Satsuma's Journal

So it occurs to me that, regardless of how the current cycles of "oh wow so the OTW is pretty fucked up internally" shake out (which synonymous is v helpfully collecting for anyone who's lost track of the many threads of discussion) it might be beneficial for us all to work on our abilities to find & share fic via avenues other than Ao3 tags.

This is not a how to quit Ao3 list—plenty of the rec communities, etc are full of Ao3 links and that's absolutely fine—but even if comms are currently pretty Ao3 heavy, they'll be a lot more resilient long term should fandom decide to diversify where fic is posted or even be forced to pivot to other platforms (dawn_felagund has some discussion of the downsides to everything being on Ao3 in her tribute to the Library of Moria from 2020.)

Posting

melannen has posted a guide to making a neocities backup for your fic: How To Make Your Own Fanfiction Archive, In Just 10 Easy Steps

I've seen several people mention backing up their fics to SquidgeWorld as well, in part because they have easy Ao3 importing (update: there is some discussion of how easy this importing actually is down in the comments)

rainbowfic is an original fiction writing community

Update: Tei has no set up a webring for neocities mini-archives

Update: for non fic hosting, there is apparently vidders.net & audiofic (note that audiofic appears to primarily mirror podfics posted elsewhere, so a good choice if you're a podficcer looking to back up your Ao3 collections)

Update: independence1776 maintains a List of Online Tolkien Fanfic Archives

Update: for Star Trek fic there is Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive

Update: the fanficfare Calibre plugin has compiled a list of every fiction hosting platform they are aware of for the purpose of stating whether or not the plugin can support them. The plugin itself looks v handy for downloading & organizing fic if you're a Calibre user, but even if not there's a lot of sites they support worth checking out!


If you know of Dreamwidth communities or independent archives which host fic, please link them in the comments! Even if they're single fandom or even single person, it'd be great to get a directory going.

Sharing

Multifandom/general

fancake is a "thematic multifandom recs community" which picks a new theme to rec around each month. It's a lot of fun! Also, the largest reccing community I'm currently aware of

recsrainbow (+archive rainbow_mod ) appears mostly defunct unfortunately but has a long list of independent reccing communities

recs any fandom, no themes or other criteria for posting besides liking the thing

recthething accepts both rec posts and reccomendation requests!

fffriday is a weekly femslash recs coms

gensplosion any fandom gen recs

vidrecs vids! Accepts "any fandom, of any length, genre or rating. If you think it's a vid, it's a vid and you can rec it"

tozka put together a fanfiction rec resource list back in 2019 which may or may not still be relevant

Fandom-specific

merit_brush_recs is a (currently very quiet) recs community for guardian fanworks

Several fandom specific noticeboard communities support recs and self-recs as well either directly to the comm or through weekly/monthly roundup posts: sid_guardian, c_ent, queerly_beloved, paradisediner, theuntamed_mdzs, and presumably many others I can't think of off the top of my head—please share yours in the comments?

Update: comms shared in the comments include: bnha_fans, eerieindiana, fearstreet2021, harringrovers, kingfallsfans, knowsitsown, pr2017, truthfoundation, & znationhq

Saving

Ao3 has no inbuilt options for exporting your bookmark links, despite pretty much every other bookmark manager supporting imports & exports--if you know of any 3rd party tools for this please share in the comments!

nianeyna's ao3downloader is a bulk downloader for Ao3 fics which supports the same list of formats as Ao3 does. She offers a "get all work links from an ao3 listing" which I'm planning to test on my bookmarks import them to Raindrop.io (Update: cyberbrain has now tested! see their post here for more info)

epub.press—if you know you're going to miss Ao3's easy download work options, epub press is a browser extension for firefox or chrome which will turn a collection of browser tabs into a single ebook for download onto the reader of your choice. Offers both .epub (the most popular standard for ereaders) and .mobi (what kindle books, or other readers designed for amazon books, uses) downloads and a choice between a direct download or download via email.

Update: flamebyrd built a AO3 Works List CSV Bookmarklet if you just want a spreadsheet of links to port elsewhere.

Update: dotepub is another option for converting webpages for ebooks.