Without context, fanworks won’t seem to be one thing price preserving—an issue that lengthy predates the online. Many fanzines and different collections have been misplaced eternally; because the Fannish Estate Planning article on the communal wiki Fanlore places it, members of the family of deceased followers typically “have no idea what they are looking at, and sadly, much fannish material ends up in the trash and other inglorious destinations.”

When AO3 was being constructed a decade and a half in the past, lots of the web site’s creators had already misplaced fandom mates—and in consequence, they’d additionally misplaced their mates’ fanworks. “FNOKs were brought up very early on, as they were starting to discuss what sorts of things they wanted in the terms of service,” says Heather Smith, AO3’s coverage and abuse committee cochair and first FNOK facilitator. “People also had the question of how their own works would be handled after they were gone, so the OTW [the Organization for Transformative Works, AO3’s parent organization] wanted some sort of arrangement that would benefit both creators and fans.”

Though FNOK set-up is simple, solely a small fraction of the location’s hundreds of thousands of customers have put one in place. “We hope that an FNOK arrangement is something users take seriously, that both people in an arrangement trust each other a lot and have talked about the possible future of becoming incapacitated together,” Smith says. But, she provides, “I think the majority of our users will never decide to set one up.” 

Smith herself created one when she joined the FNOK staff in 2020—a yr that noticed a big enhance in requests. “Covid-19 seemed to have put that possibility at the forefront of everyone’s minds,” she says. “For me, it helped make the conversation easier to bring up. Everyone had thought about it at least once that year, and it was a small relief to know my existence on the Archive would be handled by someone I trusted.”

FNOK preparations are one in all a number of methods AO3 customers’ creations might be preserved independently of the consumer. Nearly half 1,000,000 of the location’s 10-million-plus works have been “orphaned,” remaining on-line however severed from the account that posted them. Orphaning is an act of permanence on an online stuffed with damaged hyperlinks and deserted profiles, intentionally placing the work within the fingers of the Archive itself. Both options create a way of the platform as a communally constructed house—one which’s constructed to outlast any particular person.

This stands in distinction to the more and more precarious really feel of loads of our digital platforms. From the sluggish, sometimes chaotic decline of Twitter to the ever-expanding detritus left behind from earlier eras of the online, the connections we make on-line and the locations the place we put our creations can really feel ephemeral, topic to the whims of companies or ultrarich people. 

Even together with her affairs so as on the AO3, Carpenter feels this acutely in the remainder of her digital life. “I’m constantly terrified that Automattic will suddenly decide Tumblr’s not worth it and shut it down overnight, and my past 11 years on the site will be erased in the flip of a switch,” she says. “That’d be like losing my journals and photo albums, letters from friends, scrapbooks, keepsakes, and things like that to a house fire.”