Reddit
Blackout. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2016), 1138–1151.
[43] Jason Mitell. 2009. Sites of participation: Wiki fandom and the case of Lostpedia. Transformative Works and Cultures 3,
8 (2009).
[44] Edward Newell, David Jurgens, Haji Mohammad Saleem, Hardik Vala, Jad Sassine, Caitrin Armstrong, and Derek
Ruths. 2016. User Migration in Online Social Networks: A Case Study on Reddit During a Period of Community Unrest.
Proceedings of the AAAI ICWSM International Conference on the Web and Social Media (2016), 279–288.
[45] Celia Pearce and Artemesia. 2009. Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds.
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

42:23[46] Nathaniel Poor and Marko M. Skoric. 2014. Death of a guild, birth of a network: Online community ties within andbeyond code. Games and Culture 9, 3 (2014), 182–202.
[47] Laura Portwood-Stacer. 2013. Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: The performative and politicaldimensions of Facebook abstention. New Media and Society 15, 7 (2013), 1041–1057.
[48] Jenny Preece and Diane Maloney-Krichmar. 2005. Online Communities: Design, Theory, and Practice. Journal ofComputer-Mediated Communication 10, 4 (2005), 1.
[49] Joseph Seering, Felicia Ng, Zheng Yao, and Geoff Kaufman. 2018. Applications of Social Identity Theory to Researchand Design in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2,
CSCW (2018), 201:1–34.
[50] Bryan Semaan and Gloria Mark. 2012. ‘Facebooking’ Towards Crisis Recovery and Beyond. Proceedings of the ACM
CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (2012), 27–36.
[51] Mel Stanfill. 2018. The Unbearable Whiteness of Fandom and Fan Studies. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan
Studies, Paul Booth (Ed.). Wiley, 305–317.
[52] Stefan Stieger, Christoph Burger, Manuel Bohn, and Martin Voracek. 2013. Who Commits Virtual Identity Suicide? Differences in Privacy Concerns, Internet Addiction, and Personality Between Facebook Users and Quitters.
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 16, 9 (2013), 629–634.
[53] Chenhao Tan. 2018. Tracing Community Genealogy: How New Communities Emerge from the Old. Proceedings of the
AAAI ICWSM International Conference on the Web and Social Media (2018), 395–404.
[54] Yla R. Tausczik, Laura A. Dabbish, and Robert E. Kraut. 2014. Building loyalty to online communities through bond andidentity-based attachment to sub-groups. Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative
Work & Social Computing (2014), 146–157.
[55] Rebecca Tushnet. 2008. User-Generated Discontent: Transformation in Practice. Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts
10, 2007 (2008), 101–120.
[56] Rebecca Tushnet. 2010. I Put You There: User-Generated Content and Anticircumvention. Vanderbilt Journal ofEntertainment and Technology Law 12 (2010), 889–946.
[57] Xiaoqing Wang, Brian S. Butler, and Yuqing Ren. 2012. The Impact of Membership Overlap on Growth: An EcologicalCompetition View of Online Groups. Organization Science 24, 2 (2012), 414–431.
[58] Donghee Yvette Wohn, Cliff Lampe, and Ann Arbor. 2018. Psychological Wellbeing as an Explanation of User
Engagement in the Lifecycle of Online Community Participation. Proceedings of the ACM GROUP Conference on
Supporting Group Work (2018), 184–195.
[59] Diyi Yang, Robert Kraut, and John M. Levine. 2017. Commitment of Newcomers and Old-timers to Online HealthSupport Communities. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017),
6363–6375.
[60] Kodlee Yin, Cecilia Aragon, Sarah Evans, and Katie Davis. 2017. Where No One Has Gone Before: A Meta-Dataset of
the World’s Largest Fanfiction Repository. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems. 6106–6110.
[61] Peng Zhang, Haiyi Zhu, Tun Lu, Hansu Gu, Wenjian Huang, and Ning Gu. 2017. Understanding Relationship
Overlapping on Social Network Sites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, CSCW (2017),
120:1–18.
[62] Xuan Zhao, Cliff Lampe, and Nicole B. Ellison. 2016. The Social Media Ecology. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conferenceon Human Factors in Computing Systems (2016), 89–100.
[63] Haiyi Zhu, Robert E. Kraut, and Aniket Kittur. 2014. The impact of membership overlap on the survival of online
communities. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2014), 281–290.
[64] Kevin Zhu, Kenneth L. Kraemer, Vijay Gurbaxani, and Sean Xin Xu. 2017. Migration to Open-Standard Interorganizational Systems: Network Effects, Switching Costs, and Path Dependency. MIS Quarterly 30 (2017), 515–539.

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

42:24A

Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym

SURVEY QUESTIONSSurvey questions with multiple choice answers; not all survey questions are included in this table.
Question

What do you do in fandom online? Choose allthat apply.

Please select sites where you participated infandom. List the years you were active in the
textbox provided (for example: 2000-2003). If
currently active, please indicate 2018 (e.g., 20102018). If you don’t know for sure, your best
guess is fine!

Section: Questions asked for all platforms

How do/did you use [all sites listed] for fannish
activities? Choose all that apply.

What prompted you to join [all sites listed]?
Choose all that apply.

Response
1. Read, watch, or view fan creations
2. Write fanfiction
3. Make fan videos or other remixes
4. Draw fan art
5. Create fan graphics (like gifs, icons, or photomanips)
6. Participate in fan meta-discussion
7. Fan roleplay games
8. Other (please specify)
1. Usenet
2. Email Lists
3. Message boards/Online forums
4. Fandom-specific Archives (e.g., Gossamer)
5. Fiction Alley [open answer]
6. Fanfiction.net
7. LiveJournal
8. DeviantArt
9. Dreamwidth
10. Archive of Our Own
11. Tumblr
12. Twitter
13. Other (please specify)
Section: Questions asked for all platforms
1. Social interaction
2. Fannish meta-discussion
3. Posted/archived fanworks
4. Viewed and interacted with others’ fanworks
5. Roleplaying
6. Other (please specify)
1. My fan community started using it
2. I joined a new fan community
3. The site was easy to use or had features I
liked
4. The values of the site aligned with my fandom or with my own values
5. The site had content I liked
6. Other (please specify)

Received January 2020; revised February 2020; accepted March 2020

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.

Moving Across Lands

If you have left, what prompted you to leave[all sites listed]? Choose all that apply.

If you are no longer an active user of [all listed
sites], is your content still there?
Section: Consequences

Where do you feel your fan community ismost present right now? Choose all that apply, though try to choose the ones that you use
the most!

Have you encountered any of the following
issues when moving across fandom platforms
or sites?

42:25
1. I never stopped! I still use [site]
2. My friends/community left
3. I no longer wanted to be part of that community
4. Design change(s)5. Policy change(s)6. Technical problems like downtime or loss ofcontent
7. There was another site that was better
8. I changed fan communities
9. I stopped participating in fandom
10. Personal/life circumstances
11. Other (please specify)
1. Yes
2. No
3. Some content but not all of it
4. I did not have content there
5. I don’t know
Section: Consequences
1. Usenet
2. Email List
3. Fandom-specific Archive
4. Fanfiction.net
5. Livejournal
6. DeviantArt
7. Dreamwidth
8. Archive of Our Own
9. Tumblr
10. Twitter
11. Other (please specify)
1. Losing community members
2. People lose track of one another, forexample—names change
3. Difficulty fitting into or engaging with a
new/different community
4. Content disappearing
5. Norms or community values changing
6. It is difficult to learn the new platform andfind relevant content
7. Other (please specify)

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, No. CSCW1, Article 42. Publication date: May 2020.