Everyone needs to read this.
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.
