Helping wikis move away from Fandom

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Fans and editors are increasingly frustrated with Fandom’s slow, ad-heavy, and often outdated game wikis, prompting a wave of projects to fork their content and move elsewhere. One high‑profile alternative is Weird Gloop, which hosts independent MediaWiki-based sites (e.g. Minecraft and RuneScape wikis) on their own domains under contracts that let communities take their data and domains if the host ever “enshittifies.” Commenters debate funding models, the role of CDNs like Cloudflare in keeping costs low, and how search-engine bias toward legacy Fandom sites makes it difficult for cleaner, community‑run wikis to displace their predecessors.

Fandom’s Problems and Enshittification

  • Many commenters describe Fandom as borderline unusable: heavy ads, autoplay video, tracking, slow performance, large modals and cookie walls, and broken mobile UX.
  • Users report seeing more ads than on piracy or porn sites; some joke that the “fan” in Fandom refers to PC fans spinning up.
  • Without adblockers or tools like “Cleaner Fandom”/BreezeWiki, people feel the site looks malware‑like.
  • Quality problems: outdated or wrong content after communities move away, AI‑generated FAQ clutter, vandalism, and deliberate “poisoning” of Fandom copies to encourage migration.
  • Some note Fandom used to be decent as Wikia, then steadily deteriorated, seen as a classic “enshittification” story.

Weird Gloop and Independent Wikis

  • Weird Gloop is praised for fast, clean, MediaWiki‑based wikis (notably RuneScape, Minecraft, League of Legends).
  • Key design: each wiki has its own domain, with contractual guarantees that communities can leave, take the domain, and get database/image dumps. No “zombie” mirror left behind.
  • Funding is mixed: limited, non‑intrusive banner ads; contracts with game studios; donations. They claim to be profitable without third‑party investors.
  • Commenters highlight their strong community relationship: consulting users before adding ads, quick response to bad ads, and focus on editor experience and performance.

Infrastructure, Cost, and Cloudflare

  • Several participants discuss how hard it is to run large MediaWiki instances: job queues, caching, Redis/Memcached, Varnish/CDN, DB contention.
  • Cloudflare (and similar CDNs) is seen as a major reason high‑traffic wikis are now affordable; some argue you can serve huge volumes even on free tiers.
  • Others stress that even “350k requests/day” can overwhelm a poorly tuned server, so managed hosting or a farm like Weird Gloop remains attractive.

Search, SEO, and Discovery

  • Fandom pages often outrank newer, better wikis (Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Path of Exile, etc.), frustrating users.
  • Tools like Indie Wiki Buddy and custom search downranking are recommended to bypass Fandom in search results.
  • Some speculate Google’s incentives (ads, big brands, leaked ranking factors) help keep Fandom high; opinions differ on whether this is deliberate favoritism or side‑effect.

Alternatives and Models

  • Other wiki hosts mentioned: Miraheze, wiki.gg, ShoutWiki, Fextralife, Liquipedia; mixed views on their ad practices and long‑term risks.
  • Some want more dev‑hosted official wikis; others emphasize decentralized, community‑controlled hosting with easy forking and regular public dumps as the most resilient model.
  • Skeptics warn any for‑profit host can eventually follow Fandom’s path unless structures and incentives are carefully designed.