Why Fanfic Writers Should Be Maintaining Their Own Sites

So Archive of Our Own (AO3), the biggest archive of fanfic on the internet, is currently down. This major outage is estimated to last anywhere from two to four weeks according to their website. Now while the Organization for Transformative Works which runs AO3 is a great organization, and AO3 is undeniably a good thing to exist, it is still a centralized platform. And as I've been saying for a while now, centralized platforms are a problem. In March of 2025 I wrote something called "It's Time to Be Internet Cockroaches," about how we need to go back to building our own websites. I detailed how I think the internet works best as a series of connected islands, and how it makes us more resilient and less vulnerable to losing our spaces. And while I went on to talk about how you should start a blog and bring back forums, this is yet another example of how we need to resurrect a lost form of website. That form being the personal fanfic page. I don't think people realize that I used to…