First Think, THEN Ink.

Once upon a time, at the end of the previous century, there was a guy named Brad.



Brad

Brad lived in Oregon. He was headed off to college in Seattle and he wanted to stay in touch with his friends from High School. Sure, there was email and snail mail, but for a young programmer, that simply wouldn't do.

Brad's solution was to build an online journaling website so his friends could read all about his exploits and he, in turn, could read theirs. This program was called "LiveJournal."



Brad designed the program in a very specific way - the comments were "threaded," meaning that not only could someone respond to the person who posted a journal entry, but people could also read other remarks posted, then comment to other commenters and start a conversation with them.

Since everyone using Brad's program already knew each other, that was fine. But soon, this circle of friends wanted to include some of their friends in on this "journaling" thing. So the group started to slowly expand, as the people using it passed on the info about it to others.

Eventually, this became a lot more tricky as friends of friends of friends wanted to take part. Brad's solution this time was to create "invite codes," a special key to unlock LJ that were given to users already on the site that could be sent to other people to allow them to join.

This accidentally became a genius element for two reasons. The first was that everyone joining the site was being vouched for by someone who was already a part of it. Essentially that meant that all the users were approved by at least one person who was already in the group. And the second reason was that it turned the site itself into an exclusive club that you could only join, if you qualified. That made getting a "membership" that much more enticing.

Soon after, there was an explosion as people of all sorts learned about LJ and wanted to get in on the trend. The invite codes were eventually dropped and anyone could sign up make an account. Communities formed - quite literally - A "community" was a group of people who had an interest in a specific topic: from aardvarks to zebras, from ABBA to ZZ Top, from Albania to Zimbabwe... You could think of a topic you enjoyed, make an LJ about it and people would join to discuss it. friendships were forged, as people read all about the lives of each other. And people eventually met each other "in real life." Just remember to put your photos under a "cut tag" because dial up would slow your computer down to a crawl if you didn't!

There even was a new word coined for the phenomenon - "blogging," an abbreviated portmanteau for "web log." In just four years, LiveJournal went from one guy's concept of keeping his friendships going to a million accounts!

And there were the knockoffs.

Because Brad was more interested in people being able to communicate with each other, rather than profiteering, the code he wrote to create LJ was open source, meaning that anyone could come along, take that code and create their own blog site, too. And people did. And then there were other services that intended to cater to niche groups. One of the most notable of those was a site called "myspace."



About the same time as the Millionth LiveJournal Account was created, myspace began.

myspace was a direct result of one of those LJ knockoff sites: "Friendster," or rather, myspace itself was a knockoff of Friendster. And the ambitions were high. Where LiveJournal covered mostly North American territory and a bit of Europe, myspace was planned to be available, globally, and it exploded, globally.

The advantage myspace had over LiveJournal was a major corporation behind them with a whole lot of money. NewsCorp, one of Rupert Murdoch's properties, purchased myspace and were using every trick in the book to get more and more people to sign up. In the same length of time it took LJ to acquire a million different accounts, myspace got one-hundred million.

The problem was myspace was awkwardly designed, had an unattractive color palette, had a difficult to negotiate interface, added a very unpleasant web log that made just writing an entry a challenge and everyone got a friend named "Tom" as soon as they signed up.



Tom

But myspace had something LJ didn't seem to have: celebrities.

Stars from the world of music, film, television, comedy were all creating accounts on myspace. And these celebrities were "interacting" with "regular people." There was a lot of self-promotion as these luminaries would talk about their projects, post photos, list off tour dates and even write blog posts on that clunky blog. People would post the accounts they liked best in their "Top 8," a list of myspace users that could be seen by anyone who visited your myspace.

And as myspace began to take off, Facebook opened to the general public.



TheFacebook, as it was originally known, sprung from what some might consider a sordid place. "Hot or Not dot com" was a site that let you look at photographs of people and asked you to select a score for each person from 10, being Hot down to 1, being not. It was, essentially, a "ranking" website and it's simplicity helped make its popularity.



A typical "Hot or Not" Page

That site inspired Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg to create "Facemash," where he placed two photos next to each other and asked the user to select the one they thought was "hotter."



Zuckerberg - did he post his photo on Facemash?

This evolved into an online version of something that already existed. A "facebook," as it is often referred to by collegians, is a guide to students of a university class year, showing a submitted photo, a name, hometown and perhaps name of high school for each enrollee. It was a way of getting to know your fellow undergrads.

Zuckerberg wanted to create a version of that for the web, but when Harvard dragged their feet, he just went ahead and did it, himself. The resulting website became an instant hit. After it went viral at Harvard, the other seven Ivy League Schools joined, then other elite schools such as MIT and Stanford were included, eventually leading to all Colleges being added and elite high schools were also permitted to join.

