Announcing Fanfiction.lol: A Manifesto on Human Creativity and AO3

A few weeks ago, I wrote a guide for setting up a cheap, accessible server. In truth, after being a front-end developer for over a decade, I realized that the full-stack wasn't as scary as I thought it'd be. But with the server up and running, I needed a real project to sink my teeth into. Something that would force me to have skin in the game. Being on the IndieWeb for half a year now, I've encountered a lot of impressive, talented web developers and webweavers—I went over a few of them in my love letter post. One of them is a sysadmin I know who runs SuperLove, a fork of the codebase otwarchive, the codebase powering the largest fanfiction archive in the world, Archive of Our Own, or AO3. I was told this is notoriously difficult to set up, and that there are only a handful of these AO3 forks in existence. SquidgeWorld, run by Walter, published the foundational bare-metal setup guide at squidgeworld.org/works/34491. Squideworld was the very first AO3 fork, launched in November 2020.…