This essay is sponsored by Ioana, who is similarly affected by LiveJournal nostalgia.
Recently, while searching in the Narnian depths of my closet, I found my first-ever diary, a small, perfectly ’80s plastic-back book with a busted lock. When I was nine or ten, I marred the cover with handwritten bon mots from Ferngully, such as “You are one bodacious babe” and “Awesome use of the language, dude.” Within the pink and teal pages of the diary, though, I’m seven years old, growing up on a rural farm in central Illinois. I write mostly about my plans for the evening or the next day, usually sleepovers with my friends or visits with family. My girlfriends and apparently I read each other’s diaries during sleepovers; I mention several times that my best friend, Joni, is reading “not this journal, but the paperback one” as I write.
I made my first LiveJournal post at age sixteen, writing about my first break-up. I’d been online since middle school and had written about life there for years, coding websites in Notepad by cherry-picking the HTML from other sites I liked, just like many other girls I’d meet online in the next few years. We posted vague bios about ourselves. We changed our names. Our identities were fluid and often hidden, without the permanence of digital photos to anchor them. We wrote poetry. We claimed space on Tripod and Geocities, altern.org and scribble.nu and then, as girls bought their own domains and shared the paid space with their friends, we moved in with them, prefacing our subdomains with forward slashes. And when girls began to sign up on LiveJournal, we were able to talk to one another, finally in the same room.
I wrote in my LiveJournal while sitting cross-legged at my mom’s desk chair as the sun set over husked Illinois cornfields. On our first-ever computer, a Gateway 2000. Years later, I wrote while slouched on my dorm room floor or hiding my screen in a college computer lab. I wrote at night, after everyone I lived with had gone to bed. I listened to Tori Amos and Iron and Wine and Fiona Apple from CDs I fed to the computer tower and opened in WinAmp. I wrote about myself and my life, in the confessional, navel-gazey way that’s led to the 2015 connotation of the word. To LiveJournal: to write messily about your feelings.
I posted on LiveJournal throughout high school, strapping on my cheap headphones and plucking from the words piling up in my teenage heart. I wrote about the revelations of play rehearsal three nights a week, about shouting to my classmates from our respective cars in the school parking lot, about reading Sylvia Plath for the first time and literally hugging the book after finishing the last page. I fell in love, the way I knew falling in love should be—suddenly and joyously. I typed out the text of my first college acceptance letter and posted it on LiveJournal.
I wrote about starting my first job, at a bookstore, how the manager training me gestured to the shelves and asked if anyone had “taught (me) about Romance yet”—she was talking about protocol for shelving the novels, but I shivered with delight, illegally signed in to LiveJournal on a staff computer a few minutes later to tell my friends list about the turn of phrase. I loved Letters to a Young Poet and Rilke’s quote “If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches.” I wanted to make poetry out of life, to believe that life was good and beautiful, and when I was younger, that never seemed difficult. I posted on LiveJournal most days, often with a great sense of relief that it was finally time to write it all down. I bound zines full of writing I’d posted on LiveJournal; I got into college using essays I’d started on LiveJournal. The world seemed to always be shedding those riches Rilke spoke of, shiny coins from shallow pockets. I wanted to collect them, keep them all, warm them in my palms.
How the LiveJournal dashboard looked in 2001
In college, I had my first glass of wine, alone with a boy who was not my boyfriend, and LiveJournal was the only one I told. I wrote frantically on LiveJournal when my infant cousin was rushed to the hospital and I grieved on LiveJournal the next day when she died at ten months old. I wrote about going home and staying up all night with my friends, walking to a nearby graveyard with them at 3am, how a star fell above us as we walked home on the deserted highway.
Reading back, of course, it’s all a little precious, all a little LiveJournal. I was figuring out that I was a writer, but I was also young, I was very sure about many incorrect things, I felt ready for life without having any realistic idea of what life was actually like. In short, I was a teenage girl. It reassured me to filter everything, as it happened, through words. The best way for me to comprehend my own life was to read it back to myself.
And I knew I wasn’t alone. The girls who read my LJ, and vice versa, were doing the same; they, too, believed their lives were at least worth documenting, and so we were hungry together, reaching out toward the details in one another’s lives like vines toward the sun; we loved each other, celebrated surprise joys and consoled atomic hurt. We joined communities to learn to knit and to share poetry and to post photos of ourselves. We created new usernames to symbolize new directions in our lives–one for college, one for poetry, one for only extra-secret secrets. LiveJournal was a neverending sleepover for us sentimental storytellers, teenagers who were feeling every feeling. The sun was just about to come up. We had plenty of snacks. We passed our diaries around the circle.
In the LJ archives of my dear friend Courtney, there’s a post she made in 2002, as a teenage girl:
man this thing works. its like all the badness escapes when you write it down.
I stopped using LiveJournal years ago, though I gave it up in fits, came crawling back to create temporary friends-only journals that now sit dormant with only four or five posts. LiveJournal ended with a whisper; all the other girls I’d gotten to know over nearly a decade on the site stopped using it, too, seemingly within the same few months. Many of us moved to Tumblr, where there was no comment function, and our personal posts became rarer and rarer and—in my case, anyway—eventually stopped.
Last fall, after hearing about TinyLetter, a personal newsletter service, I signed up for an account. For several weeks, I sent out letters that were bad versions of other people’s fascinating TinyLetters. Finally, after some weeks of floundering, I sat down at the end of a hard day at work and wrote a letter about how I felt—very scared and lost at thirty-one. I stared out my office windows. I cried a little. I just feel like I see these lives I imagined for myself all over the place sometimes, walking around, being real. Where I’d normally sent several draft iterations to my inbox, I barely even proofread this letter. “Are you sure?” TinyLetter asked. I wasn’t. I clicked Yes, send it now and went home.
I can’t shake the memory that writing was easy in the LiveJournal days; I remember sitting at that computer desk in my childhood home, writing about my innermost joys, and pausing at the keyboard, my fingers poised over the keys. I shut my eyes and waited, knowing the next words would come soon—and they always did. Whether they came only because I believed they would, or vice versa, I still don’t know. But in the same way I knew the words would come, I knew that life would always be good to me, that its riches would always be clear to me; or at least that I could be “poet enough” to seek them out.
At the same time, I was shot through with loss since my adolescent days, terrified of how quickly time slipped by. I wrote about my life with a sense of urgency, as if documenting it could save me from getting older, as a way to cling to the hours. I stretched my minutes before bedtime to post on LiveJournal, my parents hovering in the doorway. I forced myself to stay awake on late study nights to post on LiveJournal. Weekends home from college, I held my breath, waiting for my Grandma’s ancient iMac to connect to her rural internet, so I could write on LiveJournal about the dinner we’d just had as my whole big family talked and laughed in the next room.
The reference to “the paperback one” in my childhood diary is the only indication I have that the paperback diary ever existed. I can’t find it; I don’t remember it. But I wrote about it once.
I signed in to LiveJournal recently and felt a pang of familiarity while reading the usernames on my Friends list. Even the usernames of people with whom I’ve lost touch evoked clear, hollering memories: what they were like, where they lived, who they loved. Clicking through the list of names yields lots of final posts that read “I wish I still wrote here” or “I wish LJ wasn’t so deserted.”
After I sent out my messy TinyLetter, readers and friends responded with emails and texts. I stood in my dark driveway and read them on my phone, feeling the same small lift that a bold 1 comment link gave me in the LiveJournal days, a feeling so familiar and specific that it swayed nostalgic, like listening to a mix tape I’d made as a teenager.
One of the emails was from a girl I met on LiveJournal as a teenager; she expressed amazement that my stepson is so old now, gratefulness for the TinyLetter, the easy way it led us to reconnect after so long. She wrote, “We have only ever known each other on the internet, but still.”
LiveJournal friends are still so ubiquitous in my life that I often forget how we met. Many are (still) writers. When I scroll through my Twitter feed, I see my LiveJournal friends. When I got married, LiveJournal friends stood in the sun and cheered. We’ve known and loved each other for well over a decade. We’ve listened to one another’s daily lives and confessions and complaints. Most of us have never met in person or even talked on the phone, but we’ve read each others’ diaries and found ourselves there. It’s true that we’ve only ever known each other on the internet.
But still.
Tags: friendship, lindsey gates-markel, livejournal, nikki misses livejournal too, writing
I LAST POSTED ON LIVEJOURNAL YESTERDAY.
(I got into it in my late teens, after its glory days had passed. But it is still where I have made and maintained a lot of friendships, and it’s still an important part of my life.)
Ok, I have mine and I still check it occasionally and update even more occasionally, but I can’t get my friends list to display more than 10 entries and then it tells me there are no more entries to display. What is happening! Is this just how it works now? I apologize in advance for asking you to be my LJ tech services but I can’t tell if this is happening to anyone else. (I’ve been on since 2000, and I’m never going to give it up.)
