I've thought of a better way to explain it to you.
In fandom, even if A only has 12 friends, there is a very good chance that at least one of them will be a BNF, therefore if any of that BNF's friends (by definition a huge number) says something about X or of interest to X, the information is on X's friendsfriends page. If you multiply that potential information by 11 (the friendfriends pages of X'x other friends, because you can assume that her friends will tell her if they see something) then you are going to pretty much cover the whole fandom.
So you can't guarantee that someone will always find out - because not everyone checks their friendsfriends page all the time - but there is a good chance the info is only one or two steps away from them at any time.
It even works multifandom, because there are plenty of people who act as BNF type hubs between fandoms. I actually suspect that the Buffy fandom is very important in this regard because most of us these days have an active interest in at least one other fandom as well, so we act as an important crossroads.
I once had far too much time on my hands and tracked a meme back to its source. This is easy to do because people tend to mention who they copied it from. The meme was all over my flist, but the chain was only 6 links long back to the person who said they were creating it - and that person was in a completely different fandom (I forget which, but it was one of the small ones).
But really, if you want to understand how it works, just think back to how you personally found out about the strikethrough kerfuffle. My personal story was as follows: I saw a couple of people on my flist mention possible backup systems and I wondered why they were talking about that. Then someone linked to liz-marc's post, which I read and assumed it was a misunderstanding about the recent LJ deleted journal purge. Then I spoke to a friend who explained it was something else and actually mattered. I found and followed up some info on metafandom. People started to mention fandom_counts and I joined myself. and so on.
I'm not sure how much of that you would consider 'gossip' and how much just normal LJ info spread. I tend to think of all of it in the same category as news/gossip because that is how my personal definition and understanding of communities works. Mind you, I believe fandom can only loosely be called a community in the proper sense, but that's another story. :o)
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In fandom, even if A only has 12 friends, there is a very good chance that at least one of them will be a BNF, therefore if any of that BNF's friends (by definition a huge number) says something about X or of interest to X, the information is on X's friendsfriends page. If you multiply that potential information by 11 (the friendfriends pages of X'x other friends, because you can assume that her friends will tell her if they see something) then you are going to pretty much cover the whole fandom.
So you can't guarantee that someone will always find out - because not everyone checks their friendsfriends page all the time - but there is a good chance the info is only one or two steps away from them at any time.
It even works multifandom, because there are plenty of people who act as BNF type hubs between fandoms. I actually suspect that the Buffy fandom is very important in this regard because most of us these days have an active interest in at least one other fandom as well, so we act as an important crossroads.
I once had far too much time on my hands and tracked a meme back to its source. This is easy to do because people tend to mention who they copied it from. The meme was all over my flist, but the chain was only 6 links long back to the person who said they were creating it - and that person was in a completely different fandom (I forget which, but it was one of the small ones).
But really, if you want to understand how it works, just think back to how you personally found out about the strikethrough kerfuffle. My personal story was as follows:
I saw a couple of people on my flist mention possible backup systems and I wondered why they were talking about that.
Then someone linked to liz-marc's post, which I read and assumed it was a misunderstanding about the recent LJ deleted journal purge.
Then I spoke to a friend who explained it was something else and actually mattered.
I found and followed up some info on metafandom.
People started to mention fandom_counts and I joined myself.
and so on.
I'm not sure how much of that you would consider 'gossip' and how much just normal LJ info spread. I tend to think of all of it in the same category as news/gossip because that is how my personal definition and understanding of communities works. Mind you, I believe fandom can only loosely be called a community in the proper sense, but that's another story. :o)