The three generations of fanfic

The three generations of fanfic is a Tumblr post by user heymarauders about eras of fandom. 
The post sparked meta discussion about the history of fandom, especially its use of different online platforms. As of October 2015, the post had over 68,000 notes, this number rose to more than 90 thousand notes until July 2024.
The post sparked numerous responses, largely because people disagreed with it. The most common threads of discussion covered:
* The history of zines, Usenet, Yahoo Groups, and Geocities that led to the community on LJ and then AO3
* Entry points/platforms outside of this history
* The fact that the original post gets the order of fanfiction.net and Livejournal backwards
* Other platforms where fanfics was post but focused on other media such as DeviantArt and Quizilla
==Similar Essays/Posts==
* Reminisce With Me (2008)
* The good old days before google were dark and involved horses (2010) 
* Fandom 1994-2000-ish (2012)
* Memories by vass (2012)
* A brief history of fandom, for the teenagers on here who somehow think tumblr invented fandom (2014)
* Was Fanfic Any Different in the Olden Days? (2015)
* The three generations of fanfic (2015)
* I feel like fandom generations are both very specific and easily conflated. (2018)
* Historical trends in fanfiction? (2019)
* What were popular things writers used to do in their fanfics that have pretty much faded away. (2022)
==Direct Responses==
Some posts directly critiqued the original post, others recalled different timelines and even endorsed. Some were collected and they are listed below by year.
===2015===
===2024===
=="Our" History from Zines On==
A number of people commented on the thread of fandom history that starts with Star Trek zines and carries through to Livejournal and then AO3. This was a widely talked about part of fandom history but by no means the only one that came up. The most influential of the posts of this type was the following history of fandom described in fancifully Shakespearean turns of phrase:
===General Comments on Fandom History===
Many other posts agreed with the general view of fandom history outlined in that post. Some were direct responses to it; others critiqued the original post or others like it.
===Zines===
It turns out that, far from being extinct or relegated to hiding on mailing lists, the fanosaurs roam Tumblr and had quite a few things to say about the original post putting the birth of fanfiction in the late 90s. Others chimed in to describe zine history as well.
====Types of Zines====
Fans mentioned a variety of zine types, not just media fandom zine novels and anthologies of fic, but also APAs, letterzines, music zines, and DIY zines projects done without knowledge of wider zine culture.
====Technical Aspects of Zines====
People discussed different technical methods of producing zines, whether photocopiers, mimeo, and offset printing.
===The 90's===
====Computer Access====
One of the common themes was the difficulty fans had in getting access to the internet or privacy while they accessed it. In the 90's, teenage fans likely had one shared family computer or no computer at all. Fans at universities were often using the computer lab, not a private computer in their dorm room. Older fans often hadn't spent the money to have home internet access yet. Printouts and floppy disks still played a major part in many fans' experiences because of the cost and difficulty of access to the internet. Limited internet access was still a factor for some fans on through the 90s and into the 2000s.
====The Early Internet====
The web became a major force in fandom circa 1995. Prior to that, other forms of internet were much bigger factors. They tended to be less graphical than the web and to require more tech skills to access.
=====Telnet=====
=====Prodigy & Compuserve=====
Early internet providers offered access to their own forums. They were more in the business of providing proprietary content than plain internet access. Compuserve, Prodigy, GEnie, and others were many fans' introduction to online fandom.
====Usenet====
====Boards & Forums====
====AOL====
Early on, internet access was mostly available through universities and IT jobs, but services like Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL began to provide access to more and more homes. They also provided proprietary content, mostly in the form of discussion forums. AOL was massively popular, so it became a common entry point for fans.
====The "Great Schism"====
Madmaudlingoes described the post-Usenet period where fandom was spread around the web as "The Great Schism". Others picked up her terminology and ran with it:
====X-Files====
The X-Files was one of the most influential early internet fandoms, serving as a model for archives, lists, shipping, and so much else in fandoms that came after it. Needless to say, it came up in the discussion regularly.
====Mailing Lists====
====University Listservs & Early Major Lists====
In the early 90s and before, running a mailing list wasn't something just anyone could do. Lists tended to be run by fans working at universities or who had an unusual level of technical expertise and access. Squidge was one of the earlier fannish hosts for lists and sites. Majordomo is a piece of software often used to run lists.
