In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.
It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.
We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today's internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.
The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.
But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.
First stop: your favorite place
In the 1990s, the internet was still in its infancy. Going online was an event—a ritual involving dial-up modems, screeching connections, and text-based browsers. The early web felt like a vast, uncharted galaxy, but it was also surprisingly small. In 1994, there were only about 10,000 websites and 2,500 web servers. You could buy physical directories—books and magazines—that mapped out the “information superhighway”, because it still made sense to have an offline map to the online world.
Search engines were years away from making the web easily searchable. Instead, we relied on hand-curated directories, maintained by individuals who updated them sporadically. Your online journey often began with a university homepage, an ISP’s list of “what’s hot,” or a recommendation from a friend. Jean Armour Polly, the librarian who is credited with first coining the term “surfing the internet”, says that she liked that metaphor because, like the sport, finding your way around wasn’t easy – it required skill, patience, and a sense of adventure.
Once online, the novelty of accessing news headlines quickly wore off. What kept people coming back was the ability to connect with others who shared their interests. The social heart of the early internet was Usenet, a kind of proto-Reddit where people gathered to discuss everything from science and technology to books, TV shows, and hobbies. It was here that I discovered transformative fandom for the first time—a community of fans who didn’t just consume media but debated it, reimagined it, and created art and stories that expanded its universe. For me, it was "The X-Files” fandom, and it felt like home.
Who’s the mayor of this town
It was in these fandom Usenet groups, discussing the mythology of "The X-Files”, that I cut my teeth as a citizen of the internet. Many of the norms we now take for granted—FAQs, content warnings, and even the concept of what was then quaintly called “netiquette”—were born in these early communities. Initially, most of this was dictated by the form. In an effort to make posts readable, they needed to be concise. Long elaborate email signatures were annoying, posting binaries or other large files where they would clog up news readers was downright rude, and typing in capital letters was deemed shouting.
Virginia Shea, writing in 1994 and attempting to summarise these rules, noted, “when you're holding a conversation online -- whether it's an email exchange or a response to a discussion group posting -- it's easy to misinterpret your correspondent's meaning. And it's frighteningly easy to forget that your correspondent is a person with feelings more or less like your own.” For the first time strangers were meeting other than face to face, and without any of the social context clues that would have previously guided us in person.
In the beginning, the internet was the domain of the relatively tech-savvy, often university students and researchers. Every September, a wave of new college first-years would join, who were unfamiliar with the existing norms and culture of Usenet. Experienced users expected this temporary disruption, and after a few weeks, the newcomers would learn the ropes, and things would return to normal.
The culture of Usenet changed forever in September 1993, when AOL gave its massive user base access to the platform. The influx of new, less experienced users overwhelmed the community’s ability to teach them the ropes. This period, known as “Eternal September,” marked a permanent shift in online interaction.
Moderation became a necessity, and communities developed their own DIY governance systems. In fandom, this meant detailed FAQs, content tagging, and disclaimers. Early “ship wars” (for example, between fans who believed that characters like Mulder and Scully should be in a romantic relationship and those that didn’t; between fans that saw Harry Potter finishing the books with Hermione Granger as his girlfriend and those that preferred to imagine him with sworn enemy Draco Malfoy) led to splintering communities, dramatic discourse, and a burgeoning sense of fandom ethics.
Self governance, group accountability, and a recognition that if you didn’t want to stay in a particular community or space online you were always free to make your own, characterised this pioneering era.
Keep it secret, keep it safe
As a baby lawyer in my “real” life, I was struck by the disclaimers that prefaced every piece of fanfiction I read. Some were simple acknowledgments of copyright ownership; others were elaborate pleas not to be sued. There was a certain frisson around doing something infringing. Was all this storytelling actually illegal?
It turns out that much of that had to do with the vampire Lestat. Anne Rice, the author of the popular series of novels beginning with Interview with the Vampire, stated that she did not approve of transformative fans engaging with her characters. By 2000, she had become even more adamant – posting on her own site that she “did not allow” fanfiction about her copyrighted characters. She used lawyers to send cease and desist letters to fans – a move that would later be copied by 20th Century Fox in relation to The Simpsons and The X-Files, and JK Rowling in relation to sexually-explicit Harry Potter fanfiction.
The message was clear: transformative fandom was tolerated only as long as it didn’t threaten the bottom line. Today, of course, we’re very familiar with corporations wielding content takedown notices and cease and desist letters, but back in the late nineties, this seemed a lot more confrontational and frightening. In response to these letters fans folded, lacking the money or resources to respond to legal threats from creators, and they either removed or hid works.
