published in The Washington Post. Online Discussions about Gossamer In recent years, the Gossamer Project has become a touchpoint for nostalgic discussions among fans about "the way things were" before the emergence of FanFiction.net and the ongoing decentralization of single fandoms amongst many sites and forums. The Gossamer Project and the X-Files community represent what is now considered an old style, online fan fiction community: centralized around an archive and a few posting forums, making it easy to find and access the majority of fan fiction posted in that community. In the online article Once upon a time . . . What fragmentation in fandom means to you by LJC, media fandom in the mid to late 1990s is described as: It was the age of The Gossamer Project, alt.startrek.creative, and LISTSERVs. It was a simple world, a happy world, a world before bandwidth and advertising revenues ruled the Internet. When it was easy for fans to find what they wanted, because there were huge glowing neon signs pointing them towards Mecca at every bend and fork in the road. We were all pilgrims on the same road. and specifically refers to the Gossamer Project existence today: The Gossamer Project began in the spring of 1995, and survives today by mirroring to avoid bandwidth hell. It is still the #1 place the majority of fans read fan fiction for X-Files, and continues to grow due to longevity and brand awareness. Everyone knows about it, and everyone can find it. It's got one helluva big neon sign that shines awful bright. The Gossamer example has had effects on other fan fiction communities, with many archives describing themselves as the "Gossamer" of their fandom, or with readers looking for the "Gossamer" of the fandom. In the blog post, Confessional, on the blog A Southern Girl's Guide to Almost Anything, the writer bemoans the lack of centralization she was finding in Star Trek: The Next Generation fandom by asking "Was there no organization in that fandom? Where's their Gossamer, the X-Files massive fanfic archive?!" Academic Discussions about Gossamer In the paper Coming Out as a Fanfiction Writer presented at the Western Australian Science Fiction Conference in 2001, the Gossamer Project is used, along with FanFiction.net, as an example of one of the largest online fan fiction archives. The Gossamer archive for X-Files fanfiction (probably the largest fanfiction archive on the internet for a