If you go to your account settings and click on the “Customize my journal’s appearance” link (under Style), one of the options will be “New feed settings” (they changed the Friends page to a Feed, like Twitter and Facebook, a while ago; I hate it and have been refusing to allow the change) you can edit the paging type to show a certain number of entries on each page of your Friends List. The default is 10, but youshould be able to change it to 20 (or whatever) if you like. I can’t explain the no more entries to display thing, though – sorry.
Too overwhelmed by nostalgia, will now lie down on the office floor for a while.
(I still check my flist every day, and I have a few friends that still post often, but man, it’s quiet.)
(I’ve visited friends all over that I met on LJ. I’ve met their spouses and held their babies.)
(LJ friends helped save my life.)
(ENOUGH PARENTHETICALS)
*hugs* I’m so glad we met, even if it wasn’t on LJ. I feel like that’s how we got to know each other anyway, and I remember being REALLY EXCITED when we became mutual friends. 😀
I’m on LJ if you wanna look me up, and I post nearly every day. I’m clevermanka there, too.
I still have mine, too. <3
I am so happy that LiveJournal brought Lindsey and this essay into my life. That is all.
Yes. Yes to all of this. I joined LJ in 2000? 2001? and it was my jam. I’d made my account to stay close to my fandoms, which had moved there from egroups and webrings, but my LJ quickly grew to encompass so much of my life. I miss those old days – the internet was so much smaller and intimate then, and certainly more innocent.
My account is still there, and on the (very) odd days that I post to my DW, I’ll crosspost to that LJ. I don’t think anyone follows me anymore, but I can’t stop. I miss that place and who I was back then.
Man oh man, does this bring back memories. I actually had a Diaryland journal first and then slowly migrated over to Xanga before winding up on LJ. I was there for I-don’t-remember-how-long before the mass exodus to Dreamwidth when LJ started getting all weird and making changes no one wanted.
Some of my closest Internet friends are people I’ve met through LJ. I remember the thrill of excitement whenever the friendship would graduate from LJ to exchanging friend requests on Facebook, or finally agreeing to meet up in person. My LJ community encouraged my horrible early attempts at fanfic; they’ve always backed my crazy ideas and were nothing but supportive when I made the leap into more “mainstream” writing ventures.
Pouring one out for the good old days of LJ right now.
Diaryland here too.
Shit, now I’m tearing up over the girl I left behind on both Diaryland and LiveJournal.
YEAH, DIARYLAND!!
Oh man, this. THIS THIS THIS.
I actually still use LJ, but instead of whispering at a slumber party, it’s more like shouting into a void most days.
LJ people are MY people, and they are the BEST people. Your tumblr could never.
“I actually still use LJ, but instead of whispering at a slumber party, it’s more like shouting into a void most days.”
Wow, yes – Perfect description right there.
“Shouting into a void” is exactly how I’ve been describing my LJ experience for several years now! I still post every day because I need a place to record my life without the pressure to be 100% open about my feelings that I’ve felt every time I’ve tried to keep an actual private diary, but it’s lonelier than it used to be…
I have numerous blog posts reiterating the exact same thing! I somehow missed LiveJournal but I had Xanga, Blogger, Blogspot, WordPress, and now Tumblr. Though Tumblr’s actually the only place I ever became part of the community. Everything else was friends only or private. It was too personal!
I think the real issue for me is that I loved being able to be brutally honest and that’s just not something I do in front of an audience, but now I don’t seem to be able to create a space to do that anymore. I dunno! It’s weird. But this whole piece resonated with me.
HERE FOR THIS.
I still have the LJ I created in 2000. I posted to it yesterday. It’s funny–my experience of writing and portraying myself on the Internet has been sort of backwards from Lindsey’s. My LJ, especially in the later high school years, is FULL of private entries, for my eyes only, in which I let myself be messy and teenage. The friends-locked and public entries were Serious Girl stuff, school and church and plans for the future. I was so fearful of being a “typical teenage girl,” whatever that meant to me, where even the friends closest to me could see it, afraid of even other girls my age seeing the things I felt so strongly. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found value in being more open, in my life and online. I’ve written personal essays and posted personal tidbits to Tumblr. I didn’t let myself feel every feeling when I was sixteen, but I’m glad I’m learning how now.
LJ sent me a sad little email yesterday, about bringing your friends back to the site. Somehow I don’t see that happening. LJ now, for me, is just a journal.
Anyway this piece is great. Thank you, Lindsey.
I remember how self-conscious I felt the first time I posted there about fancying a celebrity (it was Johnny Depp, and I was 22 – I was a late starter), as if it was this risible thing to bring out in the open. And that was ridiculous, because I didn’t think my friends’ posts about their crush objects were silly – I just felt like I had to hold myself to some sort of standard! Again, fear of being a “typical fangirl”… I think it’s so easy for us to absorb that fear of how the world dismisses girls’ feelings and the things they love (and that’s certainly something I sense behind a lot of the jokes people make about LJ – that it was “just teenage girls going on about teenage girl things”, as if that wasn’t inherently worthwhile)…
I think it’s so easy for us to absorb that fear of how the world dismisses girls’ feelings and the things they love (and that’s certainly something I sense behind a lot of the jokes people make about LJ – that it was “just teenage girls going on about teenage girl things”, as if that wasn’t inherently worthwhile)…
Exactly! I internalized a lot of misogyny as a kid and teenager, was snotty about “girly girls,” and even though I shared a lot of obsessive loves with girlfriends, somehow we were different because we were obsessed with LOTR instead of…Matchbox Twenty?? I see teenage girls on Tumblr now and yeah, there are some of the same problems and other, new problems, but by and large I witness a lot of support and love and boldness in terms of their fandom and interests.
I got that email too! The “Remember LiveJournal?” email!
I LOVED LiveJournal, I connected with so many other teenagers mostly in the UK, the US and Canada. I lived in the tiniest rural Belgian town and ‘knowing’ all these people was amazing to me. Everyone’s lives were fascinating to me and somehow my posts about myself seemed interesting to them. The community aspect was fun too, I still read one up to this year when it finally moved to Facebook. It’s fun still reading posts by the same people but I miss the LJ format, haha.
Also the old login screen (pictured above) was the best and I kept switching back to that whenever they tried to force me into that light blue nonsense.
SCRIBBLE.NU, THOUGH! I am glad I am not the only one who remembers that.
I identified with all of this, but none so much as the paragraph about learning HTML, websites on tripod, and desperately wanting your own domain. That was such a huge part of my high school life – and yep, it culminated with joining LJ the week I graduated high school.
Oh man this brought me back, I got onto journal in 2002 with some Lord of the Rings referencing username, had a dalliance with a personal website/blog on one of those shared paid domain spaces you refer to! Had flirtations with LJ’s poorer cousins Greatestjournal and deadjournal (my goth phase). Its incredible how some people I knew “to see” on LJ, turned their presence into huge internet presences today, recognised by people who never knew LJ. My last entry on my current LJ was November 2013, the personal posts spluttered along, getting shorter and fewer in my college years (2007-11). One of my current best friends, came into my life via livejournal. Certainly as there are more platforms to share your life – instagram, tumblr, they don’t feel like safe spaces in the way LJ did. It was a like one big sleepover, to this lonely girl living in rural Ireland – friends in large cities, all over the world. I miss it!
I’ve met some of the best – and worst – people on the internet, through LJ. It was such a huge early-mid 00s presence.
Yes, I love Tumblr, Twitter etc., but the inability to customise access options means they never flexible enough to embrace warts-and-all and public-face stuff. Facebook’s filters and tiered commenting make it the closest thing functionally to LJ (it’s so strange to say that), but their tendency to mess with privacy settings and share our data around like someone else’s popcorn means I’m never going to be comfortable connecting to friends there the way I would on LJ. And that’s a shame, because most friends I made via LJ are now on Facebook instead.
Oh the LJ knockoffs! I had them all: Greatest, Dead, and the best and most heartbreaking of all (when it finally jumped into nonexistence with no warning)…scenejournal. Losing my SJ caused actual pain.
I deleted my initial LJ because my parents found it. I still think about some of the memories I lost from that.
man, public journaling with friends in high school. So much happened with my fiends on those sites.
GreatestJournal! Instant flashbacks to my atrocious photoshop skills (paint shop pro skilsl, rather) and even worse mix of anime pics and emo music. Man, I still miss that site.
Did anyone use Diaryland before LiveJournal? I still post in both, at least once a year. Hello, I am still alive.
Both of those websites have given me some of the closest, most intense friendships I’ve had.
A girl in Denver friended me (in England) on LJ in 2001. Exchanged comments, AIM usernames, the occasional email. In 2008 I was planning to fly over to attend her wedding, and from her LiveJournal history I could see that her fiance was a cheater and all around scumbag. So when she confessed she had a crush on me I told her to call it off and bought her a plane ticket to England. We’ve been married for almost six years now. Every now and then I’ll say to her: You married @alpheius from LiveJournal.