Writing in HotWired (the first online magazine, part of Wired) in 1997, Steve Silberman summarised the then-dubbed “War on Fandom”: “The problem is that the nature of fandom has changed fundamentally in the past 30 years, while perception of the role of fan culture in marketing campaigns has not. No longer content to be passive consumers, fans - especially those on the Net - now expect to be listened to by those who create the culture they enjoy. They demand to be in the loop. Both the fans and the media companies want to cheat a little. The media companies want to parade their Web savvy in the marketplace and they want to funnel all the Net traffic into a few commercial sites. The fans want to have freedom of speech and assembly in sites of their own choosing and to have fewer constraints on the use of copyrighted materials than in any other medium.”
These clashes shaped fandom’s non-commercial ethos, which persists to this day. Fans learned to operate in the gray areas of copyright law, creating transformative works for love, not profit. But it also put fan communities at odds with the corporations that owned the intellectual property—and, increasingly, the platforms that hosted their work.
Homemade web
As fans migrated from Usenet to the early web, the communities found a home on Yahoo! mailing lists. And the fans themselves began building their own personal spaces. Geocities pages, webrings, and hand-crafted websites became the norm, because from the outset, fans sought to preserve and protect their creative output.
The X-Files was not just my first fandom, but also one of the first fandoms to have a large-scale central archive of all posted fanfiction in The Gossamer Project. Because the archive welcomed all kinds of stories regardless of subject matter, X-Files fans developed a comprehensive way of coding their stories to make it clear to readers what was inside. “MSR” meant the story was about the Mulder/Scully relationship. “UST” stood for unresolved sexual tension between the two. The MPAA rating system was used to denote the content, from G for general audiences to NC-17 for explicit or graphic content. A self-categorising system that would lead the way for content warnings and the tag cloud era to come.
By the early 2000s, I had moved on to The West Wing fandom and finally built my own website to host my fanfiction. My fandom friends and I taught each other how to code, design, and maintain our pages. Even as archives became more popular, none of us wanted to lose control of our stories to another site that might not let us change them or take them down, or might disappear overnight. This peer-to-peer knowledge sharing was vital. I learned how to stop hot-linking (because bandwidth was expensive!), how to find episodes in .rar format and recompile them, how to digitise VHS tapes to cut together fanvids, and how to use early music-sharing tools like Limewire to find the perfect soundtrack.
And so gradually I learned to build and maintain my own little corner of the web, and to choose how to share it with others. I linked to my favourite authors. I made rec lists of my favourite stories. I participated in and ran fan-voted awards and exchanges and challenges. I had a whole life, a home, on the DIY web.
You don’t own me
Fans have always been early adopters, quick to try new platforms and tools and to make them their own. But they’ve also been quick to abandon them when those platforms no longer served their needs.
Maciej Ceglowski, the founder of Pinboard, gave a talk in 2013 called Fan is a Tool Using Animal, about when Delicious, the bookmarking site that was the darling of the era, made a series of changes that made the site unusable for the fans who had been using it to meticulously tag their fanfiction collections. Seeing the disappointment and unrest among fans on Twitter, Maciej tweeted fans to ask what they might need to make the switch to Pinboard. Over the next couple of days, dozens of fans came together anonymously to collaborate on a Google document, and produced a comprehensive 52 page technical spec. He says, “having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I could not believe what I was seeing…several dozen anonymous people had come together in love and harmony to write a complex, logically coherent document, based on a single tweet.”
Perhaps the most well-known example of fans taking their destiny into their own hands is the story of the creation of Archive of Our Own. AO3 is a noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting site for transformative fanworks such as fanfiction, fanart, fan videos and podfic. The project started on the heels of a startup company called Fanlib attempting to make a commercial archive that fans would submit their stories to for free. Fans were unimpressed that a company would profit off their creative work, and began to post about alternatives. Livejournal (at that stage one of the main online homes for fandom) then bungled an attempt to remove accounts based on a list of “illegal activities” and suspended or deleted hundreds of fandom journals in a moral panic that came to be known as “Strikethrough.” Fans realised that the transgressive nature of transformative fandom was always going to be at odds with companies that wanted to make money off advertising, or were unwilling to defend content on their platforms from complaints and threats.
The Archive was entirely built and designed by volunteers from fandom. Many of the people working on the project acquired skills in coding, design and documentation through their work on the Archive. When the project went into open beta in November 2009 it had over 20 contributors, all of whom were women, and it remains a shining example of an open source project that has created an inclusive environment that welcomes people without “traditional” development experience. The Archive now has over 14.6 million uploaded fanworks, 8.1 million registered users, and has fanworks in over 70,000 fandoms.
