Photo by Jade Khatib
The internet is forever, except when it isn't.
"Hi my name is Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that's how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don't know who she is get da hell out of here!)," begins "My Immortal", one of the most famous stories ever self-published online.
Photo by Jade Khatib
An anonymous author posted this piece of Harry Potter fanfiction to Fanfiction.net serially from 2006 to 2007. Ever since, people have been captivated by how bad it is, the mystery of who the author is and the story's overall dated mall goth vibe. Some Etsy sellers even sell bound hard copies and posters of the story, and a new video of someone discussing or reading it goes viral on YouTube every few years.
However, it was nearly lost to history.
In 2008, Fanfiction.net deemed the story's language too explicit and deleted "My Immortal" and its author's account. The only reason people can read it today is that fans who had saved personal copies of the story reuploaded it to their own personal sites and wikis.
Since the dawn of the internet, sites shutting down for technological or personal reasons and censorship have erased countless games, fanfiction and fan art from the historical record. Most weren't as lucky as "My Immortal." To combat this, communities of amateur fan archivists are recording and preserving digital media and websites for the future. They use traditional coding and digital preservation techniques to create their own stand-alone digital archives and custom browsers. Together, their efforts may help people in the future better understand current culture.
One of the biggest fan-run and owned archives on the internet is Archive of Our Own, or AO3, an open-source nonprofit site that hosts fan works, primarily fanfiction.
"AO3 came about because fans wanted a place that was created by fans for fans, that they felt like they could just publish [on] without worrying that the story would get removed or something like that, or there would be like a mass purge," said Cara Marta Messina, an Assistant Professor of English at Marist College who studies fandom work and communities.
Protecting Against Purges
Those mass purges are partially why AO3's parent organization, the Organization for Transformational Works, or OTW, founded the site as an archive.
Another popular and longest-operating fanfiction site,Fanfiction.net, has been heavily moderated at various points in its history. In 2002 the site's moderators deleted works that they considered to be too explicit for younger readers. Users were outraged.
A decade later, it happened again, and Fanfiction.net purged an additional 62 thousand works from its site for similar reasons. This sparked a mass exodus, and AO3, which had existed as a small fanfiction repository until then, reached 1.4 million monthly visitors.
AO3's users post new fanfiction to the site every day, but much of the site consists of copies of older works that would have otherwise been lost.
Australian author Julie Bozza has been involved with fandom and fan work for around forty years and currently volunteers with OTW's Open Doors project, which archives endangered fan works and physical zines.
"We all tend to think the internet is forever. Anything that's out there will haunt you for the rest of your life, but it's not true in many ways. In 2020, Yahoo Groups was completely closed down. And originally, they weren't going to give users any notice that was happening. So all those fan works that only existed in Yahoo groups were at risk of being lost," said Bozza. "What we try to do is provide a safe home for fan works that are in danger like that and bring them into the AO3 so that they're not last forever."
Most people don't think of their fanfiction as being an important part of the historical record, but fan work can be invaluable for scholars researching the history and impact of popular media. For example, Messina's dissertation, "The Critical Fan Toolkit" uses fanfiction about The Legend of Korra and Game of Thrones to examine how people react to Black and Lesbian characters on television.
The Most Popular Fandoms on AO3 in February 2023
Chart by Jade Khatib
The Most Popular Fandoms on AO3 in February 2023
Chart by Jade Khatib
She explained that, because much of the early work fans did based on series like Harry Potter or "Xena: Warrior Princess" has been completely erased, those fandoms and the phenomena around them are difficult to study. Messina points to Nickelodeon buying and shutting down Quizilla, a quiz site that eventually came to host a large amount of fanfiction, as particularly tragic.
Beyond corporate decisions, Bozza explained that often sites hosting fan works shut down simply because the owners couldn't afford to keep them running or the technology they ran on shut down. She argues that this work is worth preserving simply because people cared enough to make it.
"A lot of people don't fit very well with the mainstream ideas of publishing and what sort of stories are valid. I think it's really important to acknowledge and to respect the fact that there's a whole lot of other creativity out there that people enjoy creating, and that is meaningful to them," said Bozza. "And it deserves to not be lost."