People laugh about LiveJournal but the one thing I miss the most is that every step away from that format has had more of an expectation of an audience and feels more performative, less intimate. Communities on the internet seem less tightly-knit now. Or perhaps 15 years and adulthood has just eroded mine. I used to write about serious difficult things to nobody on LJ, and, somehow, a few people found them, and that more or less implied friendship. Now I say nothing to my actual friends on Facebook.
“the one thing I miss the most is that every step away from that format has had more of an expectation of an audience and feels more performative, less intimate.”
This is so true! I have friends now who write in more more public forums than LJ, and while in a lot of ways they’re often producing better writing, I miss the casual conversational tone of their LJs, typos and occasionally-clumsy constructions and all. Like you’re just sitting down to have a cup of tea with a friend, where you don’t overthink everything you tell them about your week – you just talk it out.
Wow, amazing story!!
I used Diaryland back in my high school days, and once foolishly included my full name in a post… which now shows up in my Google search results. It wouldn’t be a huge deal besides the embarrassing amount of hugely personal posts I wrote about all my teenage FEEEELINGGGSSS. Unfortunately I think the email account I used to set it up has been long defunct, and I’ve been totally unsuccessful in logging back in to delete the post. Have you ever been able to get help from the folks at Diaryland for this kind of stuff? I have nearly given up on getting rid of it, but it haunts me that someone may go back and ask me in a job interview about all the horrendous stuff I said about arguments with my mother when I was sixteen.
If you’re in the EU you might be able to get Google to stop it coming up in search results for your name. There’s some info about that here: http://www.eudataprotectionlaw.com/category/right…
You can definitely email them and ask about it – [email protected] – but I don’t know how that will go. Even if they won’t delete it, they can make it invisible to search engines.
this is the best story. I did Diaryland too.
That is such a sweet story ♥
Oh my god, yes, this. I lived on LJ a d loved it and wrote constantly and lived for comments and updates from my friends. I love them all–they came to my wedding–we visit every summer. There is something so vital about sharing the deep gooey insides before you ever meet in person and before you even see a picture (there was a time before camera everything and easy uploading) and had only an icon to look at. Oh the hours I spent personalizing with song lyrics and pretty icons.
I really miss it. There’s nothing like it. Tumblr does not come close, lacking a good comment feature, and Facebook is so drowned in everyday stuff it isn’t the same. LJ was so important to me and to fandom and oh god I miss it so much. And I miss my friends–not that I don’t still interact with them, which I do, but there was a sense of being involved in their lives in a deep and tangible way.
Phew.
there was a sense of being involved in their lives in a deep and tangible way.
I loved being privy to all the minutiae of someone’s day, all the little thoughts and occurrences they chose to share. For the most part those aren’t things that people think to tell their friends, precisely because they seem so inconsequential that you assume nobody’s going to care about how you watched all of Lord of the Rings again and have all the feelings about Sam and Frodo or how you spotted your second grade teacher at the grocery store and it brought back a vague childhood memory you’d forgotten about. Or they’re things that you can’t really ask about because people will think you’re weird if you try to drill down into their day with all these bizarre probing questions. But I loved knowing those things.
I still haven’t found anything to replace LJ communities. Tumblr doesn’t have a decent comment feature, like you said. Subreddits come close but they often have so many members that I can’t keep track of who’s who without user icons. Signing up for individual discussion forums for every topic I want to discuss is a massive pain in the neck.
Yes, I feel like I don’t have the grip on people’s everyday lives that I used when we were all on LJ – people tend to be reluctant to post so personally on FB (because everyone’s relations are there and the risk of accidentally setting a post filter wrong/having FB reset your privacy is unsettling). Of course, it’s also that we’ve aged and our responsibilities have changed commensurately, but I miss all that…
I haven’t used my LJ in a very long time, I’m not sure it even still exists, but I miss it, too. Like you said, Tumblr doesn’t really allow you to actually interact with people, Facebook is so directed towards non-online relationships that I keep it tightly edited, and I find Twitter a confusing cacophony of noise where I can’t even bring myself to log in most days. There’s nothing quiet and intimate like LJ anymore.
LJ was like your own semi-private forum for you and your friends, a network of personal forums you could interact with. I miss that connection.
“I can’t shake the memory that writing was easy in the LiveJournal days”
Oh my god, this sentiment. I think about it almost every day when I try to write, and how I used to be so self-assured that what I wrote deserved an audience. Wish I could have bottled that and stored it for later.
I don’t even remember my livejournal name, or whether I deleted it. I’d like to go back and check but the information I’d need to dig it up is probably entombed on my old desktop computer at my parents’ home. I only really had one “friend” on LJ, she was a year older, lived in Texas (vs. my Wisconsin). She was so cool– she wore clothes from Urban Outfitters and watched Daria and had a maybe-boyfriend– but approachably so, I always thought of her as an actual friend, not an idol or anything. We liked the same songs by the Arctic Monkeys and Fall Out Boy, and for her birthday I drew her a picture of her OC. I still have the original, which means I didn’t ever work up the nerve to ask for an address to send it to, but I would have scanned it and uploaded it to DeviantArt, I think.
I feel like the Toast comments are often in the same vein of community as LJ had been. Different, but similar. I feel like my LJ friend could be a Toast commenter these days, you know?
I actually use the Toast open thread in the same way I used LJ, to talk about things that I wouldn’t really talk about with my in-person friends or family, in a place I know I’ll be understood. It’s not the same, of course, but it gives me an outlet with like-minded folks.
I often wonder if people I knew on LJ are Toast commenters or people I follow on tumblr, but I don’t recognize them under new usernames.
Livejournal (actually Journalfen was technically first, yikes) was my first foray into social media, and I still really miss some of the features. I haven’t found another blogging platform with as many filtering options–granted, I probably wouldn’t use them anyway, because my days of posting really personal stuff on the internet are long over. But it was so great when I was a teen, living the dream of writing a diary that people actually read and found interesting.
Plus all the fandom scenes, which I didn’t actively participate in but still kept up with, were incredible (and sometimes frighteningly intense–Harry Potter fandom, even we LOTR fans gazed upon your epic fights with awe) back then. Most of that seems to have migrated over to Tumblr now.
So many LJ feels, oh jeez. So many. This is perfect.
“I wanted to make poetry out of life, to believe that life was good and beautiful, and when I was younger, that never seemed difficult.” <– Yes. That’s perfect.
Writing on the Internet did not feel like as much of a performance back then as it does now. I confess I have never really figured out how to grow my Internet-self beyond what it was in about 2005. Livejournal was so formative to me, and yet it ruined me in some ways, too. I have such admiration for those old-school journallers / bloggers who’ve been able to keep a public personal narrative going over the years.
And the sleepover analogy is perfect — there was absolutely a sense that my LJ entries, even those marked Public, were secrets my friends would keep. When I realized I needed to censor myself more on LJ, I flailed around until I disappeared back into my fiction writing and let my LJ get old and crusty.
“I confess I have never really figured out how to grow my Internet-self beyond what it was in about 2005.”
And this is why I’ve been through two different (real name) accounts on both Twitter and Facebook. Life was easier when everything was under screen names…
Yup, same. I keep disappearing and reappearing from the Internet. I’ve had the same Twitter account since 2009, I think, but it’s taken me since then to reach about 750 tweets. I just have no idea how to interact online when the audience is no longer just my LJ friends, but rather, potentially, the whole freaking world.
Love the way you stated it: “writing on the internet did not feel like as much of a performance back then as it does now.” I miss the simple LJ days.
I’ve been posting daily on LiveJournal since 2004, and I don’t really understand why so many people have left. Most of the friends I’d made there migrated to Facebook, which is not at all conducive to thoughtful posts of multiple paragraphs. I guess most LJ users were there for the sense of community, so as people started to leave, there was less incentive to remain? There’s still plenty of content on my Friends page, sincelots of writers still use it regularly — Marie Brennan, Jo Walton, and Ursula Vernon come to mind — but I wish my old LJ friends still wanted to share what was on their minds and what’s really going on in their lives.
I – and a lot of the other members of the comms I was in – left during the bizarre banhammery period of LJ where management started sweeping through the HP fic comms and deleting anyone who wrote NC-17 fic, sometimes despite the fact that their LJs were locked so minors couldn’t see them. Oh and also despite the fact that they were FICTIONAL CHARACTERS and it didn’t seem like any other comms were as deeply affected as HP’s. A few people switched to DeadJournal, but most migrated entirely to AO3 or other fic-central sites.
I was still active for a little while longer in the ONTD sub-comms (_ai in particular, when Kris Allen and Adam Lambert were on tour and in lurrrrrve), but it all started with the banhammer. I miss that sense of family that I found there.
Yeah. I’m still writing, but not many people are reading anymore.
I still post sporadically – I am big on Twitter because most of my friends are there, but anything long-format or that I want to mull over without it being completely public, I post to LJ. A lot of my friends moved to Dreamwidth, which I tried to do, but I’m still so attached to my LJ… It’s mainly that the communities have gone and what big communities I’m part of started dying, but searching for new ones was a chore. Also, all the shitty changes that the Russian owners kept doing.