====Onelist/Egroups/Yahoo Groups====
In the late 90s, mailing list hosts that were free and accessed via the web arose. This meant that fans without money, technical expertise, and special access to tech could now found their own lists. Fannish mailing lists exploded in number: single-fandom and single-pairing lists became common.
====Geocities====
Personal webpages, including hand-coded html fic archives, were common in fandom in the 90's-00's. Geocities was a major host for these. Angelfire and Tripod were also common. Before the advent of good search engines, many of these pages were findable via webrings.
=====Website Aesthetics=====
A common topic was the dominant aesthetic of websites at the time, which included hard-to read fonts and colors, auto-play music, novelty cursors, animated gifs, and other crimes against taste that fans remember with nostalgia and embarrassment. Few people mentioned that all of these aesthetic choices are once again popular on Tumblr. 
=====How Websites Were Made=====
Some fans used programs to build their pages; others hand-coded completely from scratch. Formatting like text that wraps properly as you resize the window were not ubiquitous. Fans hosting their fic on somebody else's website would have to send it to the archivist: there was no automatic upload mechanism on these sites.
=====Labeling=====
Some fans mentioned how little header information was available on early fanfic sites.
=====Fic Length=====
Many fans mentioned that fic lengths used to be given in file size, not wordcount, something not immediately apparent if you look at an older page that is still up.
=====Finding Things=====
Many fans pointed out how much harder it was to find fannish sites during this period.
=====Webrings=====
Fans reminisced about webrings, one of the best ways to find fannish sites back when search engines sucked.
====Anime Fandom====
As usual, there were some differences between fannish experiences in anime fandoms and Western media fandoms, like Fanfiction.net having a more enduring popularity. However, fans' descriptions of early fandom history such as Usenet and mailing lists were relatively similar (probably more similar than anime fandom and Western fandom of the 2000s-2010s). Websites like animespiral, A Sailor Moon Romance, and the Sakura Lemon Archive came up repeatedly.
=====Anime Web Turnpike=====
The Anime Web Turnpike or "Anipike" was a major hub of anime fandom mentioned by many rebloggers.
====Realtime Chatting====
===The 00's===
====The Age of Archives====
The late 90's to mid 00's were a time of archives for many fans. Single-fandom archives proliferated, including Gossamer, the massive X-Files archive that predates fanfiction.net. (Also mentioned were Hermit Library for B7, Teaspoon for Doctor Who, among others.)
There were also other multi-fandom archives that fans fled to when FFN's policies forced them to or that were curated or focused on narrower topics.
=====Media Miner=====
One of the more commonly-mentioned multi-fandom archives was Media Miner, which was big in anime fandom in the 00's.
=====AFF=====
=====Other Multifandom Archives=====
Fandomination.net is another multifandom archive that was less popular with participants in the discussion than MediaMiner or AFF, but it still came up a number of times. It was founded in 2002 and closed down in 2009. It seems to have been especially active circa 2005-2007. It accepted fandoms of all kinds but was most popular with music RPF writers.
Fanlib was a controversial archive that many fans boycotted. Nonetheless, a number of fans in the discussion mentioned it.
lunaescence is a multi-fandom archive. The majority of its fic is for anime fandoms.
Ficwad is a multifandom archive with a large amount of RPF.
====Harry Potter Fandom====
Like The X-Files, Harry Potter was a hugely influential fandom that influenced many that followed after it. It was both absolutely massive (a fandom that ate fandom) and a common entry point for new fans in their first fandom.
====FanFiction.Net====
====Livejournal====
=====Other Journals & Blogs=====
Livejournal clones and other types of blogging and journaling sites came up regularly, including Insane Journal, Greatest Journal, Deadjournal, and Xanga, among others.
====Archive of Our Own (AO3)====
==Other 00's Entry Points==
A large number of responses focus on fans who were introduced to fic, fandom, and erotica via Quizilla, usually as young teens in the mid-00s. Fans with this background often did not experience fandom history either the way that the original post outlines it or as outlined in madmaudlin's post about zines, mailing lists, etc. There was a great deal of overlap between people who had been on Quizilla and on other similar quiz sites that got used for fic, like mibba and quotev. There was also significant overlap with the fans who mentioned Wattpad. This demographic often went from these entry points directly to FFN or AO3 and Tumblr. The most influential of the Quizilla posts describes a prototypical Quizilla fic: 
===Quizilla===
Other comments describe the structure of the site and its demographics, bemoan its passing, or bemoan the fact that anyone remembers it.
