Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2023: Week 3

The Gossamer Project (in Philedom often also simply refered to as Goss) is a group of speciality archives which, combined, contain the vast majority of X-Files fan fiction on the Internet. The intent of the archive has always been to capture all stories available in the fandom regardless of quality, length, genre, or topic, depending only on the author's consent to archive.

In the mid to late 1990s, the Gossamer Archives/Project was amongst the biggest single media fandom-focused on the Internet, and remained the largest single fandom fan fiction archive until the emergence of various Harry Potter archives in the early 2000s.

Gossamer is generally credited as the first major attempt to centralize and categorize the entire breadth of fan fiction produced in a single fandom. This sensibility may explain why X-Files fandom developed an extremely detailed and coded format for story categorization. It was not, however, the first X-Files fanfiction archive. "There were at least four that preceded it -- Cybercow, John Ruchak's, Cort Dougan's, and Martin Small. Vincent took over Martin's archive in 1995, but it did not become known as Gossamer until some time that fall when he moved to a server known as Gossamer.