As everybody branches out to new stuff, it’s hard to to maintain any one for me, and keep up with relationships. I love the Toast and people here, but even these comments are difficult to keep up with to create relationships! and with my social anxiety, I fizzle out quickly.
I don’t even keep up my Tumblr very well – I think more than anything, I just use it to follow people (well, except for my weekly pre-scheduled post: http://hollywoodhandwriting.tumblr.com – nothing like a single-topic blog!). But I log into LJ every day, especially for Vintage Ads because they’re still so lively. (And how happy am I that F_W on JF has been showing signs of life lately?!)
I think what really exacerbated the decline was the combination of all the DDOS attacks LJ experienced a few years back, and how this combined with several consecutive code updates to the site which messed up the functionality for a lot of people and communities – the time they removed subject lines for comments was particularly ruinous. I mean, there were a lot of problems before those things happened, but at that point Tumblr fandom had become big enough to be an attractive alternative and LJ really started haemmhoraging users.
I’ve noticed that the people who stay tend to be the ones who make regular attempts to find new people to add to their flists – and there does seem to be a new friending meme going round every couple of months, so it’s pretty easy to do. My flist definitely isn’t as busy as it used to be, but it’s full of people who still enjoy posting and commenting, so that makes it feel worth my while to stick around.
I haven’t gotten to add any new LJ friends for years and years – haven’t seen the friending memes. The friends I still have there who do post are lovely people, but it isn’t easy to meet new people there like it used to be. I definitely miss that. (Of course, my habit of posting daily, which from my perspective is a self-discipline thing, could easily be a turn-off for potential new friends. I wouldn’t want to start dominating the Friends page of some new friend whose other friends are mostly inactive.)
Oh man. I had a Livejournal all through middle school and high school and then deleted it late in college in a fit of embarrassment for my teenage self, and now I am FILLED WITH REGRET. I had so many feelings that I’m finally ready to laugh about!
I did a similar thing, except I started mine as a freshman in college. I’m actually not sure I ever deleted it, I just can’t remember my username or my password. I would LOVE to see those old posts, though.
me too, I started mine sometime in college mostly to follow/comment on friends’ LJs (I had a regular blog, too, I think it started on blogspot and then I used greymatter, oh man old timey internet!!) but then I got pretty into it! Being the private rather than the public blog, it was full of either very silly or very angsty. So I deleted it real quick one day before I could talk myself into any sentimentality about it.
what I miss is having a close-knit friend group who were ALL on the same platform and using it actively enough that you knew your posts reached each other. I can’t think of any social media thing now that all my close friends agree on using.
OMG, greymatter! I remember the owner of the domain I was sharing changing from GM to Movable Type and how professional I felt with the change, lol… And two weeks later I migrated to LJ, because who wants to write ultra teenagey stuff in something that doesn’t demand you to know html and css?
Can we talk about how awesome LJ was for fandom!?
For a huge part of my teens, LiveJournal was my only journal and I poured my heart out into it. It saw some of the darkest and happiest moments of my life. But mostly I just squeed about fanfiction.
LJ was THE BEST for fandom, holy shit.
I really want Tumblr fandom to GO BACK to LJ because keeping up with reblogs and comments is the WORST and trying to track down anything SUCKS because of shitty search.
I never made the switch to Tumblr and I cannot fathom how it suits fandom at all. But I sort of became too lazy for all my fandoms and whenever I think about getting back into them I’m like, I wouldn’t even know where to start. I do not have the free time of a 19 year old anymore.
Oh MAN the lack of free time! Related, I feel like the internet as a whole requires a lot more time? I don’t know if it’s just because it’s logarithmically bigger than it was even five years ago, or because all of the fandomy community stuff is no longer centralized and we also have these constant streams of incoming content – Tumblr, Twitter flag the screen when there’s new stuff, does Facebook? At least before, if you didn’t hit F5, you could pretend there wasn’t anything new (but lbh we all hit f5 all the time)
I miss the slowness, too. I’m always slow to respond to comments and things, but it felt more “okay” in the LJ commenting system somehow? (not always, but not as much as an ick feeling to be several hours or even a day later to respond)
Frank the Goat *weeps*
It was very surprising and unsettling to me how fast LJ collapsed on itself, how people who would post multiple times a week or even per day suddenly just stopped cold. I stopped updating mine after I finished undergrad and moved 200 km away for grad school – I had a hard time dealing with the changes (in hindsight I probably had a mild form of depression, but I never thought to get therapy and I eventually got out of it) and didn’t feel like writing yet another entry about how much I hated everything. When I came back to LJ after months away, I didn’t even have to go back 20 entries on my friends list to catch up. Everyone had just trickled away to Tumblr or other social media platforms or maybe none at all.
LiveJournal led me to my best friend, who’s been like a sister to me for 10 years, and to many other friends that I’m still close with. It’s strange to think that a website that enriched my life so greatly doesn’t seem to have much value to anyone anymore.
Yes, it all happened so fast! Livejournal: the old steel boom town now fallen on hard times of the internet.
I kept a personal journal for almost exactly my entire time at undergrad (the final entry is essentially just ‘oh my god I graduated!’), and it was one of the best things I ever did, mainly because I was writing for myself, which was something I’d never done before.
What I miss most about LJ is actually the RP community I joined there, long after I stopped keeping a personal journal myself. The game migrated to another platform a few years ago, and I left not long afterwards, but the people I met there are some of the best friends I ever made.
Yay, LJ RPing! I ran one game on LJ for nearly SIX YEARS! I’m not into RPing elsewhere at all, since LJ RPGs were really great at longform writing and open sandbox world-building that forums etc find hard to replicate, I think. We even had our own mini-convention! Pretty magical.
It was so great for RP, wasn’t it? The game I was in (Tabula Rasa) moved over to Dreamwidth, which was fine; it just wasn’t LJ.
(also, omg six years as a mod, you’re amazing)
Thanks! I started out in BTVS-verse RPing on LJ and then moved into original universe stuff… It was great. And yeah, being a mod for that long certainly had its stressful moments! But I made some fantastic friends, and I must say we did some brilliant writing.
I’m sitting here reading nonchalantly, getting my feels on, see the bit about rp-ing, wonder briefly if I know which one… but nah, couldn’t possibly, the web isn’t that interconnected. But lo and behold, someone from the same game. Truly the internet is a small and magical place at times.
Oh my god, I put that out there wondering if any old TR folks were also Toasties, but not expecting to actually hear from one. 😀
I was in TR from 2010-2012 (playing Francis Abernathy, from The Secret History); what about you?
I went away then came back, so I think I missed a large chunk of the beginning of your time there, but… I had a Roman? A Roman from a mystery series who may or may not share a name with a German singer from the 80s. There were definitely a few threads with Francis. Oh, for the good ol’ days.
…I definitely remember you, and I am delighted.
That is pretty much the perfect word to describe my reaction as well. The happy sound -ok, squeal- of recognition that I made upon finding out who you were scared my dog. This mini reunion has made my week. I firmly stand by what I said about the internet (or at least The Toast portion of it) being magical.
Oh man, yes. I played in a multi-fandom RP for about two years, and I still miss it and wish I hadn’t quit.
Oh, I felt the same way after leaving my old game–it’s hard! I joined a new multi-fandom game on Dreamwidth back in 2013, and it’s been great. Of course, the game is run by/has players I know from my old LJ-roleplaying days, so it’s almost like I never left…which may be part of the appeal, come to think. 🙂
I hope you can find a new place to write in, if it’s something you ever want to pick up again. <3
I kind of want to be creepy and ask where you’re playing now. My resolve not to post this didn’t last half as long as I thought it would.
HEE. Not going to lie, I was waiting to see if you’d ask. I’m at The City Never Sleeps (aka Darrow): http://thecityneversleeps.dreamwidth.org/
Come on in, the water’s fine. And often full of bee-related disasters around the holidays (don’t ask).
It’s tempting. Come the next test drive I may make an appearance.
I’ve been an active LJ user since 2001, and I still post at least weekly and read there daily! My friends list is pretty active, too, but that’s because I’ve regularly added new people over the years, and I also make a consistent effort to comment on people’s posts, because part of the point of LJ to me has been opening up conversations. LJ has many, many problems – not least its frequent downtimes – but it fills a niche in my social media world that no other site can. I love the immediacy of Twitter, the chattiness of Facebook, the prettiness of Tumblr, but none of them really allow for the slow development of real friendships in the way that LJ has. Hey, I even, in a roundabout way, met my husband through LJ. So: it’s stuck with me to the bitter end, I think.
Same here. I don’t think I realised until reading these comments that the tendency of LJ to only show some of your flist’s posts has put so many people off – if everyone decides to check in and then only sees two weeks’ worth as a default (which they’re not aware can be changed – I wasn’t until someone explained how to reset it above!), then it’s definitely going to look like a graveyard!
