Question of the Day

[potentiality_26]

questionoftheday asks: What is your internet history? What websites were you a part of that might not be around anymore, and do you have any fond memories of them?

My answer: I had an FF.net account back in the stone age, got to livejournal long after its heyday was done, and now I'm figuring out where to head next!  The lost site for which I will always pine is the slash cotillion, dedicated to mostly M/M fics in a period setting.  I didn't post there, but i did read a lot and it disappeared over night.  Almost none of it was caught by the wayback machine, and I will forever be sad about all that lost fic. 

Comments

[gokuma]

I miss slash cotillion as well D:

[potentiality_26]

I've been catching up on ACD Sherlock Holmes fic lately, and really missing all the fics I half remember from slash cotillion. It was such a great site!

[leahclaire]

It's weird, I think I remember some random buffy archives that are also lost to the mists of time. They were probably on GeoCities. I'm sad I never knew about slash cotillion!

[potentiality_26]

I remember some archives like that too!

[verdande_mi]

The first place I got an account was LJ, or perhaps IJ (or whatever it was called...) I am still on LJ, but under a different username than my very first one. I know I read fanfiction before LJ, but I can't remember any sites at the moment, but I was into slash, Backstreet Boys, Lord of the rings and then Stargate Atlantis - so wherever that was posted.

[potentiality_26]

I read fic in a lot of different places too, back in the day, but I was very much a lurker.

[speakingskies]

I was on ff.net so long ago I shudder to recall the actual timescale involved, and moved from there to LJ, I think more or less at its peak - being an HP fan I also lurked around FictionAlly and Azkaban's Lair quite a bit. I never knew about the slash cotillion, but I can see how it would be a loss.

[potentiality_26]

I remember some old HP sites too, that was one of my first fandoms. It's nice that fandom is a bit more centralized than it was back then, but I actually sort of miss looking around after discovering a new fandom and feeling like a treasure hunter when I found a really good archive!

[speakingskies]

That gasp at the first glint of buried treasure, usually deep in the bowels of Geocities...

[potentiality_26]

Yes, exactly :)

[theicescholar]

Is LJ still around?

[potentiality_26]

Yeah, it is. There aren't a whole lot of users or comms left active, and most of the people I knew from there are crossposting from here anyway, but the site still exists and everything. A couple of years ago LJ transferred its servers to Russia, and there was this very confusing TOS update that was the last gasp for a lot of the remaining users because nobody knew what being under Russian law would actually mean for non-straight users. And for users in Russia that may well be a problem, but I don't know of any deletions after the change.

(Like, there was this whole thing about how the new TOS was written in Russian and translated into English, but the site stressed that if the translation was wrong somehow it wasn't their fault, meaning that even if you read every word of this whole enormous post you still couldn't be 100% sure what was in violation)

It petered out as a platform back in the strikethrough days and it's been shrinking ever since, but it's still there for sure.

[theicescholar]

I don't know why I thought it had gone down, it just seems weird for it to exist after such a massive exodus for some reason.

Which means I still have old fic floating somewhere in the sands of the internet on some underused comm. That's a very strange thought indeed.

[potentiality_26]

Yeah, it definitely is weird. Most people who talk about LJ make it sound like it's completely gone.

I feel that way about my old FF.net fic lol. It's... not good.

[theicescholar]

FF.NET IS STILL AROUND?!!!

my face is basically my icon rn ;P

[potentiality_26]

Yes it is lol! There was a thing about it having a virus that infected users who logged in about a month ago, but so assuming it survived that it's still kicking.

[theicescholar]

What was your first fandom?

[potentiality_26]

Well, the first fic I posted on FF.net back in the day was for Les Miserables, and since I've been hardcore obsessed with it since I was a kid I think it's safe to say that was my first fandom. My first really big fandom was probably Harry Potter though, like a lot of people.

What about you?

[theicescholar]

I confess I have only read Jean Val Jean (did you read that in school?) and seen the musical.

My first fandom was due South. I can't really remember how I got into fandom itself, just from catching reruns on tv and then accidentally stumbling across a fic archive. *waves cane*

[potentiality_26]

I do remember reading an abridged version in school at one time, but it wasn't that one. I had to look it up on wikipedia and the story behind it is quite interesting! I'm into the musical as well.

The due South fandom had some great fic! I was pretty into it myself for a while.

[theicescholar]

I will check out the wiki.

I feel like everyone is required to be in the dS fandom ;) There are still new writers, it's lovely.

I was going to do a rec list to introduce new mutuals to old ones. Do you mind if I rec a fic of yours (on my dw)?

[potentiality_26]

Yeah, I'm sure everyone spends some time in dS fandom at some point.

That would be lovely (and I'll look forward to your other recs) <3