If there actuallt exists a community, they can scare up somebody to host some infrastructure the community depends on. Otherwise the community is dead, and it’s archive.org you should be thanking.

Archive.org is awfully slow, and more importantly, the archived pages are not indexed by Google, hence aren’t discoverable.

They can, but they didn't 99% of the time.

And archive.org is not a replacement for a website, not even a Fandom wiki. It's horrible to use and you're lucky if it indexes a quarter of what you want, especially on a property as big as a wiki. And it's read-only.

On Fandom I can still log in and make improvements.

WeirdGloop is supposedly profitable despite having only a single, non-intrusive banner ad. It's perfectly possible to run forums/wikis/etc. on even just the free tier of Cloudflare/Oracle OCI.

The issue is that Wikia/Fandom, Reddit, etc. subsumed most other alternatives by offering what was for a long time a legitimately convenient and decent-quality service, but now that communities are too locked in to move (due to intentional measures like changing forking policy, and the community having to fight against network effect/SEO) they enshittify to squeeze out profit. Result is a worse site than if Fandom/etc. had never existed.

Relatively optimistic about movement towards structures that resist this kind of exploitation.

WeirdGloop also runs wikis for the biggest, most active games and communities in the world. I'm more concerned about the rest of the wikis like the example I gave where I'm googling for game mechanics for a dead game.

You can migrate wikis away from Fandom. The OP is about doing just that. The problem is that there's rarely the will because it's a hobby endeavor for tiny communities, and until you last as long as the Fandom alternative would last, it wasn't even necessarily the right thing to do.

You can't just migrate and call it a day. You have to stick around for another decade so people can find that information long after you've lost interest in the game and fiddling with MediaWiki.

> WeirdGloop also runs wikis for the biggest, most active games and communities in the world

Most of the costs are those that scale up/down by activity - MediaWiki itself is free/open-source and the wiki's content is contributed for free by volunteers.

Also, keep in mind I'm not saying that each wiki needs to be individually self-hosted. Can be a host the size of WeirdGloop but made up of smaller game wikis, for instance.

> I'm more concerned about the rest of the wikis like the example I gave where I'm googling for game mechanics for a dead game.

Prospects for long term information accessibility are pretty terrible on sites aggressively squeezing out all the profit they can. See Reddit eliminating archives and third party clients and then cutting off all search engines that don't pay, or mass deletions of user content by sites like Photobucket/Imgur/etc.

> You can migrate wikis away from Fandom. The OP is about doing just that.

With significant difficulty, fighting against both Fandom's policies and SEO/network effects. The OP lists "wiki communities need to be able to freely leave their host" as the primary rule for "How to not turn into Fandom 2.0".

> You have to stick around for another decade so people can find that information long after you've lost interest

Hence ability and willingness to pass on the torch is critical - so that the information doesn't die with one person or company.

For the RuneScape wiki at least, they seem to have a paid agreement with jagex to maintain the wiki. Which makes a lot of sense, the game devs probably want to have a good wiki for their own game (especially for a game like RuneScape). Not sure if that's the case for the other wikis they host, though.

That is correct. However the jagex funding is not really enough[1] so they added ads. The League wiki seems to be also under this model, but I suppose they got a better deal. The Minecraft Wiki doesn't have any ads at all, and it's just been feeding off by the runescape wikis.

[1]: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis

Woah, I didn't know that what jagex has paid for basically only covers the infrastructure. It's crazy considering how central the wiki is (because the game is very far from "self documenting"). Thanks for the info!

I think with Fandom similar with Reddit, or Twitch, most people focus on the interface experience as sole advantage of the platform, and miss how they provide an accessible space to incubate new communities. You get low barrier to entry hosting, operation tools, and network exposure.

The system is way simpler.

— Something becomes popular.

— A $POPULAR_THING Wiki is swiftly created, some freelancers are hired to create article stubs. Links to it spread through other popular wikis.

— People trying to learn something about that topic get a lot of search results directing them to that new wiki. They assume that it's some kind of “community”, try to participate, and never realize that they're making love to an inflatable doll. Real activity, links and clicks now force the pages to stay on top, and attract even more naive visitors.

Of course, it's not specific to that site. “Social” sites often make people believe that they “interact” with thousands or millions of others, when in fact they shout into an empty box, and watch the movements of a primitive mechanism.