I’m having a lot of feelings.
*clings to you* THE FEELINGS ARE OVERWHELMING.
I got into LJ late (2008ish? Just after high school, I believe), but I am still so nostalgic for it! I feel like it was 100000x easier to make friends there. And even then, I rather sucked at it. The people I’m closest to on Twitter and Tumblr are the same people from LJ fandom. I wish LJ stuck around longer, cuz I might’ve actually figured out how to make those really close friendships I always see.
Can we just, as a group, decide to all move back?
Maybe we should start a The Toast LJ community for people to join 😉
I would be so up for that.
I totally would create it if there was a way for that to not make immediately obvious to the wider internet what my lj username is, as the moderator’s name is always listed in the profile! (Even though my journal’s friends only, I prefer to keep it away from my other, more public, social media streams.)
LJ as a site has gotten increasingly bizarre, but Dreamwidth exists! I have a bunch of inactive Dreamwidth friends too, but it’s more active than LJ for me. And it’s a better user experience. I keep wishing more people would come back to journaling sites, since they never express any particular reason for having left and often seem to regret it.
OH MAN. I will occasionally check my old LJ (which I kept writing in periodically until…2008?). I was SO SERIOUS about everything. It does go through my first love and heartbreak, so I can’t bear to get rid of it, no matter how much I’m embarrassed for my younger self.
ME TOO. I started it in high school (sophomore year?) but I fell in love early in my freshman year of college, and the comment history between the two of us over the course of 4 years is just heartbreaking now.
The timing on this post is uncanny. I just recently started blogging again, and one of the very first things I did was express regret over the lost LJ community of yesteryear. (And I am so thankful for the LJ friends I did manage to keep in touch with, too.)
This essay is so well observed and I will now be joining the other commenters in a fog of nostalgia for the rest of the day.
Oh hi, person who actually is one of my LJ friends. (My LJ had a crazy Welsh name, if you don’t recognize me here.)
I’m actually pretty sure LJ is the reason we’re still friends – I don’t see how we would have kept in touch through college without it, since Facebook wasn’t quite a thing yet. So there’s that.
I for sure agree! And I was still using LJ at the point I moved from our home city to join you in our current one, which I think probably also contributed to me reaching out to you when I did.
Through careful and determined internet stalking brought on by a wave of nostalgia (I swear it’s not as creepy as it sounds?) I think you may be someone from my own lj days. I didn’t journal so much, but I’m afraid you might have been one of the first people I ever rp-ed with? I feel like I ought to apologize for that now.
THE FEELS. My LJ turned 12 years old last month. I still write in it every week (even though as someone said about, it’s like shouting into the void now)(even though I made all my posts before like 2 years ago private and will NEVER EVER READ THEM AGAIN). All my best internet friends were there.
This is lovely. I was a regular LJ user for about four years but stopped partway through college. Finally downloaded the whole thing as a PDF last year so I could delete it from the site, but I’m so glad I have it — there’s a lot in there that didn’t get that much space in my regular (handwritten) journals, and I don’t think anything really matches that feeling of pouring everything out in an entry and then having your friends respond.
Also, god, the number of quizzes and questionnaires I did back then. Buzzfeed quizzes =/= LJ quizzes.
those quizzes/surveys were the best. I love that occasionally I’ll see one pop up somewhere on the internets now, like the “answer these questions about yourself using song titles from your favorite band” one. So much more fun than clicking Buzzfeed’s predetermined answers.
oh maaan those are going around my Tumblr friends (or at least the long survey kind?) and it’s the WORST because lj-cuts don’t exist or work properly and it’s rude to post a long list, so people are like “send me an ask to pick which ones I answer” and it’s so pathetic if no one does or only one or two people do, and then the whole Replies system is obnoxious as hell. (One of my dear friends uses the Reply publicly to EVERYONE who replies to her posts, and I just wish they could be threaded LJ comments so much because it’s this semi-private conversation that’s being blasted to her blog, which is weird and uncomfortable. Also I have less than 0 interest in some of her fandoms.)
I still post to Dreamwidth! (And cross-post to LJ, but with comments off there because I hate split discussion.)
It’s harder because (1) no scheduled posts, and I try not to post time-stamped things during the workday and (2) ineffable feeling that the barrier to production is higher than quickie links elsewhere, but I still read and keep up with people there. Come to Dreamwidth! The features are better than LJ and there’s no ads!
Yeah, it’s taken a while for my DW flist to get as active as my LJ one, but if anything posts there often get more discussion going than on LJ now.
I have a dreamwidth! I backed my LJ up onto it, and while I check it as regularly as I check my LJ these days (which is… once a week? maybe? when I remember?), I still love that it’s a moderated space that I can control in which I can post more freely than, say, tumblr or twitter (the latter of which has never been conducive to longform anyway).
And the smugness of the Dreamwidth people is why I will never, ever go there.
Love this post. I got into LJ in 2012 when I discovered fandom at 18. A lot of old Harry Potter links, if they’re not dead, led me to it. One of my favorites about LJ is that I can see a lot of what went down through the years because of the easy-access archive. And I especially love it’s comment feature which, personally, encouraged me to articulate my thoughts on a post (as opposed to my incoherent tags in tumblr). And anyway, it’s really nice to read about what people thought.
oh man, livejournal. before livejournal i had a blurty, and there was a xanga for a while, and then i had a blogspot before i finally switched to tumblr circa 2008.
but livejournal—i wish i hadn’t deleted and purged my account. i mean, i understand why i did it, but i feel so removed from who i was in 2001, i wish i could go back and read my thoughts, and read those interactions.
I never got much into LJ, but I had another online community, born from, of all things, those awful Lisi Harrison novels “The Clique.” (They’re really, really awful. They’re probably supposed to be satire but as a 13 year old I thought they were serious.) The back of the book had a link to lisiharrison.net/forum, and girls from there eventually made their own forums, password protected and hidden from outsiders. (Of course I’ve forgotten the password and can’t get back in to see what I wrote!!) My group was Glam Clan (GC)(lol) and we updated each other faithfully about our problems, shared music, helped with school stuff, etc. We all splintered as we hit the upper classes of high school, but most of us are Facebook friends. Even if we don’t talk like we used to, I’m so thankful to have had those girls as my sounding board when I needed them. I wish I could get back in and see what I wrote!!
I purged my LJ a couple of years ago. It was… I don’t know. My heaviest LJ use corresponded almost exactly with two of the biggest depressive episodes I’ve ever had, and reliving those times was not a good thing for me. Honestly, even thinking about the events of those years is not feeling particularly healthy so purging it was probably for the best.
As with most things in life, I don’t think I used LJ “right,” in that I never really made friends or discovered things or met people like so many others did. No one read it, really. I just vomited depression all over it for five years. It served its purpose at its time and now that’s done.
i suddenly and deeply miss Livejournal and my LJ friends… but i do not remember the passwords to my hs or college accounts and stupidly i used my college email for the college one, so no way to retrieve that.
i used to read the whole thing cover to cover occassionally, like a cohesive narrative of self.
You might be able to contact the college to regain your login credentials, or they may be able to provide you with a new email temporarily so you can regain your password. All depends on how their systems have been maintained over the years. But most colleges like to have alums stay in contact so there’s usually some provision to keep email addresses around. (University web staff job here.)
Just chiming in as someone else who has melted into a puddle of nostalgia. I’ve had an LJ for eleven years THIS MONTH, since I was 15, and it was once everything to me too, and online friends are still everything to me. And I do still post in it, though not nearly as much as I used to. I was a compulsive journaler, ever since first grade, and the habit only changed after I finished college and got that detested Real Job, working 40 hours a week. Now I like to focus my writing time on fiction, but I still record major updates in my LJ. It’s still the easiest writing I do.
How I dealt with the records of years of my life I can’t bear to look at anymore: I locked them down as private-only, en masse. It helped to know that no one else can see them now. But I have a pretty strong aversion to deleting anything (even to others deleting things — I see people I don’t even know here talking about how they purged their journals, and it makes me SO SAD, I can’t look at the comments for long).
ugh I truly can’t distinguish what is different because the Internet is no longer this weird new thing vs. what is different because I’m an adult. Posting stuff less often? Posting more cynical things? Not having that close online friend group? I guess a little of both for all of those…
I updated my journal on a semi-regular basis until at least late 2011/early 2012, and then finally let it die. But last fall I was going through a thing and went and poured my heart out on LJ and it felt so good, even though there were only 4-5 people still around to read it. I definitely no longer have the interest/energy to keep up with it the way I did back in 2003, with as many as 5 posts a day, but I mourn that sense of community it fostered. So many of my closest friends are LJ friends from back in the day. I wonder how different my life would be, and how different a person I would be, if I had never stumbled on LJ and the amazing group of women I found there.
Also just yesterday I was going through my LiveJournal, and a more perfect time capsule of all my most embarrassing thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors could not possibly exist. I love and loathe young LiveJournal me with equal fury.
