It was an web nerd’s worst nightmare. On July 10, Archive of Our Personal (AO3), a beloved, non-profit fan fiction platform, was suffering from DDoS assaults, rendering it inaccessible for over a day. It is smart that this neighborhood would flip to Downdetector, a web site the place customers crowdsource reviews of net outages and might talk details about outages to 1 one other. What doesn’t make sense is that AO3 has been again on-line for every week, but some individuals are nonetheless utilizing the Downdetector feedback like a large group chat. They’ve even began calling themselves “the Downdetector fandom.”

Picture Credit: Downdetector

I began drafting this story on July 11, as a result of I assumed it was humorous that folks had been writing romantic fan fiction within the Downdetector feedback in regards to the relationship between AO3 and Downdetector itself. I didn’t end it as a result of… what can I say, issues have been busy. However I checked again in on these loopy youngsters, they usually’re nonetheless kickin’ it within the Downdetector feedback! It’s been over every week!

I’ve joined in on remark threads the place all of us attempt to depend to 69420 and create oodles of spam within the course of, however the feedback on AO3’s Downdetector web page usually are not like that. These aren’t individuals attempting to simply maintain commenting on the Downdetector web page as a result of it’s humorous to make the quantity go up. Individuals are having precise conversations about asexuality in fanfiction, the pitfalls of Wattpad, and managing psychological well being situations. They’re additionally speaking about Homestuck and generally bullying one another, which isn’t so nice, however that is what occurs on the web.

Picture Credit: Downdetector

As of publication, there are 117,325 feedback (and counting) on AO3’s Downdetector. For comparability, Fb’s Downdetector web page has a complete of 1,751 feedback, and Google has 261 feedback (all the Downdetector remark sections appear to solely return about 7 months).

Why are these individuals turning the Downdetector remark part into their new digital residence, particularly if AO3 is again, anyway? The consumer interface of the Disqus feedback part sort of sucks, since you possibly can solely load a handful of feedback at a time. However the novelty of that is that there’s completely no good motive to create a de facto web discussion board within the remark part of a web site about which web sites are offline. These individuals — most likely only some dozen recurring posters, however they’re going robust — proceed coming again as a result of it’s such an unintuitive use of the know-how, and that makes it enjoyable.

Whilst AO3 upgrades to a “shiny new Cloudflare setup,” the fan fiction haven will possible crash once more sooner or later. By then, these keen commenters will possible have misplaced contact, returning to their common web routines, fortunately studying their fanfic like they wished all alongside. However when somebody logs onto Downdetector to report that they’ll’t learn their favourite Supernatural fic, they’ll see over 100 1000’s feedback ready for them. I believe that’s lovely.