Keeping the past alive
Fandom's need for archival permanence has led to remarkable grassroots preservation efforts. The Open Doors project at AO3 is a great example of this commitment to preserving fan history. Recognizing that many older archives were at risk of disappearing as their maintainers moved on or hosting costs became prohibitive, Open Doors established a process to import endangered archives into AO3, preserving not just the works themselves but their contexts and metadata.
This archival impulse stands in stark contrast to the ephemeral nature of corporate platforms, where content can disappear due to policy changes, acquisitions, or shutdowns. Fan communities understand that their creative works have value beyond the moment of creation—they're part of a continuum of cultural conversation that spans decades.
The importance of archiving extends beyond fanfiction to all aspects of fan culture. Projects like Fanlore (also run by the Organisation for Transformative Works, the parent nonprofit behind AO3), a wiki documenting the history and terminology of fandom, ensure that the institutional knowledge and cultural context of these communities aren't lost. Without such efforts, each new platform migration would risk erasing the rich history that came before.
At a point in history where we are watching the current US administration dismantle institutions and direct the erasure of databases, websites and historical records, the kind of preservation at the heart of fan communities has never been more important.
Tumbling along
David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, said back in 2012: "The only real tools for expression these days are YouTube, which turns my stomach,...They take your creative works – your film that you poured hours and hours of energy into – and they put ads on top of it. They make it as gross an experience to watch your film as possible. I'm sure it will contribute to Google's bottom line; I'm not sure it will inspire any creators."
When Tumblr launched in 2007, fandom took to it like a duck to water. It combined a place to share the strongly visual content that was increasingly possible (photos and gifs from your favourite shows), with a new way of “conversing” through weblogs and tags. It had the aesthetic appeal of being able to design your own page and theme, which felt like the personal approach of MySpace or Geocities, but far more beautiful. And the dashboard let you curate a personal feed of all kinds of interests in one place. The tag structure made discovery easy, but then was turned into something unique. Fans developed their own tagging systems and also used the tags for conversations and creation in themselves.
And unlike Facebook, Tumblr allowed for complete anonymity – something that was crucial for fans. Tumblr took on a life of its own, mainstreaming a focus on social justice, sex positivity, and cultural identity for a whole generation long before anyone dared to misuse the word “woke.” But as with Livejournal before it, the time came when the corporate landlords decided to act. In 2018, Apple removed the Tumblr app from the iOS app store because of the ability to access objectionable material on the site. Instead of acting to improve moderation, trust and safety, Tumblr elected to ban all adult content from the site, sending its user-numbers into a terminal decline. Acquired by Yahoo! for $1 billion in 2013 and sold for $3 million in 2019, fandom diehards are still there sharing gifs of the hot firefighter show, but it’s never been the same.
We all live in the town square now
As we moved into the social media era, fans were again among the first to embrace the new tools. Seeing the potential to boost their faves, twitter users were for the first time able to drive trends, hype singles, outpace celebrity gossip sites, and propel artists and celebrities to a new kind of stardom. But the shift from small, self-governed communities to centralized platforms came at a cost.
Unlike the online communities of old, with our quaint attempts at self-governance, agreed shorthand, and etiquette – venture capital-backed social media platforms prioritised user growth above all else. And they quickly found that the fastest route to “engagement” was through conflict. While fans have always disagreed with one another, and “ship wars” are a time-honored tradition, social media cast everything onto a larger stage. Stan wars, toxic fandom, and terms like “parasociality” made mainstream news headlines.
Everyone began to experience context collapse. Bad faith readings of tweets propelled unsuspecting civilians to being the “main character”, piled on by strangers. The internet embraced the algorithm. We no longer had much of an ability to curate our own day-to-day experience online. Instead, the apps prioritized feeds filled with advertising, rage-bait, misinformation and clout-chasers – things that would keep us doom-scrolling as long as possible. Gone was the central idea of communities gathered around shared interests. We were all just existing in a handful of noisy, overcrowded, post-apocalyptic online cities.
The reality is it’s become dehumanizing – this many people online. And so we are seeking out alternatives to the noise and the crowds and the hate. Fans, like almost everyone else, are drawing back into smaller private neighbourhoods. Social discords and slacks. Group chats. Newsletter commenting threads. Ask people where their favourite place on the internet is now and it’s going to be an obscure private Facebook group about a podcast they like.
The reason fan communities continue to embrace Tumblr is because in many ways it’s the antithesis of mainstream social media. There’s no algorithm. Sure you can like a post but it does nothing to extend its reach. And honestly? Good luck ever finding a post again after the first time you see it. Tumblr introduced the ability to pay for a sponsored post but in typical Tumblr fashion there’s no targeting, no guaranteed impressions. Just the ability to pay ten dollars to share a photo of your lizard on other people’s dashboards.
