I have fond memories of it. I first heard about it in high school through a friend of mine. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to obtain one of their coveted invites– an email and code that a current user had to send you. Until they opened registration for everyone, I made do with other platforms like BlogDrive.

Livejournal won me over with all the features they had tha BD lacked, like communities and privacy options for each of your entries. And I could finally read the entries my HS bestie was posting behind the "Friend Locked" posts– "Flocked," for short. There was still a social aspect, but I chose LiveJournal over MySpace. I liked poetry and writing and I felt it was a better fit.

A few of my friends migrated with me from BlogDrive, but I made new friends there as well. I have really fond memories of the communities I was a part of. Especially the fanfiction and other fandom communities. Some of my longest Internet friends I have met through mutual interests or Friending Meme sprees. I’ve bonded with offline friends as well, who signed up or already had accounts, and our relationships grew closer because of it. We grew older together, read about each other’s lives and milestones. A few people on my Ride-or-Die list came from LJ and we are still thick as thieves!

I had my favorites, and I mostly hung around anything with video game news, yuri, random yousendit links (I discovered a lot of cool music this way), snark, and DRAMA comms. And we lived through some LiveJournal DRAMA. As usual, you have the occasional spat between two more more users, which would be documented in a community for its members to poke fun and laugh at. And then there was the communities created to make fun of the members of said community ("meta"). And then were were communities dedicated to just sniping at each other. And then there were the communities that would document "dumb stuff," whatever that was.

While the interpersonal clashes did happen, it was different from what we’re gonna get into next: LJ Capital-D DRAMA. This Drama impacted the entire website– and beyond.

Nipplegate was the first major upheaval under SixApart’s purview: somehow, people with breasts feeding their children was in violation of their rules in the year of our lord 2006. Nevermind tho, though– Strikethrough ’07 was where things really began heating up. Around 500 communities and journals were suspended with no warning– and no recourse. If you had interests listed in the bio that were sexually explicit– especially illegal sexual ones– your account was axed. Unfortunately, it was a baby-with-bathwater situation.

The goal here was to get journals with profiles that listed “child rape” or “pedophilia” as their interests to know they’re not welcome on LJ. Naturally, the list of sites submitted by groups like WFI likely included some friendly fire, including legitimate communities for abuse survivors, or, yes fandom. And we accidentally suspended some of those communities, but their data is not gone and will be restored once we get our shit together. Anil Dash, Meta Filter

For most of us in fandom, we did note that the disproportionate amount of suspended accounts were… gay. Very gay. Russia Would Totally Censor This gay. Suspicious, to say the least. And this happened again in the same year, this time under the moniker Boldthrough– as usernames were in bold instead of "struck out," like that would fool anyone.

Now, migrations or backups to other services was nothing new– whenever LJ servers went down, everyone panicked and made spare accounts or updated their archives. But after Boldthrough, it was different. Most of us saw the writing on the wall with its new Russian ownership, especially when it came to journalism and LGBTQ topics. Additionally, more people were fed up with having their transformative works disappear at the whim of moral guardians.

So we began to strike out (groan) for greener pastures.

Between LJ’s fuckups and FF.Net nuking NC-17 fic, the collective fandom-in-general had had enough. And that is how we got Archive of Our Own! It’s a more positive impact on the Internet compared to, say, Encyclopedia Dramatica (tldr edgelord wikipedia). There were also the software forks of the pre-Russian Livejournal code.

There was GreatestJournal— with it’s 1000 icon limit, a constant supply of pop culture snarkiness and role-playing hubs– until it quietly went offline.

Fandom Wank’s home of JournalFen held on for longer, but it grew dark in 2015.

Deadjournal and InsaneJournal are still alive and kicking.

And then you have Dreamwidth— founded in 2009 by former LJ employees with a commitment to their principles: Transparency, Freedom, Respect, and No Ads. To this day it is still highly recommended and thriving, especially compared to DJ and IJ. At least, it is much more widely known.

I’ve now owned a Dreamwidth account for the majority of my online presence. Even when I was mainly blogging on WordPress, I’d login to read other’s lives, works, and everything in between. Now, if I posted– that was another matter. But the older I become, the more I rely on journaling my life to remember the good and bad things (or just what I ate for dinner that one day last week). And I’ve become better at that habit.

But like most things on the Internet, old school Livejournal was something else. I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

To get a more in-depth reads about LiveJournal, check out Strikethrough, Boldthrough, Nipplegate, and Russian Censorship: The Livejournal Saga.