Signal-Boosting a Cool Project to Demystify Web Development Tech for Fans

[dawn_felagund]

ithiliana sent me a link to a kickstarter for a project that seems really cool and is very much under the banner of Things Dawn Beats the Drum and Yells About Occasionally: the fan-built web.

Remember this thing? When every other person had a Geocities (or Angelfire or ...) site, or ran a forum or eFiction archive (or both!) for a character, or owned a Yahoo! group or LJ comm for some niche fannish interest? There is lately a lot of nostalgia for these days and what fandom was like then. It certainly wasn't perfect, but I think many of us are emerging from the increasing consolidation and corporatization of the fannish web in the past several years and going, "Waaaaait ..." like when you're sledding down a hill as a kid and suddenly realize you might smash painfully into that thing that looked so impossibly small from the hilltop.

As someone who does still run an independent fandom website, I think often about where we are now and where we were then and how we can empower fans to take back their own spaces. And it's tough. More than eighteen years (dear god) of running the SWG and I know it's not for the faint of heart, and a big part of that is because of the knowledge it takes to set up and run an archive or another fannish web project. We're no longer in the days when being able to creatively wield the <font> and <marquee> tags and copy-pasting some webring code was enough to muddle through making a respectable site, but I've gone nose-first into a brick wall in trying to learn what I needed to build and improve the SWG more times than I can count because it is hard to find information about site building and development that is at the just-right level for someone who is not a professional (me). For example, I've tried to learn about Composer so many times now that when I begin to type "compo ..." into Google, it autosuggests "this again??"

So I very much support endeavors to provide technical training to fans who want to learn the skills needed to build their own websites. To that end, I have outlined (and, this summer, will hopefully record) a tutorial about using Drupal to build a fanworks archive, but I am still not a professional, FAR from perfect in my own knowledge, and Drupal will not be the right fit for every project.

Enter The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development. In their own words:

Jokes aside (though, really, there's no joke), despite the many complaints about the disappearance of old "GeoCities-like" websites, there's a dire lack of accessible guides made for busy everyday netizens of modest ambition. Indeed, while educational content on web development is available in many forms, it tends to fall into two categories: heavy, sometimes-jargony material targeted to those who want to make web development their full-time job, and oversimplified, nostalgia-driven tutorials that forgo modern techniques to focus on simple but outdated approaches.

Instead, this project aims to create educational material for web development that puts modern tools and techniques in the hands of a fannish, non-technical public, and which speaks to their needs without talking down to them. Our guides start from the belief that, given the right encouragement and support, people can master the best professional tools that will allow them to quickly achieve their website-building goals. We believe that, while some of these tools might require a bit of initial effort, they will eventually help people fully focus on the fun and creative parts of development without getting bogged down by unnecessary, obsolete complexities.

These are the same people behind Fandom Coders (which I also found through this project!) and they are seeking to raise money through Kickstarter to produce a series of illustrated zines/books teaching web development topics aimed specifically at a fannish audience. The illustrations and concept are themselves very fannish ... I'm not even going to attempt to describe them. Just go look at the link. This doesn't even look remotely like my fandom but I think it's adorable, and even if the aesthetic isn't your thing ... well, the information is still there.

Why does this "fan-built web" even matter?

Whenever I rant about the fan-built web, I piss someone off who thinks I'm anti-AO3/anti-OTW. I am neither. I think the OTW and its various projects have been essential to the growth of fandom. I am glad that they exist. Now that that's out of the way ...

I am concerned that a single organization is increasingly the only fan-run organization/location where most fanworks can be found. This is a problem. The biggest reason is the eggs-in-one-basket issue. Having dropped a basket of actual eggs, that saying came from truth because it makes a big fucking mess that, even as a grown-ass woman, you want to cry over when it happens. Imagine even a day's worth of data lost from AO3 and you'd have a lot of grown-ass humans bawling. Digital data is fragile, and if you think it's impossible that AO3 could suffer a data loss or be targeted by any number of individuals/entities hostile to their mission or even, gods forbid, close someday ... well. Running a website is not easy and, especially at the scale of AO3, it is not cheap. It is hard to find people to do anything, much less the specialized technical tasks that are required to run any site but, again, especially one of that scale. Right now, we can't imagine not wanting an archive for fanfiction, but in 2003, we couldn't imagine not wanting mailing lists either and the LJ homepage still featured Frank the Goat. I am less concerned that AO3's servers will be annihilated by a meteorite than I am that fans will move on to some future way of doing fandom that we currently can't even imagine, and AO3 will lack the people or the funds or both to continue.