I met my girlfriend on LJ almost exactly six years ago today in a super niche, super strange fandom-adjacent community that could only have existed on LJ at that time. I’ve technically had an LJ account for about 14 years (eesh) and it’s clearly the best thing to have come out of it, for me. <3
I always thought I was too young for LiveJournal (in retrospect, I wasn’t, it just took me a long time to shed the lurker instinct) and now I feel weirdly sad to have missed out on all of this. I spent so much of my teenagerdom feeling alone and uncool and I could’ve been alone and uncool on the internet with other people, but I was afraid they’d realize I was uncool and make me feel even more alone.
I’ve been posting on LJ regularly since 2001 (clevermanka there, too). I think I’ll be one of the last people there. It’s okay. I’ll turn off the lights when I leave.
I’ve been there since 2003, I can see from my first post that I was using irc chat and friendster (and I also got into tribe.net which was great for certain communities and thankfully can still be accessed).
I’ll probably be a half a step ahead of you at the end.
-kazoogrrl
Oh my god, reading this made me feel So Much. I’ve had an LJ since 2001 (sophomore year of high school), so that’ll be 14 years exactly this August. I used it obsessively in high school (all my school friends had accounts and it was a big part of how we communicated outside of class), regularly in college, but it’s petered out in the years post-graduation, especially as more and more of my friends have moved away from the platform. Nowadays I still make posts, but it’s much more sporadic – end of year posts, or when I really want to put something on the record and say, “this happened.” It feels more permanent than other platforms like tumblr (which I love and am addicted to), so I still find myself going back there. It is very much like shouting into a void, though. Or like I’ve set up camp on a mountain and every so often I build a new cairn – sometimes someone adds a rock or two but it doesn’t happen much these days. (It’s still my mountain, though, and I like it well enough for what it gives me.)
On the positive side, some of the comms are still quite active and vibrant, and I definitely value the, well, community provided by one of them in particular. Even in these twilight years of LJ. 🙂 All in all, though, I don’t think we’ll ever go back to the heyday of the mid-00s… too much has changed in social media-land, and some things just can’t be replicated. I don’t know.
Thanks for this. I was on Livejournal from nearly the beginning and over the years I have come and gone with accounts there, on DW, on IJ and on Deadjournal. I recently created a new one because I realized there were people on LJ that don’t use other social networking sites and of all the various sites LJ was the one I was the happiest writing on and the Doctor Who fandom there is amazing. Nice to see other people still have nostalgia for it!
This is the first and only time I’ve thought about Livejournal in the past 3 years without experiencing a visceral shudder of embarrassment, so…wow. Congratulations on capturing the nostalgia.
Livejournal was my primary online social network from ages 12 to 19. I cannot overstate how embarrassing my LJ is to read, but I met a lot of good friends (and one girlfriend!) through it.
My account still exists and I’ve posted a handful of times since tumblr took over my life 5 years ago. Usually about people who followed me on every other social media account, or on subjects that were too tough for tumblr.
It’s weird how these things change – I used to write pages and pages of totally raw and unapologetic and unedited personal content on LJ. If it was something TMI or upsetting I’d put it under a cut but usually I just assumed people didn’t mind reading ALL OF MY FEELINGS. Now, my “personal posts” on tumblr are a sentence or two of sardonic self-deprecation, under a cut and heavily tagged with “personal” and “no1currolyn” (my name is Carolyn and I’m really proud of that tag). I’m a much less embarrassing person because of it, but I do miss the LJ catharsis.
Anyway, I’m seeing the Decemberists next week with someone I met on LJ (actually I think it was Sheroes, if anyone remembers that tiny pocket of the internet) 12+ years ago, so…true love never dies, or something.
IT ME 😀
For the record, we met on Sheroes (and then IRL at that thing), and then reconnected on LJ a couple years later.
I have remembered my LJ username but I can’t remember my password. And apparently whatever email address I used is no longer in play. 🙁
I’m almost tempted to post a link to this article on my LJ that hasn’t been updated since 2013 to see if there is anyone still out there. Funny, and sad, how most people seemed to drift away around the same time. I don’t know how I have survived my teens without LJ comms and pals. I was @marauded
This is lovely. I still check my flist every day. It’s mostly dead, but I keep hoping my friends will be back. It felt like they all flocked to tumblr and I always hated tumblr for that and how impersonal it was.
I also still check my flist fairly regularly, and have a few friends that still post often. Most of us have migrated to twitter/tumblr, though. I have lifelong friends that I met on LJ, I consider them some of my closest. LJ basically is an important part of my life. I created my livejournal in 2001 and basically, it was the center of my online universe up until just a few years ago. I still post occasionally (it’s like 6 times a year at this point) but at the height of my time there I was posting 3-4 times a day and in tons and tons of communities. I was the mod of lotricons (and a few others) when those movies were out. I was all over metaquotes. I was all up on fandom meta pages as well. I LIVED AND BREATHED livejournal. If it ever goes under I will legitimately mourn the loss.
Metaquotes! Icon communities! aahh!
Oh god. A few months ago I went back and looked at my Livejournal, which I haven’t written in since 2009. It’s all about boys. It’s just ALL ABOUT BOYS. ALL OF IT. The first entry is about kissing my highschool boyfriend for the first time, in 2000, and the last entry is about breaking up with my now-husband (we reconciled, obviously). It’s so embarrassing.
I’ve had mine since 2003, when I was going through a terrible breakup. I was 23.
I haven’t updated it since some time last fall, when my laptop finally became borderline useless, and now I do 90% of my internetting on my phone, and LJ is awkward as fuck on my phone, whether on the actual (shitty) app or in the browser.
Sigh. I should download it all–there was a span of several years where I posted multiple times a day! And I would hate to lose that.
Also it’s how I met clevermanka, and many other fandom friends that have also become real-life friends. I wouldn’t have started watching BBC Sherlock without an old LJ friend starting to write fic for it. And now I’m flying to Atlanta next week for my fifth Sherlock con–where I will be rooming with people I met via LJ.
Oh god this post. THIS POST. I was a bit older than you, but started LJ around the same time. I later went on to date the boy who was my very first livejournal friend, some eight years later, after he moved into my area. I made SUCH good friends through LJ, and I felt like I could talk about things there that I just can’t on other social media. Tumblr had a lot of the same feel but the lack of comments makes me really sad.
Toasts, I’m back to report that I logged into my email just now and saw this:
Got the same thing yesterday. Alas, LJ, I think the times have changed too much.
I am so glad I waited until after I was done with all my actual adult responsibilities for the day before reading this because, hell. I was not in any way prepared for the amount of Feelings that would ensue. If anyone needs me I’ll be in the nostalgia corner for the rest of the evening. Apparently I’ll be in good company.
I feel like we need to have a friending frenzy for the folks who are still LJ-ing and keen to see other people on their lists. I’ve got a permanent account. I’m not going anywhere – even though I do crosspost from Dreamwidth these days.
I bet if you posted a friending meme lots of people would join in! 🙂
My LJ is 13 years old. I still post a few times a week. Is there a The Toast comm? It kind of seems like there should be!
Oh my gosh, I would be all here for a tqc/off_wut-like Toast OT comm.
Replying very late to agree that an LJ Toast comm would be awesome.
I miss livejournal. Almost all of my internet friends I made through LJ comms, but now we’ve mostly migrated to Twitter. Some of them I’ve known for 5-8 years, and we’ve been through multiple fandoms together. It’s wild. I haven’t found that same kind of environment on Tumblr. I enjoy Tumblr for other reasons, but the set up doesn’t really make for the same kind of interaction I loved from LJ. At least not in the way I’ve been using it, I suppose.
I really find the Toast comments similar to some of my favorite LJ communities. Although I’m an infrequent commenter, I read most Toast posts, and I love reading everyone’s thoughts/opinions and learning new things. The sense of community here kind of fills the LJ comm-shaped hole in my heart (though with less soccer memes).
Still on lj, not planning to go anywhere. Well, it’s continues to be a rather popular blogging platform here (in Russia). Even after being blocked once or twice. But some English-speaking people I like are also still on lj.
Sometimes I’m tempted to get a tumblr account, but only *in addition to* lj, not *instead of*. And then I think that to have conversations on Tumblr one has to either reblog everything several times or attach disqus to comments’ section (which is helpful, but not everyone uses or wants to use this function). And that’s not the only problem I have with Tumblr as a format.
(Tumblr-as-a-community doesn’t really seem all that different from lj-as-a-community. It’s just that a lot of Tumblr inhabitants are young, with all the consequences. Once upon a time there were young people on lj too.)
Oh wow, okay, this hits home! I am another one of those “still uses LJ” people, and I have since 2002 or so? The same journal, too (thanks rename token!) Before then, I had an Open Diary, but what really drew me to LJ were the security features. That’s something still missing in a lot of “long-form” social media these days – there’s no way to selectively post an entry to Tumblr, so to speak.
I still have a fairly active friends list, but just…my heart and my life are in the digital pages of my LJ, and should that ever disappear, I will too.
