Thank you so, so much for this series of posts; it's a fascinating read. lapillus and I were just talking this weekend about fannish history and she told me some stories similar to yours -- about mailing lists, the list-to-LJ transition, signal-to-noise ratios, the decline in the prominence of meta since mailing list days -- which led into a discussion of the new fannish norms on platforms like Tumblr. (Like you, I find Tumblr's barriers to sustained conversation intensely frustrating; there are things I like about Tumblr, and a lot of other things I find anthropologically fascinating, but fannishness for me has text-based discussion at its heart, and wow, that's not Tumblr's default setting.)

Anyway! So glad to have all this info in one place.