The age might be a reason. There are certainly a lot more “mature” fans around than in other fandoms. I’d say, during my BtVS days most people were in their twens. Tolkien is broader – there are a lot of really young fans writing MS and there are a large number of “older” fans who’ve been around a while. The group is more diverse. I guess beíng “in the loop” also depends on the BNFs and what they bring into fandom. If a really influential fan suddenly migrates to another journal, blogging tool, archive s/he will draw others as well. At least that’s my guess.

Tolkien is my first and only fandom, but I’m addicted to multi-fandom meta, and I’ve certainly noticed as well that Tolkien fans, in general, are out of the loop compared to fandom at large, both in terms of technical expertise and keeping up with inter-fandom news and issues. My theory on this is the age of the fandom. Yes, there are some fans (like me) who are young in years and in fannish involvement; when I was in high school, most people had the Internet at home (even if AOL dial-up ), and when I entered fandom, it was almost entirely online by that point. But a lot of Tolkien fans I know can fondly remember the days when fanzines and conventions were the only real “fix” available to people who wanted to be involved, and people snail-mailed stories to each other. To me, fandom is an Internet entity, so becoming fluent with how the Internet works is an essential part of being involved to the degree that I am. To them, it is so much broader and involvement can’t be so narrowly defined as willingness to learn HTML and CSS to build a website (which was one of the first things I did when I decided I wanted to be more than peripherally involved).

That’s my crackpot theory.

Fandom is interesting, both as a whole and in how individual fandoms (or even sub-groups within a single fandom) do things differently.

From a reader’s point, things look very differently, especially where multi-chaptered stories are concerned. I’m coming from BtVS, were every fandom person had his/her own website. I was quite surprised to find that with the Tolkien crowd it was a rare occurence to find a writer with a personal site (though that’s slowly changing). BtVS-fans were very skilled in webdesign, a lot of Tolkien fans don’t even know what RSS is.

Don’t take me wrong, I’m not saying that one fan is better than the other, but I always found it fascinating how a fandom seems to function like a living being – it has its own personality and it generally doesn’t want to change:)

Some fandoms are concentrated almost entirely on LJ, though. Because I’m strictly a Tolkien writer, I had something of a “wtf?” reaction to the panic over Strikethrough … until I realized that whole fandoms were terrified of the possibility of losing their archives because all of those archives were on LJ. Given the ease of software like eFiction, I don’t particularly understand this but … *shrug*

I will *never* post fiction to my LJ, because in my opinion LJ is the worst solution ever to archive fanfic.

I will almost never post private stuff, because it’s private.

I will only rarely post fannish stuff, because others do that so much better.

So to me, LJ is nothing more but a crutch I need to get around in fandom.

It wasn’t so much the mixture of fiction-meta-life that I found difficult but the fact that I assumed (wrongly and foolishly) that people wouldn’t be so critical of posts that (in my mind) were clearly personal or clearly letting off steam. I realized that this was an unfair expectation on my part.

I am a organization freak, though. LJ tags were the best thing to happen to me. I’ll make three posts in a row rather than mix topics too much. But that’s my right brain stretching itself a bit. However, I do lately tend to write and paint in the dining room rather than the study designed for that purpose … but that’s because Bobby and I have so many schoolbooks that they’re piled all over the study and there is no place to work!

I have to add a hearty “hell yeah” to your lack of shame about fanfic. Or writing in general. I refuse to be embarrassed by my creativity. If people I know aren’t embarrassed that they spend eight hours a night sitting on their duffs in front of the television, why should I be embarrassed that I write in my free time? As for the topics … well, sex is part of life. I never write PWP and don’t think that even my most lascivious stories could be considered “smut,” so if someone finds it horrifying that I write sex … well, I guess they need to find a new friend!

On RSS feeds, I recommend Google Reader, which does not require you to install new software and acts a lot like an email inbox. As for RSS feeds on comments, I think I need to add that. But if you comment on the blog, I will answer it. (Unlike my LJ, which is much more touch-and-go these days …)

French Pony: I think you may have interpretted my comment “LiveJournal–in its name, its mission, and its history–carries with it the connotation of a personal safe space, a private journal” differently than I meant it. I didn’t mean that f-lock–or even p-lock–should act as a guarantee of security. That is a foolish level of Internet naivete that I lost more than a decade ago. I meant that LJ, compared to a blog or a forum, seems aimed more toward sharing one’s personal life and thoughts than a blog or forum, which are aimed more at encouraging public discourse, at least in my perception. When I make a post on my LJ, I have no delusions that a “friend” could share it with someone else or even make so innocent a mistake as leaving it open on her PC for a passerby to read. However, I did expect that if I made a post about my family, for example, than people would understand that this was not an appropriate place for criticism and debate. I see now that this was not a fair assumption when I was encouraging both on other posts.

It is generally good policy to regard anything you post on the Internet, especially if it is not password-protected, as a public utterance, viewable to anyone who should happen upon it. Content that you don’t want people to see, You Don’t Post. I would take serious issue with your statement that “LiveJournal–in its name, its mission, and its history–carries with it the connotation of a personal safe space, a private journal.” LiveJournal is “Live.” It has always been more about a shared social space than a personal, private journaling space. That’s inherent in the nature of the Internet.

The LJ privacy controls are lovely, in that they let you control exactly who has access to a post, and that’s probably the best way to think of them. Forget the labels that LJ uses, like “public” and “private” — deconstructing those words will only cause you to forget the function of those settings. Instead, regard the default audience for your words as “everybody and their second cousins once removed,” and treat them accordingly. Change the audience as suits your words, but never forget that, on the Internet, the assumption is one of publicity.