Hi onionhairs! Elizabeth here. So the first thing I'd recommend is probably checking out more episodes—that was a very early conversation (we are now on episode 193!) and definitely one we've been building on a lot throughout the past seven years.
But tl;dr what I would say is 1) "being in fandom" is about self-definition (if you say you're in fandom, you are, regardless of what you "do" as a fan and 2) discussing what "counts" as fandom is contextual, and it's very important to define that context.
If you're talking about "participatory fandom," for example, a lurker who doesn't engage with other fans in any way might not "count." Scholars and industry researchers often look at participatory fandom because those are the fans they can see—they can't write a paper or report on the thoughts or feelings of lurkers, because how would they know what they are? Deeper into the industry side, someone might define "fan" as a person who spends money on a ticket to a thing: it doesn't matter if lots of other people think of themselves as fans, because your only metric is a fan's monetary value. (This is reductive, but as the saying has historically gone in Hollywood, it's all about "butts in seats.")
Speaking as a person who lurked in fandom for about 15 years, I think you're well-positioned to write about these paradoxes, and about feeling like you're part of a community even though it's totally one-sided—you really feel like you're in the room, but nobody knows you're there. Or at least that's how I always felt! It's a hard thing to talk about with folks who've never lurked—especially because the "participatory fandom is the only fandom that counts" argument can be delivered very loudly—and harder still to find other lurkers to relate to, since they are usually still lurking.
The classic internet community ratio is 90-9-1: 1% creators, 9% commenters, 90% lurkers. Anyone who creates fanworks can see this imbalance in their stats. The idea that "fandom" is only the people in that 10% has never been true, at least as long as fandom has been conducted in digital spaces where people could lurk. And I think the answer to the "can you still be in fandom if [x]" question is always "yes"—the real question here is what does it mean to be "in" a community when you aren't communicating with anyone else?
