- Juneteenth remembrance of LiveJournal -

[demonlurking]

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so, i don’t know where else to post this, but my thoughts tonight delve, once again, into nostalgia for LJ.

and i realize that today is an appropriate day to mourn the passing of the LJ community.

i don’t know if anyone else has put it together as I have in my head (probably, but I haven’t seen any posts about it)

see, the LJ community dies in little steps, but the first big step was the sale to SUP. when LJ was sold to the Russians there was worry that free speech would become a liability. this caused people to seek alternatives. Some left for Facebook, some MySpace (which was still a thing back then, though it too was beginning to die), some came here to DreamWidth. the problem was that we scattered. not enough people went to any one alternative and the overall community just stopped.

now, we look back and those fears were founded. in 2017, SUP rewrote the LJ TOS and now they conform to Russian law and free speech and particularly LGBTQ+ voices are no longer allowed. their TOS are even written in Russian now.

and I look back on that dead community and realize that it was killed by Russian homophobes. and that makes it appropriate to mourn today.

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Comments

[ladypoetess]

I think I still have an automated thing posting to my LJ, whatever things I've tweeted/retweeted, but I haven't logged in since the last time I had to change a password because of a security breach. I miss it all the time. Pillowfort is a decent alternative for both LJ and Tumblr (once adult content was no longer allowed there) but the community is so small in comparison.

I miss the intimacy of the conversations that could be had, even within a large group or an open post. I miss the long form logging of things in my life in a way that didn't just feel self indulgent, but as a means of communication with people other than myself. And I remember how many people told me I was being overly reactionary about the sale to SUP, when I was worried about what it would do to LJ as a whole and to the voices that were permitted there.

Just... yeah. What you said.