As for for-profit sites/platforms used for fandom, if the last two decades have shown us anything, it is that no matter how fandom-friendly they seem, they will eventually gravitate toward a corporate-friendly stance on copyright and censorship, which will never be in fans' favor.

Then there is the simple desirability of more diverse options for the fannish web. There are advantages to being able to find everything in one place, but there are disadvantages too. I used to roll my eyes at the people who couldn't stand [whatever] to the extent that they couldn't even behave civilly on a website that included it, but the fact of the matter is, when these folks could self-select into their own spaces with their own likeminded people, that wasn't entirely a bad thing.

There are lots of reasons why people want to set up their own spaces beyond that, though. AO3, after all, has its own mission (creating a site where any fannish content is allowed) that doesn't necessarily align with what fans want/need out of fandom. Needs that come immediately to mind: the ability to create 18+ fannish spaces and the ability to curate content to create sites that prioritize the needs of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other fans from groups who have historically put up with a lot of shit and wouldn't mind a break from it when reading fic for fun.

Then sometimes people want their own space just to have a space to be mindlessly, squeefully fannish without the worry that they're interrupting or detracting or getting in the way of other fans who aren't as into their favorite as they are. This was the motive behind me starting the SWG. There were plenty of Tolkien fanfiction archives and lists and groups—we certainly didn't need another one—but I wanted a space just for nerding about the Silm.

And of course there are individual fan websites, which used to be a thing but largely ended with the closure of Geocities! I have my own website, and while it is terribly out-of-date (due to the conundrum of webmasters everywhere, which is the same reason the cobbler's kids go barefoot), I do love that there is a space where I can put absolutely anything I make and can then point people toward. This would resolve the eggs-in-one-basket issue for people who are multifandom or otherwise not inclined to use smaller archives like the SWG but who want a place other than AO3 to host their work.

For those who, like me, are interested in making it easier for fan-run sites to exist, I thought this kickstarter and the larger Fandom Coders project might be of interest. Even if not ... it warms the cockles of my crabby-on-this-issue heart to feel less like I'm tilting at windmills and maybe like we might be making some progress.

Comments

[vriddy]

I'm excited about the project as well. I think it's fantastic to have resources to teach people in different ways out there, and if the goal is to make something difficult less intimidating, all the better! I hope the Kickstarter takes off and the resources created help a lot of people. "Empowering" is a great word, we could use more of that! More diversity in fannish spaces would be good and make us stronger in general.

[spiced_wine]

Yes, I remember Geocities and the old proboards sites which had a template you could do a lot with and many people did and while I’m glad AO3’s around, the eggs in one basket does bother me. When greater diversity is being recognised among people (and fans) it makes sense people would like to have their own corner of fandom.

[erulissedances]

I used to have/operate several Yahoo boards, and I miss the interchange and the ideas that were bounced from one person to another. I love the concept that the GIT group have come up with. I wish they were doing something about setting up commercial websites, I'd sign up with them in a flash.

- Erulisse (one L)

[sauronnaise]

I heard about Tolkien becoming public domain soon. What are your predictions to the upcoming future on the fandom communities and artists?

[hhimring]

The B2MeM mods recently ran into another issue with using one site like AO3 for everything. Not really such a major issue, I suppose, but still enough to create a real hitch in proceedings. It was that drabble-a-thon: it seemed very convenient that you could create a collection for the drabbles and AO3 would check the word count for you so that you could be sure it was really 100, without an inconvenient amount of mods doing arithmetic. But it turned out that it would create a real problem for some writers that you could not switch off AO3 notifications just for those drabbles; they feared losing subscribers, especially those in other fandoms. ETA: What I mean, it can be convenient to have and do everything on the same site, in some ways, but it also can have unexpected repercussions that wouldn't even occur to you.