Fandom and the Internet

Fandom online has been shaped by the nature of the internet, the level of access in the general population, and successive waves of both genuine newbies and old fans who are new to a particular part of the internet.
By the mid-to-late 1990s, "the internet" had become synonymous with the world wide web to most people, but it wasn't always so. Early fandom activity online happened in the private forums of service providers and on Usenet. One common description of fandom migrations online is that fandom started on Usenet in the early 90s;"Does anyone have any information about Star Trek slash fanzines, or Trekkie fanzines in general?" is an extremely early mention of this genre on soc.motss, posted 1 January 1991, accessed 18 November 2012 then moved to Yahoo Groups in the late 90s, also creating a lot of single-fandom archives; and finally transferred to Livejournal and/or Fanfiction.net for most of the 00s. However, while this does describe the shift across internet media for many people, there are other fans who continue to be active primarily on mailing lists or message boards and have never used social networking sites or multi-fandom archiving sites. Furthermore, there are still fans who are primarily active offline.
The arrival of the Internet and the spread of online communication had a profound and lasting impact on pre-internet types of fandom, from how fanzines were devalued and eventually replaced (see Zines and the Internet) to how slash fans responded to the increased visibility (see History of Slash Fandom).
==Infrastructure==
===Early "ISPs"===
Early in the development of the internet, most people got access through universities or technical jobs. Few companies provided access to the general public. Those that did operated on a very different model from today: they primarily saw themselves as content providers, selling access to information and private discussion forums or chat features, not as internet service providers, selling access to the internet in general. (In fact, they're rarely referred to as "ISPs" at all; that is merely the modern equivalent of these early companies and what many of them changed into later.)
===Usenet===
Usenet is a style of discussion forum that functions something like a mailing list, but posts are deleted from the servers after a few weeks and often not saved by participants. In the past, posts were frequently signed with an e-mail address containing the user's real name. Users often archived posts themselves, had mailing lists they used in conjunction with groups, and developed FTP archives, and later web archives for Usenet content, including fanfiction.
Originally, Usenet was mostly accessible to university students and IT professionals. Every September, there was an influx of freshman newbies until September 1993 when AOL added news groups to its features and opened the floodgates. This is known as the Eternal September. Newbies suddenly outnumbered regulars in such numbers that it was impossible to socialize them all into the pre-existing Usenet culture. This is similar to the cultural conflicts around feral fandoms.
Fandom activity was greatest on Usenet in the mid to late 1990s, but some individual groups still get a lot of traffic today.
===MUDs===
MUDs are a type of realtime text-based online environment. (There are several related formats like MUSHes, MUCKs, and MOOs.) Many of them include elaborate worlds and game plots that range from Collosal Cave style text adventures to role playing. Some users primarily use them to hang out and chat in real time (or to cyber). Some influential MUDs have been based on pre-existing fantasy settings like Pern, and a number of them have catered to furries and other subcultures, so while they don't necessarily have a direct connection to traditional media fandom fanfiction, they were extremely influential on early internet fandom and a big part of internet culture in general. Early writing about the internet and people taking on different identities there is often referring to MUDs, not newsgroups or the web.
A number of MUDs were active by the late 1980s. They proliferated in the 1990s. Graphical environments like Second Life, many other widely available forms of realtime chat that require fewer technical skills, and a wide variety of other online gaming and roleplaying options made them less attractive (or even visible) to the average internet user in the 2000s. Nonetheless, they continue to have many fans in the 2010s.
===Mailing Lists===
Early on, mailing lists were privately hosted, which required money and know-how. Most people had e-mail addresses through universities or companies (most of them containing real names).
Starting in 1998, Yahoo! Groups (and egroups and ONElist, both of which it bought) provided an easy way for the non-tech-savvy to host their own mailing lists for free. Hotmail started providing free (and potentially pseudonymous) e-mail addresses in 1996 and was followed by a number of similar web-based providers. This caused a huge proliferation of fannish mailing lists in the late 90's/early 00's.
AOL had its own version of mailing lists among the anime community. Hosts would compose large, graphic-heavy emails with attached files or a link to request something they were offering (a video, an image, an MP3 file). Some lists were small and only offered a featured image, but others were more involved and engaged the members in discussion or reviews of certain anime or manga. Due to AOL's limitations, larger files had to be split up and sent in pieces the receiver would then put back together using a file splitter. Hosts would also have to be placed on AOL's "white list" in order to send the issues, due to AOL's stringent policies against mass emailing.
AOL's mailing list culture died down in the early 2000s as people found other means of accessing fansubs or music, and Livejournal became the preferred discussion forum.
===The Web===
The web initially provided few ways of interacting, was difficult to search, and didn't have all that much content. As search engines developed and different free web-based services arose, it became more and more attractive as a platform for fandom.
Early free web hosts include Geocities (1995), Tripod (1995), Angelfire (1996), and FortuneCity (1997),Free hosting services do not charge the website owners. Instead, they earn revenue from advertisers who pay to place commercial banners on the site, usually at the top of each page. as well as webspace provided by universities and colleges to faculty and students. The use of such webspace either requires the knowledge of HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) to hand code the webpages, or the use of WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") Site-Builder software that allows the creation of simple webpages by filling in blanks.
Typically, websites created on webspace provided by a university or college are short-lived, disappearing when the student graduates. Sites on free web-hosting services, however, can linger indefinitely. Indeed, provided the hosting service continues to exist, such a site can still be around today even if it has not been updated for years.
Initially, most sites were small. They often were created to provide personal information about the site owner (a sort of precursor of Facebook), but might include tribute pages to favourite fandoms and archive the owner's fan fiction. By the late 90s, however, fans with a knowledge of HTML were starting to create larger resource sites offering information about the fandom as well as assistance for newbies. In addition, before archives with automatic upload became common, fans undertook the hand coding of large fanfic archives. The content of resource sites and archives was usually restricted to a single fandom.
A fan in 1993 described "The Net" for other fans: 
===Archives===
Many fans identify an era of large, single-fandom archives starting with The Gossamer Project in 1995 and lasting until posting fic to Livejournal became common in the early 00's. The founding of the enormous multi-fandom FanFiction.Net in 1998 and the development of the Automated Archive software and eFiction also had a profound effect on fandom archiving practices.
===Journals and Blogs===
Journals and blogs took off among the general public starting in 1999 with the founding of Livejournal, blogger.com, and a number of other sites. Fans were active on a wide variety of these in the early 00's. Around 2002, a large wave of fandom migration to Livejournal started. When Livejournal eliminated invite codes and moved to open account creation on December 12, 2003, even more fans moved from mailing lists and other blog/diary sites.
==Cultural Shift==
It is more accurate to think of a series of many cultural shifts as different waves of internet users discovered parts of the internet or got online for the first time. One major cultural difference is between long-time zine-producers and readers and a variety of fans active online:
A fan noticed a trend towards shorter stories and fanworks beginning in 1997: 
In the early days of fandom online, some questioned the whether the Internet would have any impact on fandom at all:
==Zines and the Internet: Visibility==
Many fans had a lot of fears and hopes as their activities and creation became more visible. For more on this subject, see: Visibility.
== Graphical Timeline: 1980-2010==
This timeline shows major developments in internet infrastructure and some early influential fannish spaces.
==Fan Comments==
===1992===
 
