Ceri B.

It suddenly struck me that one feature that looms large in talking about the history of print-focused sf fandom the last few decades is the repeated collapse of institutions: mailing lists, Usenet, services like CIS and GEnie, the overall displacement of zines, and so on. I'm thinking that the burden a lot of us feel isn't so much the effort of learning new tools and the systems they enable as it is dealing with the failure of old ones, most particularly when the failure is, fundamentally, dumb and external, like the overwhelming of both mail and newsgroups by spammers and pirates.

But as I keep saying, partly to remind myself, I don't know much about media fandom's institutions or history. So have you folks dealt with the same kind of thing? Did you have presences in the old independent online services and felt the same "ah, hell" defeat as they eroded away? How much is loss and displacement part of your experience, too?