Journal-based Fandom

Synonyms:	blog-based fandom, livejournal-based fandom, livejournal fandom
See also:	LiveJournal, DreamWidth, InsaneJournal, Journalfen, GreatestJournal, The Impact of Blogging on Fandom, Timeline of Fandom on LiveJournal
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Journal-based fandom is a catchall term sometimes used to distinguish fannish activities that primarily take place on journal-based platforms such as LiveJournal, DreamWidth, InsaneJournal and JournalFen, from those that take or took place on other platforms, such as usenet, internet mailing lists and bulletin boards, Yahoo Groups, archives, and in zines.

Many fans and fan communities migrated to LiveJournal in the early 2000s, creating platform-specific ways of "doing fandom". The transition period was a source of angst and much commentary, especially for fans who were already doing fandom on mailing lists: see The Impact of Blogging on Fandom. Clones and forks were made using LJ's software to create similar journal services that existed alongside LJ and hosted some fannish infrastructure, but none were as popular as the original. Fandom declined on LiveJournal in the early 2010s. As of the early 2020s Dreamwidth is seen as the main journal-based alternative, used by some fans and communities to a lesser extent. See LiveJournal and Timeline of Fandom on LiveJournal for more.

As fans migrated away from LiveJournal and its clones, many of them to Tumblr, the term "journal-based fandom" took on a new connotation, signifying both a moment in fannish history and a particular text-based mode of fannish participation. "Traditional" journal-based fandom was seen to be text-heavy and fostered threaded conversations, whereas Tumblr tended to be image-heavy and conversations took place in public, sitewide, through reblogs and tags rather than in one or a few threads on journals.^{[citation needed]}