2007-05-17

cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (bend it like beckham)
2007-05-17 11:29 pm
Entry tags:

the ideal multifannish archive

For those of you who don't track [livejournal.com profile] metafandom-related happenings in the wider fandom, the last few days have been heating up over a for-profit ff.net-type archive that a bunch of non-fans have set up in an attempt to make a buck. An exciting contribution: [livejournal.com profile] astolat: An Archive Of One's Own. Fandom has needed this - a good, non-restrictive multifandom archive which would allow creators as much control over their endeavours as lj does, while being a friendlier archive format - for a while, now. [livejournal.com profile] almostnever's proposed features made me a little starry-eyed.

There are a lot of fandom-specific archives, many of them excellent although none with the kind of functionality being discussed here; and there are a lot of people in fandom expending huge amounts of energy (and money!) to organise things for us. Fandom has been growing increasingly multifannish even since the last of ff.net's usefulness was pretty much killed by the nc-17 ban. There's a growing need for something like this, and with so many people eager for it, it seems like fandom might actually have the means (although not, as yet, the organisation) to make it happen.