I suspect this is not a particularly helpful response, if what you're looking for is "Go here to find fandom." But if you were asking a somewhat more philosophical question, here's a bit of anecdata and an idea or two.
There is an alternative not mentioned in the way your question is phrased. It's also possible that fandom has always been widespread, existing in various pockets of community such that it's the poly-fandom gathering in LJ was an unusual moment in fan history. Also possible is that as broadly based as LJ fandom was, there are fair sized fandoms it never included. One of the reasons I suggest this is that I ended up on LJ fairly late, and was surprised as I explored it to find very little of my then primary fandom.
That gap came up again for me rather forcefully in a recent "Guide to fanfiction for people who can't stop getting it wrong" on DailyDot. The writers talk in passing about groups of fans setting up publishers print Twilight fic with serial numbers filed off. Interesting, yes, but the writers make that sound like a singular occasion. Yet the largest lesbian publishers still in business started out publishing Xena fic, and a raft of smaller ones also grew out of the fandom and continue. (Canon in Xena includes the characters being reincarnated in a variety of times/places, so the serial number doesn't take much filing off.)
From the AO3 counts, Xena is in the small fandoms range with ~600 stories, yet there are closer to ~20k spread over the three biggest Xenafic sites, and again, a raft of smaller sites and collections.
Thing is, most of this grew through email lists, and bulletin board systems -- and has never really felt the need to move on to journals, tumblers or whatever the next sites/apps will be. That means that if one doesn't know a specific site or community exists it'll be hard to find, leaving it almost impossible to know how many fragments fandom is broken into, for how long (the Xena sites date bag to the mid 1990's), or where to find them all.
I don't for a minute think that the Xena fandom is the only one left out of, or forgotten by, the Daily Dot article. It'd not surprise me at all to find snail mail based, or zine based fandoms that were still going strong, perhaps having transitioned to email, but no further. Yet as long as fandom history gets described as a general movement from one key platform to another, the communities' real level of fragmentation cannot be assessed.
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Date: 1 Mar 2015 09:58 pm (UTC)There is an alternative not mentioned in the way your question is phrased. It's also possible that fandom has always been widespread, existing in various pockets of community such that it's the poly-fandom gathering in LJ was an unusual moment in fan history. Also possible is that as broadly based as LJ fandom was, there are fair sized fandoms it never included. One of the reasons I suggest this is that I ended up on LJ fairly late, and was surprised as I explored it to find very little of my then primary fandom.
That gap came up again for me rather forcefully in a recent "Guide to fanfiction for people who can't stop getting it wrong" on DailyDot. The writers talk in passing about groups of fans setting up publishers print Twilight fic with serial numbers filed off. Interesting, yes, but the writers make that sound like a singular occasion. Yet the largest lesbian publishers still in business started out publishing Xena fic, and a raft of smaller ones also grew out of the fandom and continue. (Canon in Xena includes the characters being reincarnated in a variety of times/places, so the serial number doesn't take much filing off.)
From the AO3 counts, Xena is in the small fandoms range with ~600 stories, yet there are closer to ~20k spread over the three biggest Xenafic sites, and again, a raft of smaller sites and collections.
Thing is, most of this grew through email lists, and bulletin board systems -- and has never really felt the need to move on to journals, tumblers or whatever the next sites/apps will be. That means that if one doesn't know a specific site or community exists it'll be hard to find, leaving it almost impossible to know how many fragments fandom is broken into, for how long (the Xena sites date bag to the mid 1990's), or where to find them all.
I don't for a minute think that the Xena fandom is the only one left out of, or forgotten by, the Daily Dot article. It'd not surprise me at all to find snail mail based, or zine based fandoms that were still going strong, perhaps having transitioned to email, but no further. Yet as long as fandom history gets described as a general movement from one key platform to another, the communities' real level of fragmentation cannot be assessed.