Oh my — what fun it was reading this. I’ve been on Live Journal since 2001 but I was an oddity back then because I was an “older user” in a sea of teens, tweens and college aged kids who were the bulk of lJ members at that time. I was 51 years old, which puts me at 65 years old now. At first I wrote only for myself and 2 others like myself. But, then I found the “fortysomething” community (and – yeah – I was technically too old for that, but the “fiftysomething” community was way too inactive!) I found a group of friends – most who are still friends with me today – and I was off and running.
I am still posting to Live Journal today, but it’s much quieter, except for a few die hards like me who remain there. Facebook and Twitter took many away, and so many left their journals abandoned. I miss the action – but I also realize that I post just as much for ME as I do for that sense of being in a journaling community. I, too, have joined the ranks of Facebook and Twitter, and use them both. Yet, for me, it’s more about using complete sentences and full paragraphs and having the feeling I can be more open and real than on other social media. I also realized — maybe a tad too late — that I wish I’d become a writer or a photographer, and I’m at my happiest when I combine the two. In short – “Live Journaling” is still an integral part of my life.
I’ve been posting on LJ since 2002. I still post, mainly out of habit, and have recorded my life in various ways since then.
Another ‘still uses LJ regularly’ person here, but my friendslist has gone from being something I couldn’t hope to catch up with unless I checked it several times a day to… a handful of posts a day, from a few other people who can’t seem to give it up. I met a lot of friends — and my wife — via LJ fandom. It’s hard to let go (though when I occasionally see what the site looks like to people without paid/permanent accounts, I can’t blame people for fleeing).
I get a lot of the same sort of fandom interactions via tumblr these days, but… it is so much harder to have conversations. Threaded comments. Notifications on replies. Locked posts and the ability to set up different filters for different types of posts. Ahhh. LJ did so much right, at one point, and then messed it all up so very fast.
(I have a DW account, and crosspost to it in batches as an LJ backup, but my flist there never hit the critical mass I’d need to make the jump permanent, for some reason.)
I, too, cross post to Dreamwidth, but lacking a f/l there is the reason I never completely moved over to Dreamwidth. My LJ friends (or those who are left) were not about to jump ship – and I didn’t have the energy to create a new f/l over there – so my cross posting there is just as “insurance” so I won’t lose all my entries. In many ways I like DW better as it’s more true to the roots of LJ. I’m also glad I have a permanent account (circa 2005) and don’t have the horrid ads I hear about from the free users.
This (still) free user runs AdBlock, sees nothing. 🙂
I post to DW maybe once or twice a week, when I have something worth writing about, with auto-crossposts to LJ… but all of my friends (those who still read, anyway) are on the latter. Back in ’02, when I started, that was a mix of local or formerly local friends and online ones; now, only the latter remain. I do miss reading others’ journals (as frequently as I used to), but my own was always fairly personal, so that part hasn’t changed – I’m fine with few comments or none at all. My involvement with fandom(s) has always been rather peripheral, and I left the one big community that I was involved in years ago for personal reasons.
Like others commenting here, I’ve never gotten into Tumblr, Twitter, et al – too ephemeral and/or one-way for my taste, like an ever-flowing stream. As noted above, I’d be fine casting my own leaves upon the waters, but I’d also want to hold discussions with others, and that’s a lot harder under the comment model of those other sites. Some of my difficulty may be due to my age (like climbingbean below, I was in my 30s, now 40s) and a generally hobbitish, change-averse temperament.
I check mine about once a week, and I post in it when really important things are happening, rather than a daily/weekly basis. Most of my friends that are close still post too.
I still write on my LJ! However I only started in 2008 when i was 12. It has allllll my teenage life on it. I still kind of need it and I’m 20.
I was not even remotely prepared for these feelings today. I was an LJ “beta tester.” If my journal were a person, she’d have a learner’s permit by now. That is so… weird.
This made me tear up. It describes, very vividly and poignantly, such a huge part of my life. I still have my LJ, and I still post in it from time to time, but it’s not the same. I met some of my closest friends on LJ–I’ve been friends with some of them since 2001, when I first got my LJ, at age 19. I absolutely cherish the memories I have with those people, the laughter, the late nights, the friendships I’ve made. So, so dear to me. Thank you for this article.
That is such a sweet story ♥
I came to LJ when I was about 30, I think, so I didn’t have the embarrassing teenage entries on there (I have books full of those in a case under my bed, and am considering at some point burning them, lest my children ever find them. Ugh.) But I started it when my oldest child was about 8 months old and LJ went through the next three pregnancies and births with me, my father getting sick (and better), my mum’s operations, my own post-natal depression… LJ offered something more intimate that the forums I visited in those days, too, and one of the communities in particular has been instrumental in providing opportunities for me for friendship and employment. I don’t think I would ever have had the confidence to even attempt to get published, had it not been for LJ, and three of my published pieces are via connections I got there — my current editing job is through an LJ friend.
LJ still offers great friendship to me. I did go through and make all the entries friends only a while back, and I feel like I’m among my people there. I’m not as active there as I was but I still post once or twice a week. I love it and I doubt I’ll ever leave.
I came to LJ when I was about 30, I think, so I didn't have the embarrassing teenage entries on there (I have books full of those in a case under my bed, and am considering at some point burning them, lest my children ever find them. Ugh.) But I started it when my oldest child was about 8 months old and LJ went through the next three pregnancies and births with me, my father getting sick (and better), my mum's operations, my own post-natal depression… LJ offered something more intimate that the forums I visited in those days, too, and one of the communities in particular has been instrumental in providing opportunities for me for friendship and employment. I don't think I would ever have had the confidence to even attempt to get published, had it not been for LJ, and three of my published pieces are via connections I got there — my current editing job is through an LJ friend.
LJ still offers great friendship to me. I did go through and make all the entries friends only a while back, and I feel like I'm among my people there. I'm not as active there as I was but I still post once or twice a week. I love it and I doubt I'll ever leave.
I HEAR YOU AMANITA and I'm with you! What's your username?
My heart, my heart! Just about ready to weep, but you know it’s time to sleep, and these days it’s easier to find that moment when I grant myself permission to leave the day and night be(side)hind me.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Ugh.
You can all come back to LJ. Some of us are still here…..
i got my LJ as an adult, one of those “non traditional” college students who went back to college in her mid 20s after getting burned in the dotcom boom/bust (i never made any money, not even paper money, though). so i have a slightly different nostalgia than what’s here… but it’s a nostalgia all the same. i miss that personal connection. i miss really KNOWING the people on my friends lists… and i miss the privacy filters that LJ made so easy. i find myself wanting other sites to just copy how easy LJ made it to sort friends into filters, reading who you wanted and didn’t want to read on a regular basis, and know you’d see EVERYTHING they posted. Or, at least everything they wanted you to see. It was much, much closer to how we manage our friends out here in The Real World.
Now though… now i have more cynical eyes for it. I wrote my Master’s thesis about LJ, and how the company did/not communicate with its community over its lifetime. There’s a lot more eye rolling now, with some sadness tinged in there too for what was, what could have been, and what it is now.
But now i just have a lovely rose-coloured nostalgia. Thank you. I needed it.
I was a very active LJ user from 2003 to 2011. Every now and again I go back and pick random dates from the calendar to see what I was up to every year. LiveJournal gave me so much at a time when I my life was something of a nightmare. It helped me through quitting school, deep depression, and a suicide attempt. It gave me new interests, new things to love, and some of the best friends I will ever have. I still miss the sense of community LJ provided for me.
This is so real. I identify with every word of this.
Forever grateful for LJ and you, Linds. Livejournal girls for life. Xoxo
This plucked at the hardest-to-reach and dustiest strings of my heart. I revisted my first ever livejournal, the bastion of my middle school despair and devastation, and reread it with a very incredulous eye (“your friend borrowing your Stephen Colbert book was not nearly this dramatic, Abby.”) that was very quickly opened when I realized I didn’t remember the last time I had ever spoken to anyone with such openness; I also couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so loved and supported. The last time I used LJ was probably five years ago. Now, at twenty-three, I struggle to write in a diary for fear of sounding vain and have a difficult time focusing on myself during biweekly therapy sessions. When I looked over past journal entries, I was astounded by how deeply I reflected on my life, willing to share the most shameful and embarrassing things–suicidal ideation, my sense of loss after my grandmother died, how growing up with an emotionally abusive mom impacted my life–with some complete and utter confidence that I’m now envious of my past self for having. Livejournal was a beacon of hope for me. I knew people understood. I knew people cared, as I cared for them. It wasn’t a guessing game; it didn’t devolve to vague “likes,” but actual heartfelt notes of support and affection and general acceptance. Livejournal may have been just a silly blogging site for teenage girl, but it was also an incredibly important tool for those girls to navigate their lives and find some solace with, especially during rocky times (when my high school crush admitted he was interested in someone else, for example). I think that makes it as important as any real-life method of self-discovery.
