I'm an optimist and idealist. I see the best in people and always believe they're acting in good faith. Does this bite me in the ass? Sometimes. But it also gives me the will to survive an increasingly unstable, unknowable world.

When I first began work on fanfiction.lol, there were a few things I wanted to be set in stone based on my values and beliefs. I wanted all tags to be canonical, unlike AO3 where the system is built on what archivists call a curated folksonomy: you can tag your work however you like. Any phrasing, any form. And then, a volunteer army of tag wranglers works behind the scenes to link synonymous tags together so filtering still works. If you tag a fic "steve and tony kiss" and someone else tags theirs "Steve Rogers/Tony Stark First Kiss," a wrangler connects both to the same canonical tag. It's designed as a deliberate compromise between a rigid regulated taxonomy (like fanfiction.net, where you pick from a fixed list) and a pure free-for-all, and it means that tags are not canonical by default. They're free text until a wrangler acts on them.

My instinct was to skip that whole system and canonize everything from the start. In addition, I also wanted to have a wider range of archive warnings so people could better filter out stories they didn't want to see, and I wanted to add a diverse range of relationship types so people felt seen and represented.

Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to be small, scrappy, and allow anybody to write anything on ff.lol. I didn't care about which fandoms, or tropes, or ships, or writing quality. I didn't care if you wrote fiction or original work or poetry or creative nonfiction or scripts. Making people, especially beginners or inexperienced writers, feel as though they could publish their work, was the most important thing for me.

I think these are all really good values to have, and I still stand by all of them, but the past few days of actually figuring out the mechanics of running a site like this made some of these universal promises impossible to keep.

I live in Canada, and the server is housed in Canada. I'm not using a remote VPS in another part of the world, I wanted this project to be on bare metal I own. I wanted to have access to everything and, also, not pay a monthly expense for computation.

However, because of that, I need to follow Canadian law. While this doesn't change that you can write about whatever fandom, or ship, with whatever tropes, and whatever writing quality, it does prohibit certain topics. Talking to a lawyer I know, it was eye-opening how strict yet vague these laws are.

A Brief History of Obscenity in Canada

Section 163 of the Criminal Code defines obscenity as any publication whose dominant characteristic is the "undue exploitation of sex," or sex combined with crime, horror, cruelty, or violence. The operative word is undue, and it has never really been defined. The standard set by the Supreme Court in R v Butler (1992) is not what Canadians personally find offensive, but what they would not tolerate other Canadians being exposed to. A community standards test that sounds reasonable in the abstract and has functioned as a weapon in practice.

The first obscenity charges laid after Butler were against Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto, for selling a lesbian magazine made by women for women. Canada Customs spent years systematically seizing shipments to Little Sisters Book & Art Emporium in Vancouver—Queer books, erotic literature, lesbian photography—while the same materials arriving at mainstream booksellers passed through without inspection. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the targeting violated the Charter, then upheld the underlying obscenity law anyway. The law has historically considered Queer sexuality, sexual violence written consensually between adults, and dark erotic fiction to fall within "undue" exploitation in ways that straight, vanilla content does not. This is not a value-free technical constraint I'm operating within. And I do not agree with these laws. They are not neutral, and they function as censorship. However, as the host of this archive, I must abide by them to keep the site running and protect myself legally. This is not a judgment on the validity of any work or anyone's creative choices. It's just a legal necessity.

I started out with the tagline "write whatever the hell you want" and had to change it to "express yourself freely within our content guidelines" and that sucks. I'm sorry for that.

How Do You Organize Hundreds of Works of Creative Writing?

The next issue is a little more inside baseball. Regarding the tagging system, I thought it would be refreshing and validating to have tags be canonized by default; however, the more you look into how people use tags, the more impossibly philosophical the principle becomes.

I'm not good at tag wrangling. I'm terrible at making judgment calls about which tags name the same thing, which are distinct concepts, which are specific enough to stand on their own. Look at the current stats on my site and you'll see I currently have 197 blog posts and 193 tags. That's absurd! There are redundancies, tags with very similar themes, upper/lowercase issues, plural vs. singular, I could go on.

That's why I've been so fortunate and lucky to have a head tag wrangler join me in organizing ff.lol, Jar. Beyond being incredibly organized and thoughtful about how the taxonomy of the site should be, you can check out her other stuff here, and I'd recommend you follow her! Fans like her are exactly why I created ff.lol in the first place.