===1993===
=== 1996===
=== 1997===
=== 1998===
By 1998, fans were emailing in their thoughts and feelings about fan fiction and fandom to the the Sci-Fi section of About.com. They even included fan fic recommendations and links to their recommendations, along with their names and email addresses. While About.com was not a for profit website, it was hardly a fannish forum and showed just how far fandom had come in terms of embracing the visibility that the Internet provided.A single page from the Weekly Fan Fiction forum survives and can be read here
=== 2000===
 
=== 2001===
=== 2002===
 
===2003===
=== 2005===
=== 2016===
==Further Reading/Meta==
===Essays/Commentary===
* , by The Brat Queen (unknown date)
* Coming Soon To A City Near You (1996)
* Sandy Herrold's 1996 Slash Fandom Survey
* Internet Fans Controversy Du Jour (Sandy Herrold) (1997)
* Sci-fi fans who are users of the Internet: take a stab at rewriting your favorite shows by Melissa Perenson (February 1998)
* Censored ("an essay on Net vs Print K/S Fans") by Judith Gran (1999)
* Here Today, Zined Forever (January 2001)
* How The Internet Can Save Us, And Why It Won't Last by Mie Tsukikoushi (2001)
* Fanfiction.net: The Worst Thing That's Ever Happened to Fanfiction? (2002)
* (2005)
* Internet and Fandom, discussion at Fanthropology (February 2006)
* Fandom 1994-2000-ish, arduinna's 4-part essay about Western Media Fandom during the early Internet years (2012)
* Was Fanfic Any Different in the Olden Days? (2015) 
* (January 2021)
Terminology/Background:
* Feral fans
* Threshold Fandom
* Netfans vs print fans
Publications:
* Fan Fiction Directory
==References==