Tikatu's Travels Through Time

That's the title of the warning posts that I've been spreading around the fandom this morning as I got the news that Lycos Europe is shutting down both their email and their Tripod webhosting services next month. For some fandoms, this being a European thing isn't all bad; the US isn't affected (yet) and most of the active sites on Tripod (if there are any) would be on the US servers. However, for my fandom, this isn't good. The UK is where the widest fan base is, and I know there are still sites on Tripod. Tripod has been around a long while, and some fans moved on to other places - like MSN groups, which is also closing down next month.

Adding in the AOL Groups closure last year, I get the distinct impression that the fannish world is shrinking. Like being on an ice floe and all the edges are falling off, floating and melting away into the surrounding ocean, leaving less and less space to stand on. Many of the webmasters/groups owners have moved on in fandom; some have dropped out entirely. Now the information, pictures, discussions and fanfiction stored on these remaining sites, abandoned or not, will drop out as well.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? In a way, yes. A lot of unique material is going to be lost forever. I went hunting through Tripod's search engine, looking for sites specific to my fandom. None were terribly active, but one had some fanfiction that I've seen nowhere else, and another had some unique computer generated art. Will these be saved by their creators? Will they be posted elsewhere? At this point, I doubt it. How much more of this is tucked away in abandoned Yahoo groups, or Angelfire sites, or Geocities sites? What happens if these are shut down, too, as being "unprofitable" or not "best of breed"? In the greater scheme of things, I suppose they're not much of a loss. Fandom, as important as it is to some now, won't necessarily be important to the same people later. But even in closed canon fandoms, such as my own, there are still fans that come along, all fired up by their new shiny, and it's good to see where others have been before. It's good to know what the clichés were, who the BNFs were, where to find the fanworks that aren't in the mainstream, or where that plagiarist might have found the work s/he is stealing. Those unique contributions are lost, and it stings.

That's what's got me so determined not to let my own MSN Groups go quietly. I've spent the past couple of days copying all the custom pages and downloading any pictures that I don't have on my own hard drive. I hope to use them in building a new site elsewhere... but will that one day go the way these others have gone? I guess only time will tell.