"All tags are canon" sounds nice on paper, but working through it in practice reveals a problem that's more philosophical than technical. Here's an abridged conversation from our Discord:

Water: Actually, I have a question about what a wrangler's aim should be in regards to canonizing and not canonizing? Unrequited Crush and Unrequited Love—these both currently synned to Unrequited Feelings, but they could become their own canonicals and then subbed to Unrequited Feelings. How far would you like us to go in wrangling canonicals that are similar enough to syn but still be considered somewhat different?

Brennan: you ever have an idea that sounds nice at first but is actually deeply philosophical and requires a great amount of mental energy with no actual simple answers?

Jar: (about something else entirely) "How can it be that bad" I'm trying to figure out concepts that we don't even know about as a society

Jar was talking about her own fic—but she accidentally summarized the tagging problem. Unrequited Crush and Unrequited Love feel intuitively distinct. For one, this is about longing for someone who doesn't know you exist; the other carries the full weight of love given and not returned. But the line between them is one that human experience blurs constantly, and the tagging system has to make a call.

And that's just two tags. Multiply that across every emotional state, every AU type, every relationship permutation, and you start to see the scope of the problem. And over-granular tags tend to cause writers to start using the wrong ones, either because they can't find the right one or because the distinctions have become invisible to anyone who isn't already a power user.

I've landed on the operating principle canonization-first: a tag gets canonized based on whether it's likely to be useful for filtering, calibrated against a normal distribution of how often that concept would plausibly appear in fics for a given fandom or character. "Lesbian [character]"? Canon, almost certainly recurs. "Lesbian space pirate from the Edwardian era [character]"? That's based as hell, but not getting canonized unless there's a canonical basis to make it likely.

The wrangling docs Jar put together also establish that tags are for filtering, not for self-expression: if something functions as a summary of plot events rather than a descriptor of content, it belongs in the fic's notes, not the tag field. Your tags get read by wranglers. Phrasing may be adjusted. Meaning won't be changed, but format will.

Being an English major, I took multiple courses on literary theory, where one of the main topics is debating how much of a work is in the hands of the author, the reader, or the work itself. The question maps onto tag wrangling a lot.

Roland Barthes argued in his 1967 essay The Death of the Author that once a text is written, the author's intentions stop being authoritative and thus belongs to the reader, not the writer. Before him, Wimsatt and Beardsley's 1946 concept of the intentional fallacy made a similar case: a poem, once published, "belongs to the public." The author can no longer control what it means.

For tags, that tension is not abstract theory. The writer tags their fic out of a felt sense of what it contains. The wrangler reads that tag as a data point in a taxonomy. The reader uses it as a filter. All three acts happen to the same string of text, and they don't always agree on what it means.

And so, does it matter more to keep author intentions or to help make a work more accessible to readers? We've landed on: readers. Tags are infrastructure for discovery, not self-expression, and that means the reader's ability to use them takes priority over the writer's desire to use them however they want. I don't know if this is the right call, but I think it's still a good-enough compromise.

Promises Kept

Luckily, there are some promises I am able to keep. ff.lol has a completely revamped relationship category system compared to AO3. You can see a full visual list of them here (I coded the pride flags in pure CSS which I think is neat). I've also done a security audit and set up a robust backup system to ensure that, even if the site goes down for whatever reason, I'll be able to preserve the fics that have been published.

I also am able to keep the site secure: the Rails application runs behind a Cloudflare Tunnel, so the server itself is never directly exposed to the internet. No port forwarding, no direct IP exposure, with DDoS protection and SSL handled at the edge before traffic reaches my machine. The database is isolated on Docker's internal network, inaccessible from outside the container environment. No containers run as root or with elevated privileges. User data is encrypted at the application level using Active Record encryption. SSH access is key-based only. Sensitive credentials live in environment variables, not in config files.

The site is also compliant with PIPEDA and Quebec's Law 25, because Canadian privacy law applies here too and I'd rather do that right from the start than patch it later.

Anyway, as I've already said, creating this silly little site has taught me so much, and I'm really grateful for it. When it comes to what I'm trying to offer to people, I need to be measured.

Why Go Through So Much Effort for a Fanfic Site?

The entire reason why I created fanfiction.lol is because I want to positively contribute to the commons of the Internet. It certainly isn't meant to be a replacement for AO3. It's just meant to be a low-barrier, accessible community-based archive of transformative works for anybody who wants an alternative, for whatever reason. Maybe you're too intimidated by AO3 and you want a smaller place to practice your writing. Maybe you just want to crosspost. Any answer is acceptable. That's the whole point.

Even more important is that anybody can do this, with anything. You can buy a domain and start to learn how to make websites to share with people. I've even made a beginner's guide for this for non-technical people. I don't care if you use my website, but I do care about making the Internet a better place since we're all here so often.