Again, like LiveJournal's "invite codes," the requirement of being part of the scholastic community gave the site a certain cachet that made people want to join. And, like LJ, Facebook eventually opened to anyone who wanted to create an account, over the age of thirteen.

Last, but certainly not least was the arrival of Twitter.




As the blogging craze peaked, there had to be a backlash. Not everyone was a writer but they still wanted the jolt of having people hear what they had to say. Enter twitter. With a strict limit of 140 characters per entry, you had to be brief. Essentially twitter was the blog for people who hated blogging.

And a celebrity couple helped to catapult the site, nearly immediately. Ashton Kutcher was at the height of his pop culture power, starring in the popular Fox sitcom, "That '70s Show" and was creator and host of MTV's celebrity prank show "Punk'd." His then wife, actress Demi Moore, (AplusK and MrsKutcher as they called themselves on the site), joined twitter and got a lot of their celebrity friends to open accounts there, too.

Where myspace had the potential for celebrity interaction, Twitter promised direct contact with the stars. Of course, millions scrambled to join, and Kutcher was the first person to reach a million followers, something that seemed incredibly impressive at the time.

But let's get back to the old El Jay. Right before Twitter was about to begin and as these other sites where people began interacting with each other were growing, Brad was approached by a group that wanted to purchase LiveJournal.

SixApart, a company that already had a kind of web log service on its roster (Moveable Type), purchased Danga Interactive (the company that owned LiveJournal) from Brad at the start of 2005. But as soon as the purchase was announced, there was a severe sense of foreboding from the userbase.

Brad had previously made a promise to the users: no ads anywhere, ever on LiveJournal. Most other sites had text ads or photo ads as a part of their presentation. LJ was never designed for that. It, like the internet itself, was created to be a communications outlet first, not an advertising one. So, when 6A came in, the users knew that ads were going to arrive with them. After all, no one buys a social media site to NOT make money.

SixApart's purchase of LJ, and their attempts to monetize the platform were hampered by a series of missteps that caused many users to recoil. One of 6A's early actions dealt directly with censorship - the ability to use icons to show what you want as you post an entry or comment.

Attempting to dictate what was permissible for the already established userbase may have been fine to make the platform safe for advertisers, but it did not sit well at all with the people active on LiveJournal. This happened several times, created a lot of strife and caused many users to want to preserve their journals before leaving the platform for some other, less controlling service.

6A frequently issued changes in policy without consulting the users first. Though it was clear they were harming the very people who were what they purchased the website for, they pressed ahead. They even created a brand new blogging service that they called "VOX" to siphon users off of LJ. In that way they could ignore the "no ads on LiveJournal" rule that Brad had promised, because anyone joining VOX would no longer be on LJ.

The people at 6A made so many blunders that they eventually created an anonymous account which they called "theljstaff," their way of attempting to correct things without attaching a particular person to it. Let's call that what it was: an attempt to hide from the users, never a good sign. They even held an election to create a user/staff liaison from candidates who used the site, and that went as well as everything else they attempted.

But there was something else going on with LiveJournal that most people in the West weren't aware of.

Russia was starting to change under their leader, Vladimir Putin. Putin was the Russian leader from 2000 to 2008, and a number of Russian citizens were not fond of his rule. Though the country was claimed to be a "democracy," it seemed quite clear that this was a front and that Putin was controlling elections, eliminating contenders, preventing any opposition and blocking any criticism of his government.

In Russia, LiveJournal was, in fact, the place where Russian celebrities, political figures and other luminaries had accounts. Known as Zhivoy Zhurnal, or ZheZhe for short, It was, essentially what Twitter was in the United States: the place where everyone wanted to be.

It was also the platform where those that opposed Russian rule communicated with each other.

After completely botching just about everything to do with LiveJournal, 6A finally decided to offload it to the only interested buyer that would match their price: A company in Russia called SUP.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realize that *someone* in Russia was trying to find and weed out the dissidents that were coming for Putin and his government, and soon after this Russian company took control of the site, the organization built on that platform to go against Putin had severely diminished and essentially ended.

And now we flash ahead to 2022, when another takeover of another social media site happened. Elon Musk, long time head of Tesla, the man behind SpaceX and the efforts to get humans to Mars suddenly, and almost defiantly said he would purchase twitter for the tidy sum of 44 Billion dollars. People were curious as to why Musk seemed intent on purchasing this platform, as he had no experience in social media, except for using it, like anyone else on the site.

After some haggling and jockeying, the purchase finally went through and Musk took ownership of twitter in October 2022: a new toy. He had revealed his intentions to revamp the entirety of twitter, for his own gratification.



Musk

Musk has stated that he feels that "free speech" has been harmed and claimed to want to rectify this. One of the hinted actions included reinstating accounts of twitter users that were banned; the most prominent of these being former President of the United States trump.

Though that hasn't happened, so far, a whole lot of wild actions have taken place, none of which has improved the usage for those people with accounts nor has it helped his stated goals. Just what is going on here?

