pomrania asked: Pern was my first fandom too! The Anne McCaffrey site was pretty much the first thing I actually DID online to interact with people, as a kid, in the very late 90s / very early 2000s.

Yeah, Pern fandom had quite the renaissance when groups started being able to be online, although I recall it as a time of huge growing pains within the fandom as well.  (Because of the ways that McC tried to keep some control over a fandom that had been created with and grown up with so many restrictions on content, imposed by her from the start; and the online world was a lot more lawless and hard to regulate, although in the early days, she certainly tried.)

I got involved in an offline group - the only kind that existed at that time - with paper zines, in about ‘82.  :)  I had arguably been producing fannish content for both LOTR and Pern before that, by myself, but that was when I really got connected with an organized “fandom” and interacted with people through it.