As a venture capital investment – Tumblr is a disaster. But as a place to hang out? It can be a delight.
But our corporate landlords persist in trying to control everything we do online, fundamentally putting them at odds with fans (and sex workers, and activists, and survivors, and so on). On Tiktok we’ve seen the rise of “algospeak”, with users adopting “a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems. For instance, in many online videos, it’s common to say “unalive” rather than “dead,” “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” or “spicy eggplant” instead of “vibrator.””
Contrast this with the early web, where fans controlled our own content and distribution. Where we wrote and made art about whatever we liked.
The internet is outside the walls
I first started thinking about this when I read Molly White’s great piece “We Can Have a Different Web”:
The walled enclosures that crowded out much of that acre of developed land still reside within an infinite expanse of possibility. There are no limits to the web — if it has borders, they are ever expanding. We may feel as though we are trapped in a tiny, crowded, noisy space, but it is only because we don't see over the walls.
It inspired me at the end of last year to build my second ever website. I built a single-serve site to help me plan a new layout for my LEGO city. It was a wild journey involving a lot of ChatGPT as my sometimes-helpful coach, a poor replacement for the friends who taught me two decades earlier. This little website wound up being a finalist in the Tiny Awards, which: “exist to celebrate the personal internet, the other web, the one that is small and handmade and isn’t trying to sell you anything or monetise anything but which instead is about people using the digital tools we all have access to to make the sorts of small, personal experiences that you tend not to see ‘in feed.'”
This is what I want to focus on in my online life now. This other web.
We're witnessing a resurgence of the personal web, a quiet revolution against the homogenized social media landscape. Personal websites, newsletters, and indie social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky are gaining traction among those disillusioned with corporate platforms. Fandom continues to be at the forefront, experimenting with decentralized technologies. Discord servers have become the new mailing lists, offering private spaces for discussion free from algorithmic interference. The growth of personal newsletters echoes the webzines and digests of early fandom.
What's most striking is how these new tools are being used in old ways. The POSSE approach – Post on your Own Site, Share Everywhere – is gaining popularity as people reclaim ownership of their digital presence. It's a return to the pre-platform internet, where your online identity wasn't tied to a single corporate entity. Building your own forever-home, instead of “renting” attention on someone else’s platform.
The challenges, of course, are significant. Building and maintaining your own digital space requires time, skill, and resources that not everyone has. And there's the eternal question of audience: if you build it, will they come? But perhaps that's the wrong framing. The value of the personal web isn't measured in reach or engagement metrics. It's about authentic connection, creative expression, and control over your digital footprint. In fandom circles “reach” has historically just been a function of the community you’ve built around you. In my earliest fandoms, being “popular” came with writing and posting a great story people liked. As the scale of the fandoms grew — and with it the concept of “big name fans” — recognition still came with connection: friends who recommended your stories, mutuals on Tumblr. Sharing our favourite things is a love language. That’s how we get the good internet back.
The blueprint for reclaiming the web
We’ve had the instructions for saving the web in our hands all along, we just haven’t focused on them. If you, like me, haven’t built a website in many years, it’s time to give it a go again. Use AI copilots if your skills are dusty. Show a young person in your life how you do it while you’re at it. Empower them to resist platform dependency.
Don’t settle for corporate landlords who don’t care. You don’t need to stay on a platform that dismantles its trust and safety team, that says that slurs are welcome, or that Nazi propaganda is “free speech.” No audience is worth that. Vote with your wallet.
Embrace the new tools – Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber appeared at SxSW this year wearing a shirt that read Mundus sine Caesaribus ("A world without Caesars" in Latin). It poked fun at Zuckerburg’s now infamous shirt that read Aut Zuck aut nihil ("Zuck or nothing"). Bluesky lets you design your very own custom feeds, build your own communities and control your own scroll. We should expect nothing less than an internet without emperors.
The strength of the early web wasn't in its scale, but in its diversity and interconnectedness. We don't need a billion-user replacement for Facebook. We need thousands of vibrant, self-sustaining communities linked by shared interests and mutual respect.
The web we lost has been here all along, quietly thriving in the corners corporate interests haven't fully colonized. By learning from fandom's resilience and creativity, we can start building a different, better internet—one that serves human connection rather than corporate profit. It won't happen overnight, and it won't be without challenges, but the blueprint is there.
All we need to do is follow it.
Sacha Judd is a writer based in Aotearoa New Zealand who focuses on pop culture, media and the intersection of technology and fandom. You can subscribe to her newsletter here.
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