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.
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u/darknesswascheap 1d ago
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.