Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
rosatherad@kbin.social to 
Technology@kbin.social – 119 points – 
catvalente.substack.com
Everyone needs to read this.
You are viewing a single comment
Great article. Damn, I miss the glory days of Livejournal
It really was so valuable in its heyday.
When the Russia thing happened circa 2016, I copied mine to Dreamwidth and while it’s been great it’s also pretty lonely. Basically no one in my circle updates anymore; maybe two or three friends read my stuff.
But I’m never going to stop. My whole adult life is recorded on Dreamwidth; I started my LJ the month I graduated from high school, and 22 years later I’m still blathering, just on DW now with no one to interact with. (The loneliness is mostly a result of me making a decision ~15 years ago to limit my LJ friends list to people I actually knew offline, so at this point the number of people-I-know-offline who have any interest in regularly updating DW can be rounded down to zero.) (But it still bums me out and I dream of a Dreamwidth Renaissance.)
I stopped using LJ long before that, so I didn't know anything about the Russian stuff until fairly recently. A RL friend told me about Dreamwidth and I immediately moved all my stuff over to there... though it's private and I have no friends.
So many of my years are recorded in that journal.. I would be absolutely destroyed if I lost all of it. I met my husband through LJ. I wrote about losing my mom on LJ. My entries are so so special to me. Even the cringey teenage angst! I go through them every once in a while just to remember how far I've come and how much I've changed from the person who wrote those entries.
There's also tools you can use to make local downloads of your LJ posts. I did that with all of mine, so I have them stored away as a series of per-month html files of all my posts.