Why I have my own site for fic

Plainly, because I don't trust anyone.  Yes, my host could up and vanish tomorrow, but I still have backups just in case.  And at the end of the day I trust my host a little bit more than I trust AO3, which I trust far more than any other platform.

I used to be one of those people who would keep all their fic on LJ, meticulously tagged and organised, and mirrored to FFN as much as possible.  But FFN is on the very bottom of the trust list.  I have an account there so nobody takes my name, but I don't trust them to host anything I've written.

LiveJournal is right out, and has been since like 2009.  Tumblr is impossible, and frankly fuck that site anyway.  As for DW?  Nope.  Don't trust it either.  Not as a platform with long term reliability.  It hasn't evolved since it was launched, and some people might say that's a good thing.  It's comfortable in the fact that it doesn't change.  You don't wake up one day and have war flashbacks from that time you logged into Delicious and found it had been turned into a weird Myspace clone.  But let's be frank: it's ugly as hell.  It was ugly as hell when it launched, the layouts are terrible, and there are so many half-started features that got forgotten about that you have to just accept that the site doesn't work right if you want to use it.

The design in and of itself is not the problem.  It's the messages that it sends that's a problem for me.  I might not wake up tomorrow and find that the site has radically changed, but I very well may wake up tomorrow and find that the bills haven't been paid and the site is no longer accessible.

And yeah, I'm a bit paranoid and distrusting of any website where fandom congregates, regardless of whether or not it was founded for fandom's sake.  I got my fandom start in mailing groups.  They all shut down.  Yahoo groups is gone.  Geocities was fun, but that disappeared out from under us too.  I've already mentioned Delicious.  LiveJournal took a different approach and just went out of its way to become as hostile as possible toward fandom.  FFN seems to be paying the bills on a credit card someone forgot to cancel, because nobody is steering that ship.  DW has just flat out failed to thrive from the beginning.  Tumblr straight up doesn't work, and is nothing but wank.  Twitter isn't even an option.

Yeah, I'm paranoid.  I'm sick of having to move to another platform every time I get comfortable.  But even as it is, I'm working on getting my stuff mirrored over here as quickly as possible because I've been burned so many times that I don't completely trust AO3.  It's for fans, by fans, and has a fairly decent reputation, but there's this little voice in the back of my mind that says "what if?"  What if something happens?  What if some new legislation passes, or there's some big drama within the OTW, or the site is targeted in an attack?

I have everything I've ever written backed up on two hard drives, plus Dropbox.  I don't trust Dropbox either.  I used to use Google Drive, but I lost faith in them ages ago and pulled everything down.  I've also been thinking about potentially archive-locking everything I put on AO3, and potentially turning off comments.  I don't enable fic comments on my site, and I'm not sure why they need to be enabled on AO3 the more I think about it.  (Even comments on my blog posts lock after two weeks.)  This Unus Annus project has actually made me realise that it's not fic engagement that I crave, but social engagement.  And that's getting harder and harder as more and more people my age are just giving up on using internet as a social tool as more and more of our platforms fall apart.

But I very well may just decide to restructure my entire AO3 presence to be exactly what it says on the tin: an archive.  A personal backup of everything I put on this site.  I have my newsletter, which I'm still trying to figure out how to use effectively.  But I think I've been trying to use creative output to replace the community aspect that was lost when fandom splintered off to places like Tumblr and Twitter.  And I think if I just put my fic out there and let it exist on its own, without any other expectations, that might be better for me.  And I think it would also mean that it puts less at stake should AO3 just blip out of existence one day.  AO3 would no longer be my primary location for fandom interaction. 

I already mirror all of my recs for other people's fic over here.  In fact, I'd wager more people see them here than they ever do on AO3 anyway.

I've got another week and a half or so of meta posts to upload over there and think about it.  But I feel like using AO3 just as a mirror archive is probably the direction I want to go.  We'll see how I feel about it when I start posting fic again.