Internet-based fandom is a constructed space. It didn't magically pop into existence out of the ether, it was built over years and it's changed its mailing address many times. Consider if you will the age of Usenet and the WELL. Back in the day, when fans were swimming happily in the primordial waters of SASEs and word-of-mouth fan-run conventions, a strange, shining beacon lured them from the shore: a way to communicate with other fans across the world in real time. Fans haunted their local BBSes, posting Star Trek discussions and coordinating Beauty and the Beast meet-ups.

Usenet exploded, and then the home base for fandoms straddled the line between the rec.arts.* groups and the mailing lists that sprung up around them. The stories on alt.startrek.creative were archived by Joseph Young on his school server. Authors and readers from alt.tv.x-files.creative created the Gossamer archive, which eventually landed at http://www.gossamer.org. FORKNI-L and FKFIC-L were archived on their listserv's home site (and later uploaded to http://www.fkfanfic.com).  Fan spaces were being created and maintained by fans.

As more fans came online, specialty archives started to appear. Geocities offered free websites in 1996, and then anyone who could copy HTML from another site could run an archive. Favorite pairing? Archive. Favorite character? Archive. School accounts and personal websites had the most storage space and bandwidth, so those were the sites that grew. Gargoyles fans watched their fanfics migrate from a small FTP server on http://www.rat.org to http://www.castle.net and finally http://www.gargoyles-fans.org.  Star Trek fans saw the big archive bounce from place to place, finally finding a home at http://www.trekiverse.org. Fans grew and tended their own fannish spaces, even as they kept those spaces separate.

Then came Xing.

The story is legendary: Xing Li started an archive as his senior project in school. Fanfiction.Net went live in late 1998 and never looked back. Described by one user as "the giant shopping mall" of fandom, FFN changed the dynamics of fan archiving. With no editorial oversight and no moderation, posting fanfic for any fandom became something that anyone could do.

Now, there are good things about shopping malls, and there are bad things. FFN takes a lot of flack for the same things that malls do: no good place for adults to hang out, overpriced yet cheaply-made merchandise, ads everywhere, and way too many darn teenagers around. Ah. I see you recognize the place. But it's big, it's convenient, it's open for everyone, and you're likely to find something that you want eventually. Besides, some of those teenagers are pretty cool.

My friend who made the "shopping mall" comment was user 3454 at the site. I was user 37360. Today there are well over a million users. Even if many have drifted away, that's a big fannish presence at the mall, and not one costumed Easter Bunny in sight.

Livejournal has also been a great resource for fanfiction archiving, as its Friends List function allows people to view friends and communities in one handy place. If FFN is the shopping mall, Livejournal is the swap meet, where everybody and everything is out there at once, and you know the seller personally. When LJ was still under Brad Fitzpatrick and his team, the customers were the people who bought the paid accounts.

FFN was not set up to be a money-making opportunity. Xing ran the site out of his own pocket for years before advertising finally took over paying the bills, round about the time when NC17 fanfics were booted per the new TOS. While no numbers on how much the site takes in now, it is the fifth stickiest site on the Web, and Google appears to have a special deal going to permit the ads being shown with fanfic. That's a huge business, and I speak only for myself, but I certainly don't begrudge Xing; he provided and continues to provide a great service for fandom.

One of the best pieces of advice in any mystery is to follow the money. Where money goes, people who want money will follow.

Fans have money. More importantly, fans also create huge numbers of creative works for free. Fandom is after all a "gift economy," in which we give each other presents of 'fic and in return receive thank yous of reviews.

When the occasional fan tries to make money off fanfic, the rest of fandom falls on her/his head like a ton of rectangular building things. Back in the heyday of print 'zines, fans would sometimes charge extra for the 'zones, which normally cost enough to cover printing and binding costs, and those fans found their wares shunned in the Dealer's Rooms. A few years ago, a fan (who shall remain nameless for now) decided she didn't like her job and if her readers would just each send her $25, the cost of a hardcover, she could afford to quit, stay home, and write them fanfic for a year. This was not received well by fandom, wank ensued, and hopefully we won't have to go through that again for a while.

Why? Because fandom is aware of its grey area of influence and nobody likes a lawsuit. The general consensus, right or wrong, is that The Powers That Be will ignore us as long as we're not making money, and in practice, that's what happens.

However, we live in a new climate, and our favorite media projects are being written by people who used to be us. They're fan-friendly because they were fans, and some of them are willing to work with us. The Star Wars producers encourage fan films to be sent in for contests. Star Trek, via Pocket Books, runs a regular fanfiction contest called "Strange New Worlds," the winners of which get published.

They're still not entirely happy about us, but they're willing to see what we can do, and they've realized they can make more money off of us. And that's where FanLib came in. FanLib (whom we tried to reach for this article) combines corporate interests in fannish output with contacts on the inside. They package up the fanfiction by the authors on their site and promote it to advertisers as user-generated content ala Livejournal and MySpace. While claiming to be fans, they're running a business and trying to make money off fandom from the outset. What fandom allows for FFN and mutters about on LJ is the thing it likely will not accept about FanLib, and despite the changes in their TOS, it is what will continue to keep FanLib separate from the majority of online fandom.

So what's the alternative? Many writers dropped FFN when it banned NC17 material and the fans went to LJ. Now fans are fleeing Livejournal, fed up with the TOS changes and the witch hunts. Journalfen, GreatestJournal and InsaneJournal are LJ clones with some fannish overlap, but stories spread out among many sites are not going to be seen by as many people. The "boutique" fanfiction archive, geared towards just one product, may have to return, and fandom as a whole may splinter again.

That'd be sad. I liked the mall well enough, but I loved the swap meet. It'll be hard to go back to just yard sales.

(Continued in Part Two)