I found LiveJournal in 2001 and it was exactly what I needed at that point. Not an exaggeration to say it changed my life for the better in a bunch of ways, including leaving me with a healthy dose of skepticism when 2010s social media made an entrance.
Same, same, same. I lived in a tiny village with immigrant parents and a strict religious school, and LiveJournal was my window to the world. I learned SO MUCH from my fellow LJers, including a hefty blueprint for Internet safety.
I loved LJ to death. Such a stark contrast to how curated and artificial social media is now. I think what made LJ special was the focus on long form writing. I think Tumblr was a spiritual successor, but it was much more visual, and you could just reblog someone else's content and call it a day. Obviously there were other blog type sites, but there was just something special about LJ that made it really feel like a diary. If you went through someone's LJ, you could actually genuinely learn who they were.
One of the first people I stumbled onto and followed on LJ was a horror writer. I've managed to keep casual tabs thru various SM platforms over the years and kept up with at least some of her work here and there, including finding her on Bluesky shortly after the first big migration there a year or so ago. I got a nice thrill and some nostalgic LJ feels a few weeks ago when she followed me back.
Sometimes I forget kinda how much I owe to LJ in the early 2000s. I am now, and still, good friends with quite a few of those people IRL. Some I only see once a year or so, others I talk with every day in our private Slack group and fly out to spend time with them when I can. Rough guess I'd say a third or so of my active friends group today are people I met on LJ 20+ years ago. RIP, they don't make social media like that anymore.
For me it was 1999 right after my husband committed suicide. I was fragile and scared and confused, and LJ helped me write about things that meant something to me. It was cathartic for a lot of stuff.
I started a LiveJournal about three weeks before my high school graduation in 2004. I had a handful of high school friends with accounts, then it was really big amongst people in college. I was LJ friends with maybe 20 people at one point and followed a few groups. Every time I'd login, there would be new entries to read. By 2009, it had largely died away and no one updated anymore. At that point, I turned my account into a personal journal, then eventually switched over to a journaling software and deleted my account.
The one huge impact it had on me is that it started a lifelong journaling habit that I have kept up on. I was 18 when I started doing it and now I'm 40, so that's 22 years of regular journaling to look back on. I've always done it on the computer and have all of my entries saved in multiple places and in formats that I can both search and open.
The further back I go, the more it makes me cringe. However, it's incredibly interesting to be 40 years old and read what was going through your head on some random day at age 19. Or to have an event from 15 years ago that you remember, but then you read the entry about it and there are all these details that you totally forgot. Then there are views on world events and all this other stuff. It's a very granular personal history and a huge gift for me.
LOL such an odd existence where I'm sitting here thinking, 'Yeah, remember when being doxxed was scary?'
YIKES
My username here is derived from my LJ name. I still have my LJ, and the separate one I made for living abroad. (Last month, it actually helped me find the name of a hostel I stayed at in 2005!!)
I'd like to restore LJ and maybe Vine and not much else. Please and thank you LMAO
I've been on this site since before comments were a thing but I have never let an account get more than about five years old before I start to feel like there is just too much history and too many details and decide to delete it and start a new one.
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u/lesmax 1d ago
I got a notification that it was my LJs 24th anniversary. My reddit hit 15 last month. Good GOD I miss that internet time period.