Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Got Any Sites??

Once upon a time there were loads of sites. Multi-fandom archive websites, personal pages, single-fandom archives. Dozens and dozens of them.

Where have they gone??

There are almost no personal pages any more. Of course AOL taking down Hometown without warning didn't help. Nor did the demise of Geocites and Fortunecity. And most of the archives have folded, or no longer update.

There were LiveJournal communities - a huge, thriving variety of fandoms. Then LJ shot itself in the foot by forgetting what its users loved about it and tried to be a combination of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. It failed miserably and rolled back some of the changes - but not before users had deserted it in droves. Most of those communities are ghost-towns now. Few update any more. Even the femslash newsletter page is struggling. Dreamwidth tried to take up the baton but while individuals moved there the community mirrors never really took off.

All of this means that there are fewer and fewer femslash sites for us to tell you about. If it wasn't for AO3 we'd have next to nothing to report on.

So...

Do you folks out there know of any femslash sites, archives, or personal pages which are regularly updated?? Any thriving communities, preferably which don't require membership/logging in to read?? Anything we could be checking & reporting on but don't. (Other than FanFiction dot net which is a nightmare to check as it's beyond chaotic and I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot barge-pole).

Let us know.

Also... rambles... anybody got one??

Ze

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2 comments:

Lynn said...

I don't have any new sites to suggest. Not so much because there aren't many, but because authors are generally choosing publishing platforms that allow me to follow them specifically, or to follow a particular pairing, directly via either RSS or email alerts. For example, FFN has email alerts for authors and new chapters of fics, and RSS feeds that can be filtered by fandom, pairing, rating, language, etc. AO3 has the same features with prettier formatting. One exception is Tumblr, which I wish authors would not publish on exclusively because I can't figure out a way to filter just the content I want and not their posts on things unrelated to their fics. It's great for visual media, though. Some astonishingly good fandom artwork can be found there. It's also great for participating/interacting with others in the fandom, and the meta conversations there are often fantastic. I still have email alerts for all the longstanding Yahoo Groups I subscribed to back in the day. Livejournal has RSS feeds. All the RSS feeds show the summary and tags, which makes it super quick to weed out tropes, triggers and kinks I don't care to read. Plus spelling/grammar issues in the summary or missing summary is an insta-pass. It's usually 30-100 updates per day, so I star the intriguing stories to read later. I mainly rely on your blog for the old sites that don't have these technologies built in, and for the human curation for quality. I, um, kinda don't like that you're covering AO3 now, because it leads to duplicates. And with the delay due to the curation step, I have to try and recall if I've seen a story already just from the title without context for pairing. I'm hugely appreciative of what you do and I'm grateful for all the effort you've put into the site over the years. (And thank you so much for adding the RSS feed all those years back ((2007?!?)) when I asked about it!) ❤️❤️❤️

Sorry if you get a duplicate comment, Blogger didn't give me a confirmation of posting.

6:04 PM
zero2aries said...

I can understand your frustration - a few years ago, when there were many archives & author's sites posting Xena fanfic, I used to check the RAOB (archive) and Bard's Corner (archive) and then check UXFFD (updates/links site). They always posted lots more stuff to read. Gradually as the sites closed, disappeared, or simply stopped updating, all the UXFFD was posting was the updates from the RAOB. Frustrating. But I told myself that there were other folk out there who didn't check the RAOB but relied on the UXFFD to do it for them. And I simply checked the UXFFD but didn't follow any links to sites I checked myself. That way I always knew what I'd read or was up-to-date with.

12:28 PM

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