alternatehistory.com

Today, after almost fifteen years of being active on LiveJournal, I finally shut down my account.

I blogged about my decision. Briefly, like most of the other people still active there, I was motivated to leave on account of a new and highly restrict terms of service agreement which placed strict limits on user identity and content. For a website with a non-Russian user base that seems concentrated among creative types and/or LGBTQ+ people, this is deadly. It's not necessarily likely to help LiveJournal out in the Russosphere, as people there shift to different, often more secure, methods of communication and social networking.

I think this a minor shame. I have many positive memories of the site, a prototype of modern social networking and blogging sites. Many of the relationships I forged through LiveJournal have lasted to the current day. I think that LiveJournal, with better promotion and management, could have avoided its steady decline into irrelevance. It may not have become Facebook--or could it?--but I can imagine LiveJournal, with its tight-knit communities and stable pseudonyms and customizability, might well have become another Blogger or WordPress if things had gone well.

What do you think? Could LiveJournal have managed to adapt better to the changing Internet? Or was this end, or something like this end, inevitable?
Top