Anyway, thank you for this. Thank you for reminding me of something I feel like we were all so lucky to have a piece of. Thank you for articulating the sense of loss I felt while poring over LJ entries from seventh grade as an (arguable) adult, and for letting others share their experiences with it, too. This article made my week.
(Also, I apologize if this comment doesn’t make as much sense as I’d like it to–in true LJ fashion, I’m posting it recklessly after finding your article and binge-reading it way, WAY past a reasonable hour.)
I wrote my master’s thesis on autobiographical acts on the internet and did a lot of research into what made things like blogs different from and yet similar to diaries and autobiographies. Although I’m not working in digital humanities anymore, the subject still fascinates me. Thanks for writing this post!
Read the article first and then took note of the author…you really caught the feel of Live Journal…funny, I actually started on PLATO and then Usenet before Live Journal and I miss the world in the crystal that became teh interwebz… Now the kid, who is 14, does Tumbler and writes hundreds of words of fanfic weekly. Of course, back in the day your mom and my sister were stuck using the telephone.
I’ve met some really awesome people on Livejournal so I share your sentiments.Lovely article!
SO.MANY.FEELINGS.
I logged in sometime in the last week or two as well, because a community I created there ages ago is apparently still active and I got an email notification about an old post there.
My boyfriend of nearly 12 years and I met on LJ back in the day. The New Orleans community on LJ is how I first met many long-time real-life friends.
“LiveJournal friends are still so ubiquitous in my life that I often forget how we met.”
This is legit.
God, I started with Openjournal in 2002 and then quickly switched over to LJ, had a brief dalliance with xanga and deadjournal. But LJ was where I made and kept friends. In fact, when we went to college in 2004 a handful of my friends from hs all made sure we had them so we could keep each other updated about our lives. It mostly worked, but then we were swept into facebook.
But the days when LJ was good, I made new friends, some who I’ve now met and are kinda family. I’ve been able to do the same sort of thing on tumblr, but without threaded replies and the privacy settings it’s just not the same.
I haven’t logged in in years. I think about it every so often, mostly when I think about deleting it. I downloaded the entire thing using LJ book, so at least I’ve got a PDF of the years I was active
So much love for old LJ and it’s really lovely to see how many others have made it -here- who had similar experiences with it.
God, I started with Openjournal in 2002 and then quickly switched over to LJ, had a brief dalliance with xanga and deadjournal. But LJ was where I made and kept friends. In fact, when we went to college in 2004 a handful of my friends from hs all made sure we had them so we could keep each other updated about our lives. It mostly worked, but then we were swept into facebook.
But the days when LJ was good, I made new friends, some who I've now met and are kinda family. I've been able to do the same sort of thing on tumblr, but without threaded replies and the privacy settings it's just not the same.
I haven't logged in in years. I think about it every so often, mostly when I think about deleting it. I downloaded the entire thing using LJ book, so at least I've got a PDF of the years I was active
So much love for old LJ and it's really lovely to see how many others have made it -here- who had similar experiences with it.
How I dealt with the records of years of my life I can’t bear to look at anymore: I locked them down as private-only, en masse. It helped to know that no one else can see them now. But I have a pretty strong aversion to deleting anything (even to others deleting things — I see people I don’t even know here talking about how they purged their journals, and it makes me SO SAD, I can’t look at the comments for long).
I have the same nostalgia. I went back to LJ after a 5 five hiatus and it’s been like coming home. It’s sort of a sad homecoming, there are fewer people, less of the social hum there used to me…but there are still good, interesting people on LiveJournal and I’ve been so happy to be back.
I think that we may see somewhat of a resurgence in LJ. Tumblr and Twitter do not a deep connection make. There is something about spending two hours reading your F-List that creates a feeling like non other.
I am late to this, but you can hack it a little to get older entries. If you go to /friends/yyyy/mm/dd (like /friends/2015/05/21) you can get the entries for that day. This may only work on some styles, but it works for me.
Thank you for this posting. Love the quote from Rilk: “If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches.” It’s that very reason that I went back to LJ recently and started posting again. It’s definitely quiet – like shouting into an empty cave. But that cathartic feeling is so important when life stresses get harder and more complex – not just for teenage angst, but for midlife crisis, too. After all, it’s either that or I fork out the money for a Porsche. 🙂
Lindsey Markel. I’m thrilled to have found you and thrilled that you still write. Fifteen years ago during long spells of depression, I would spend hours reading strangers’ LiveJournals, and yours was my favorite. Rarely have I EVER read a writer so lyrical, passionate, and inspiring. Rock on!
Come back! Some of us are still there – and more are returning by the day.
I read LiveJournal once or twice a day, every day, but I rarely post. Facebook is immediate, so I write down random thoughts and share posts there. From telling alt.callahans everything on my mind in my 20s, and my LJ list everything in my 30s, I’ve gone to just sharing interesting political things and disability rights rants on Facebook. But I read and comment to everyone. A lot of my fannish friends went to Dreamwidth, so I usually post there and mirror it to LJ.
LJ (and its clone, DreamWidth, which I use as mirror sites of each other for backup purposes) is still my blogging platform of choice. I use Facebook, but not for anything important or personal because I don’t trust them on privacy issues. Tumblr is ferociously non-intuitive (I have an account, but I’ve never figured out how to DO anything with it!), and Twitter is for ephemera. My LJ account has over 2,700 posts on it, and the last one was made last week. LJ is where I put anything I want to be able to FIND again, because it has full access to the archives and a tag function. It also has a meaningful Lock function, so I can post about things I don’t want J. Random Stranger to be able to see; AFAICT, no other major blogging platform provides this utility.
I was a very late adopter; I didn’t set up my LJ until 2004, at which time I was over 40 years old, and a lot of my initial friends there were people from my first major online community, alt.callahans. Yes, I was on Usenet, and one of the major selling points of LJ for me was the ability to block trolls and scammers, which were destroying the places on Usenet where I hung out. Over the years, I’ve added friends from my other online communities as well. Many of them are people I’ve never met FTF, but they are no less “real” friends for that.
Why do I keep using LJ, when it’s not the Hot New Thing any more? Well… because having the Hot New Thing isn’t as important to me as something being actually useful, and LJ continues to be useful. I blog about my life, I write essays about politics and social issues, I do occasional memes, as one does. I’ve never tried to monetize it the way a lot of modern bloggers seem to do; it’s for my personal enjoyment and that of my friends.
But also, it’s my primary business and travel reference. My partner and I are traveling vendors, and I track our experiences at various shows on LJ — including information about how much money we took in, which is why the Lock function is critical for me. When we’re going back to a show, I can check previous posts and see what I noted as important along the travel route (good/bad hotels, places to eat, cheap gas), and that’s invaluable.
Bluntly, I don’t care how un-trendy LJ has become. It works for me, and I will continue to use it unless and until it dies. And if/when it dies, I’ll be able to switch seamlessly to DreamWidth and continue on.
This is SO BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN! I literally started tearing while reading. It’s absolutely perfect.
Come back to livejournal!! (And let’s be friends!) There are still lots of us there, we’re just an even smaller, tighter group than we used to be.
I started on LJ after college, because many of my MUX friend were using it, and some of my SCA friends, then I searched for other SCAdians, and a few of those that I timidly followed have become friends. I was snarlingbadger, and created a few alternatives, but logging in/out to go between accounts annoyed me, so those alts didn’t get used much.
I miss being able to choose an appropriate user icon based on a whim, and the mood icons. I miss setting a theme for my corner of LJ, and my tags were a mess, because I used them inconsistently, but I looked being able to summarize the content in a few pithy words.
The various layers of me, posting to different groups or even public based on how vulnerable it felt, I scratch that itch with Google+. I have different circles, and while the majority of my posts are either public or “my circles,” I do have a lot of conversations with one of a few very limited circles, or individuals. One of the things G+ has done right is that with each post, you can designate a custom audience: Public, Extended Circles (visible to people in your circles and the people in their circles), My Circles (everyone that you have circled, unless you’ve set a custom circle as follow only), one or more of your custom circles, and/or whatever individuals you care to tag.
You can put people in more than one circle, so if they want to be inclined of your job stuff and your hobby stuff, put then in both circles. There are Communities, where you can gather and discuss whatever topic is of interest, and most recently, Collections, where you can post items gathered by topic (kind of like a Pinterest board) – people can follow one of more of your Collections, and if it’s Public, people can follow just that collection and not you in general, if they choose.
I read this essay when it came out last year, and I read it again when it popped up on my Facebook feed. Livejournal really did matter. My thanks to the author for getting this across.
This made me smile. I love livejournal and used to follow people in the days where it was still payed-only and I could not get an account. I travelled to UK and met with LJ friends about 12 years ago and now I live there! I really miss the LJ community, and I think I will make an effort to return.
Tumblr is great, but as a friend once described it (somewhere on-line): it is fanish TV, one sided, little interaction.
Thank you for remembering and making me remember.