seasoliloquy | question of the day 4/12/18

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:

This is a super weird question for me to answer? Because at first I was like, "oh, my first real experience with being involved in fandom was tumblr" but then I realised that it actually kind of wasn't!

I got 'involved' (lurking lmao) in the Pokemon fandom from when I was like 9/10ish I guess? and at that point, it must've been around 2004ish, I didn't discover any of the big sites that were around then except for FFN. What I do distinctly remember is 4 different Pokemon fansites, two of which still exist and two of which are utterly lost to the ether now sadly! (seriously, even archive.org only has a few of the pages archived.)

Those sites were Serebii.net, The Cave of Dragonflies, Mew's Hangout, and Mewtwofan's Pokemon Page. The latter two are now gone, but I remember reading tons of Pokemon fanfic on there, including fic which I later rediscovered on FFN (literally about a decade later so that was nice and nostalgic!) Serebii is obviously still up as possibly the longest-lasting Pokemon website, and TCoD is still around with no signs of fading :)

Apart from that, I read a lot of Pokemon fic on FFN, and sadly a lot of those fics were abandoned around 2009-2012... This was also iirc around the time when FFN removed all external links from profiles, so unfortunately any way to find those authors again was also lost when FFN wiped the links and those authors never logged back in.

Then in Jan 2012 I got a tumblr, and now I'm on dreamwidth because of the whole current tumblr drama!

Overall, I have a lot of good memories of those early days in fandom/online :) To some degree, I miss the whole 'stumbling-over-things' nature of fandom back then, but I think that's mostly nostalgia - I've gotten so used to being able to easily find things on tumblr and AO3 that I feel like I take that ease-of-access for granted a bit, especially when I find a fic rec that links to FFN and realise how difficult that site is to navigate lol