{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "LOL. Okay, it\u2019s also this time of year again. AO3 started with astolat\u2019s post An Archive of One\u2019s Own on Livejournal. Details at...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/665772599847124992/", "html": "

olderthannetfic:

\n\n

zz9pzza:

olderthannetfic:

doctor\u2013idiot:

mistydeath:

\n\n

olderthannetfic:

zz9pzza:

olderthannetfic:

naryrising:

cesperanza:

\n\n

olderthannetfic:

jinxedwood:

three\u2013rings:

\n\n

nianeyna:

olderthannetfic:

\n\n

tallihensia:

olderthannetfic:

\n\n

zinglebert-bembledack:

olderthannetfic:

mattiecat:

olderthannetfic:

\n\n

LOL. Okay, it\u2019s also this time of year again.

AO3 started with astolat\u2019s post An Archive of One\u2019s Own on Livejournal. Details at Fanlore here.

(And no, it wasn\u2019t originally supposed to be the actual archive\u2019s name. It\u2019s just that no one liked any of the other proposed names. There was a poll and everything.)

Cesperanza and various other friends (or more like acquaintances in my case) of astolat are all over the comments and were involved in the initial building. It was a who\u2019s-who of LJ era big Western slash fandoms, so if you\u2019re into stuff like SGA, you\u2019ll see many familiar names.

The comments are still up if you want to go see what fandom was thinking in 2007 about this pie-in-the-sky proposal that was definitely never going to work.

\n\n\n

I\u2014-I followed them back in the day on LJ. Wow.

\n

Everybody did. I guarantee if you were active on LJ and into m/m for live action Western fandoms, you followed at least somebody in those comments too.

It was a smaller world than now (or than all of fandom everywhere), and AO3 really was a community project.

\n

I remember when I had to wait patiently for an AO3 invite from a friend of a friend\u2026and that friend of a friend was a fic author who followed those named above.

I\u2019m so proud to be an AO3 member since 2010.

\n

The account number thing on everyone\u2019s profile page is presumably for the future block feature, but it also gives you obnoxious bragging rights:

\n\n\n

I waited a year - mostly watching to see how it was going first. ^^

{rummages through stats}

Oh good lord. I didn\u2019t need to see that.

\ud83d\ude05

\n

Ahaha. I forgot about that feature.

\n\n\n

oh wow

\n
\n\n\n
\n

#ao3#haha three\u2013rings is right#you can tell EXACTLY when ao3 opened to non beta testers#the floodgates opened in november 2009

Hah. Truth.

astolat is 8. elz is 10. I assume 1-7 are deleted test accounts. The really low numbers are the primary coders, unsurprisingly. The rest of the 2-digit numbers are committee members of the first round of committees (writing the ToS and so on). Then come whatever testers joined during closed beta.

Closed beta started on October 3, 2008. That\u2019s when a bunch of staff\u2019s imported old fic was visible to the public and people could start commenting and hammering on the archive.

Open beta, when anyone could request an invite, started on November 14, 2009.

\n

#16 reporting in. :D\u00a0 Also, btw, the Archive of Our Own phrase comes right out of Virginia Woolf\u2019s A Room of One\u2019s Own: \u201cA woman must\nhave money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.\u201d I take blame/responsibility/credit for this, though overall I still think it was the best name on the table and I like the history baked into it (arguably A Room of One\u2019s Own kicked off the discipline of Women\u2019s and Gender Studies and led to a search for women writers to include in the canon.) What I remember more though was people being like, \u201cThe Organization for Transformative Works is a terrible name for an archive!!\u201d which\u2013(one of my jobs was to explain this over and over and over)\u2013yes, yes, it is, it\u2019s NOT the name of the archive, it\u2019s the name of the nonprofit company we have to set up to run the archive if we\u2019re serious about this\u201d (spoiler: we were serious about this) \u201cand also it\u2019s the name of the legal defense - transformativity - that the whole project is based on!\u201d And the truth is, seriously, every time I see someone\u2013someone I don\u2019t know, in a fannish community I\u2019m not in, or randomly on YouTube or wherever\u2013announce \u201cthis is a transformative work\u201d I sit back with a happy little warm feeling\u00a0 (and I also bow a couple of times in the direction of the OTW Legal\u2019s team without whom etc.)

\n\n\n

2759 here. One particular flood of new members in Dec. 2009 was Yuletide participants - that year we did signups and matching through the old Yuletide site, but we had to post our gifts on the new site (AO3). I became a tag wrangler about two weeks later and I\u2019m still working.

\n

It\u2019s so interesting to track the various little explosions of users.

\n

I was a late joiner, 3 months after I got an account I was a member of the systems committe.

I joined on:\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a02010-09-13\n \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0

My user ID is:\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a09262

\n

\\o/

Are there posts showing how the number of accounts and/or users has grown over time? I recall a couple of news posts, but I don\u2019t remember if they show the whole history. It would be interesting to see how 2012 affected things.

\n\n\n

This is crazy to see I joined in 2012 and oh my gods it was like winning the lottery I stg felt so amazing.

I joined on: 2012-06-30

My user ID is: 55564

50K in three years and it\u2019s insane to me to think that there\u2019s another 10+ years of this. I always smile when I see the user / fandom counts pass a milestone but it\u2019s crazy to see how fast this place has grown.

Anywho - donate if you can, it\u2019s definitely something that helps keep the growth going!

\n\n\n

So you\u2019re telling me the website grew by 10,000 users within two months?

\n

That is exactly what I\u2019m telling you.

When I talk about AO3/OTW being hit with \u201ccurveballs\u201d (and this is why some coding things didn\u2019t happen or didn\u2019t happen fast), this is the kind of thing I\u2019m talking about.

AO3 was a shaky baby colt taking its first steps. Nobody was even interested in the invitations I had. A little growth was happening, but not much.

And then FFN decided to go be a gigantic choad and delete all the porn again.

SIGNUP-POCALYPSE!

Jan 14, 2012 - 632 people on the waitlist

May 3, 2012 - 5,834

May 14, 2012 - 18,707

Jul 10, 2012 - 28,415

\u2013

It stayed around 30k for months, finally dropping to like 20k in December.

And from what I remember, this whole time, AO3 was increasing the invites-per day to try to accommodate new users!

\u2013

Feb 8, 2013 - 26

\u2013

By the end of 2013, they\u2019d added the \u2018per day\u2019 count to the page.

\u2013

Dec 23, 2013 - \u00a0528 people waiting, 750 per day

I don\u2019t recall when the next massive wait times were, but around 2013-2014, things were back to the norm where you requested an invite and got it in a day or two.

2012 was fucking bonkers.

\n

2012 was really hard work, with traffic doubling over 12 months.

\n

AO3: Too God Damn Popular For Its Own Good


(And this, kids, is why we hope our projects get popular\u2026 but at a steady and moderate rate.)

\n", "thumbnail_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/media/4d1c025748ffa3d753fcd23a073a19814742cf71_5cfa0984d521.png", "thumbnail_width": 540, "thumbnail_height": 96}