As an acafan, one of the more interesting aspects of fandom to me is the migration of communities from one platform to another, and how that affects text. From hard-copy mailing lists to USEnet groups to YahooGroups to customized online forums and such forth, the matter of fandom community–the writings of it–have never been constant.
In regards to fanfiction, that is partly due to its history as an underground literature, but mostly I believe because it is an opportunistic phenomenon. Fandom moves fast, as anyone watching the number of Avengers inspired fanfic to the AO3 can attest, and looks for faster ways to transmit more text to more people. Early adapters took fandom from zines to USEnet to YahooGroups to LJ and now AO3, and at each stage the transmission of the text affected its presentation.
Right now, the AO3 is delivering perhaps a death knell to the primacy of LJ for fanfiction because it is simply easier to read. But the cost is a loss of community: people do not read stories as groups, but as individuals. Personal relationships are nearly impossible to form on AO3, while on LJ and dreamwidth it is a natural outcome of people posting not just stories but entries about their personal lives.
This ease of access and readability is what pulled so many fans off of YahooGroups and on to LJ in the first place; change is not new. What is interesting is how the search for readability (and convenience) is, itself, directly impacting user communities.
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