 
===Other Quiz Sites===
===Wattpad===
==The Timing of FanFiction.Net vs. Livejournal==
Many people pointed out that Fanfiction.net was founded in 1998, Livejournal in 1999. Livejournal initially required an invite code. There were efforts to distribute codes, particularly in Harry Potter fandom in 2002. When LJ moved to open registration in 2003, fans flooded in. So, for many of the fans commenting, the LJ phase of fandom effectively started five years after FFN's, not one year. Fanfiction.net's "heyday" was also before Livejournal's for many of these commenters. (However, based on responses, Fanfiction.net has clearly had several "heydays" and several mass exoduses.)
==Other Parts of Fandom==
Many respondants were from similar parts of fandom, but there were also responses from people who felt left out or that the bulk of the discussions did not represent their fannish experience.
===Why Did No One Mention X?===
Many responses were in the form of "Why has no one mentioned ___?" or "You forgot ___" or "How dare you forget ___". The assumption, or at least the phrasing, often suggested intentional omission or that the topic had slipped people's minds, rather than that some of these sites and points of origin are probably unknown to many posters.
Typical examples:
===What About Fan Art?===
Though the original post does specify that it's talking about "generations" of fanfiction, the discussion ranged widely into fandom history. Fans brought up that they had actually started in fan art, not fic, or commented on the importance of art to fandom history. DeviantArt was chief among sites mentioned, but Elfwood also came up repeatedly. The use of DeviantArt for fanfic also came up.
===Youtube===
Vidding was mentioned very rarely in the discussion, aside from a few comments about VHS tapes in pre-internet fandom, but fanfic on Youtube was mentioned a number of times.
===Roleplaying===
===Other Sites and Platforms===
Other locations of fandom that came up repeatedly include Gaia Online, MSN groups, ficbook.net, orkut, twoj.net (a polish site), animespiral.com, FictionPad, kwiz.biz, y!gallery, SoupFiction.net , slashfanfiction.com...
==What it Means to be "Old"==
A common sentiment in many posts was that the poster was practically geriatric due to their lengthy time in fandom. This included fans who had been around for all three of the original post's generations (i.e. since at least the mid-00s). It also included fans who felt that these three generations were but a blink of an eye, and that having experienced 90s internet 1.0 fandom institutions made them old. Lastly, the focus on the internet made zine fans from the 70s and 80s feel ancient. The sentiments were quite similar across groups, but the actual number of years in fandom that counts as "old" varied widely.
And, just for variety, every once in a while, someone took a gander at all this talk of zines and carving fic into stone tablets and felt rather the opposite:
===Influential Posts on Age===
An influential and heavily-reblogged post made other fans feel old by implying that being around for the three generations mentioned in the original post is in any way surprising. Ironically, this poster's own tags show a broader knowledge of fandom history. (But the tags don't show in most of the reblogs, so many responses took the post text at face value.)
Another often-reblogged post referred to the original post with its three generations of LJ, FFN, and AO3 and said:
===Wattpad & Quizilla = Old===
===LJ = Old===
===So Long, Yahoo Groups===
===Who Remembers Usenet?===
===I Was a Zine Fan===
===Smart Alecks===
==Second-Generation Fans==
A number of posts commented on not just the poster but the poster's parent's and relatives' fandom history.
==Fanfiction is Older than Dirt==
Some responses focused on the idea of modern fanfiction as part of the same tradition as Classical authors reworking pre-existing stories and Shakespeare cribbing from everywhere. Others likened modern fan practices to Sherlock Holmes fans during Conan Doyle's lifetime and to early 20th Century sf fandom.
==Fans Invent Fic Over and Over==
Last but not least, many fans mention independently coming up with the idea of fic or writing it in person with friends long before finding zines/the internet/etc.
==The Future==
===Historical Perspective: From a Fan in 2018===
In March 2018, a 24-year old fan commented on this essay, and a similar one, and mused upon ever-changing (but not!) fandom, platforms, and personal alienation due to age and experience: 
==References==
Category:2019 Featured Articles
Category:Meta on Tumblr
Category:Fanfiction Meta
Category:2015 Meta