cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50855395

I (and a lot of other people, I'd guess) read and write fanfiction.

But as far as I know, there's never really been a federated fanfic platform, nothing that plugs into the fediverse the way Mastodon does for microblogging or PeerTube/Loops does for video.

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Then I stumbled upon SquidgeWorld Archive (SQWA), an AO3 alternative that actually runs on the same codebase as AO3 otwarchive.

It's got way fewer users than AO3, which honestly gives it a cozier, more small-town vibe.

The devs/maintainers behind it, squidge.org, even run both Mastodon and Bluesky accounts.

The catch: people have posted that fics pulling thousands of views on AO3 get little to none on SQWA. Makes sense, it's just a much smaller pond.

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So, two half-formed ideas that I wanted to possibly toss out:

Suggestion #1: "colonize" SQWA.

What if fediverse-native fanfic folks just started actually posting there? Cross-link your fediverse socials, bring your existing following over, treat it like planting a flag. It already exists, the maintainers are clearly fediverse-friendly, it just needs bodies.

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Suggestion #2: fork it (and ao3) and actually federate it.

AO3's otwarchive code is open source, which is exactly what SQWA is running on. What if someone forked it and built out real federation, ActivityPub support, the whole deal, instead of just being a second standalone AO3 clone? That feels like the "real" long-term fix, but it's a genuine software undertaking, not a weekend project.

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I'd love to take a crack at #2 myself but I don't have the time or the technical bandwidth for something that size right now, so I'm just putting it out there in case it resonates with anyone here.

Curious what this community thinks: is #1 realistic, or does fanfiction just need a ground-up federated archive to actually work?

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Edit: Sorry for any mistakes, I'm currently at work.

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Edit Edit:*** There are also these Ao3 mirror sites and alternatives:

Mirror sites:

https://archiveofourown.gay/

https://archive.transformativeworks.org/

https://insecure.archiveofourown.org/

Redirects:

https://archiveofourown.com/

https://archiveofourown.net/

https://archiveofourown.site/

https://ao3.gay/

https://ao3.org/

Other Alternatives:

https://sunset.femslash.club/

https://www.cfaarchive.org/

https://www.adastrafanfic.com/

Why not just use something like Wordpress? Plenty of web fiction is already published on it and it federates.

It seems like a really interesting idea, but yea, reaching critical mass is hard. Having a module instead of a full rewrite would be too big indeed, but the module mentioned in the comments would be a better idea. Sadly having something even half as big as AO3 would be quite the effort to maintain.

Ping the devs of both, ask them about federation and go from there.

Something I still don't understand about the fediverse: how does it handle backups?

UserA@SquidgeY posts Spiderman x Whatever fan-fiction, and it's accessible to UserB@SquidgeZ.

But if SquidgeY goes down, does the entire Squidgieverse just lose access to UserA's story?

If so, I don't know that I'd want a federated AO3.

I've seen dozens of instances come and go over the years, and it sucks to imagine your favorite new story disappearing because the UserA picked the wrong instance and admin Colin393 decided not renew after The Drama happened with CorkyTheMostVampire.

Re: backups, I think a large part of the idea is that users are theoretically able to back up and migrate their own data at will.

I don't exactly get what is even the selling point of the "federation" for something like fanfic. Since it's read-only consumption, isn't that just as simple as keeping a web archive / mirror? You can just have a mirror tool use the same general system as AO3 and only mirror the stories you want. Heck, if push comes to shove you don't even need all that, you just need curl / wget.

Not to mention, it gets into thorny author / writer community issues, such as if a user wants to delete / abandon their work. If I want to make sure I can preserve a work I can already run a local mirror or save a local copy, federation only offers weal points on that front if someone else can (under their own rules) remotely delete what I have archived. It's literally federation with DRM. Don't we have hate DRM?

EDIT: lol typo

Good point

Theoretically.

I've migrated a couple of accounts. But only my follows came with me, not my old posts.

Does the fediverse have a robust, user-centric "backup on site A, restore on site B" flow?

Never done it myself, so I don't know for sure, but being able to do something like that was part of what I assumed was possible.

Lemmynsfw is my reference point for what happens when an instance goes down.

Users who created accounts on the new fedinsfw.app instance either started over from scratch or exported their user data from lemmynsfw.

As for our communities and posts... best case scenario, you can request the instance admin to migrate them for you, but at the community admin and user levels? The tools just don't exist yet.

I think the main benefit, theoretically, would be engagement with other parts of the Fediverse. It might be an introduction to many if they see an update scroll by in the feed.