Also: The past was a different country. AOL Hometown, GeoCites, lots of user-owned sites where the user ran out of money for bandwidth usage or lost their ISPs... things were demonstrably NOT forever on the internet.
Oh yes. I was but a lurker on Usenet but stopped going there when it got Google-grouped.
And the cost to get on the internet was HIGH in terms of tech know-how and actual service fees....
When I was a wee fan mailing lists were paid for and maintained by individual fans however, in what is probably the only contrary example to the disappearance of the early web, the Blake's 7 mailing list still has a publicly available searchable archive of the list posts. Going back to 1992!
Re: fanlore issue
Oh yes. I was but a lurker on Usenet but stopped going there when it got Google-grouped.
And the cost to get on the internet was HIGH in terms of tech know-how and actual service fees....
When I was a wee fan mailing lists were paid for and maintained by individual fans however, in what is probably the only contrary example to the disappearance of the early web, the Blake's 7 mailing list still has a publicly available searchable archive of the list posts. Going back to 1992!