When examining SixApart's purchase of LiveJournal and relating it to Musk's acquisition of twitter. The community is what they were buying. It's the community that makes any social media platform. Without the people, all you have is the hardware and software. Brad never would have created that original site if there were no people to write to - and that site never would have grown into something a company wanted to purchase if an enormous mass of people didn't find it worthwhile.

But how do you "control" the community once you own the site?

At the very least, Musk has been trying to cease all criticism of himself by anyone on twitter. Accounts have been banned or shadowbanned or simply quashed.

But, when you reveal your weakness to any trolls on the internet, they exploit it, so more and more parody accounts, more jokes, more insults and more slams started coming as soon as it was clear this was what Musk didn't want. And that led to more action against the offenders.

Away from the online parodies and reactions that were starting to explode, something to remember about twitter is that, similarly to the Russian part of LiveJournal, people were using that platform in a very serious way: to communicate and to organize.

Over the years, time and again, in Moldova, in Iran, in Tunisia, and even in Ukraine, after LJ was all but dismantled in the Cyrillic world, twitter became to go-to place to keep track of what was happening, of police state circumstances, of human rights violations. And it was the place to record video clips and photographs of offenses for anyone who had an account to view.

So the question must be asked:

Does Elon Musk realize that his personal antics on this site could potentially cause harm to populations who rely on the site to stay in touch, or, perhaps, was that his intention? Is he trying to, as the Russians essentially did with their version of LiveJournal, dismantle the platform to prevent any more action from the rank and file against the upper echelon?

But is Musk actively and knowingly attempting to help particular rulers who see revolution in their futures and want a helping hand to stop it? Who can know?

It's been a long strange trip from a high school coder in the Pacific Northwest to the richest man on the planet. And this ride isn't over. It's just a matter of where we are collectively going next.

The one important lesson we need to learn is, we must keep control of our communities, not have them taken over by those who don't care about them, or us. It's through communication that we have our greatest strength, and that's what those in power fear most.

Let's keep the conversation going.

UPDATE: Musk reinstated trump's twitter account as of November 19, 2022 based on a popularity poll he conducted.

In 2017, I talked about how nobody is actually using Dreamwidth for their blogs, HERE, one of my entries in that year's LJ Idol, back when I tried to get people to leave the Russian owned LiveJournal for more American pastures.

Of course, everyone was completely resistant to the concept. It is hard getting folks to change their habits, especially when the audience I was playing to mostly consisted of people participating in a competition that celebrated the platform on which we were located! Not to mention I had an LJ permanent account, or, in the Яussian method of description: "Account with Permanent package of service" (which I can't help but hear in my head in a broken English style stereotypical Muscovite accent). Here, I'm just a second class nobody, with more than half of my icons and tags unavailable to me because I'm not a paid subscriber.

I'm not going to bother to make the case to leave the old El Jay again, even here at my new blog home, but I do have some observations on being a Daily DW user, with a mostly LJ reading page.

If the people you read on DW are actually writing from LJ, there are two big problems that occur.

The first is that LJ writers mirroring their journal on DW won't see any comment you make on their post until they come to DW directly and either see it in their "inbox" or find it on their entry.

To that, I say DW needs to institute email alerts, as LJ has had from the start, so folks can know when someone has responded to their entries as it happens. That's a major reason why it's more like a ghost town over here.

Conversely, LJ writers already have a community that is writing and responding to them, there. So, tramping over to DW to see the five, two, one(?!) other people, or person you may want to read is, in fact, a chore.

And it's a somewhat thankless chore. Because what if you check in every day? And days go by and there's nothing? The negative reinforcement will likely drop that down to once or twice a week, once a month or eventually, to whenever you think of it, which could be, never.

But today, I noticed on my DW reading page, a bunch of new entries... Well, new to me, but they were dated with dates from last week.

That means that either the interface from LJ to DW is slow to load - the entries that are being forwarded from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth aren't getting there fast enough. OR, more likely, it's that entries that are mirrored have a slower time populating on your reading list and instead of posting there as they come through, they show up in your feed... When they do.

That's a problem because I may miss days of posts, then get flooded by entries I simply didn't see until long after they were written.

And that contributes to the downward spiral. I check my reading page, comment where appropriate, receive no comments on my entries because no one is here reading them, check my reading page and find nothing new, but then, a day or two later, I see a bunch of entries all at once and feel compelled to answer them all, even though it might be days before anyone knows I did.

So DW needs to fix the reading page feed to make sure these mirrored entries get listed in a timely manner. At least that would help the feeling of isolation here.

The biggest positive of disabling my Facebook, which I did this morning, is simply getting the time back that was spent on it. And that's time that I can use back here, both for posting and reading. I had disabled FB back in 2012, returned last October, and nearly lasted a year, and I would call it a "bad" year, before pulling the plug again.

It also frees up time that I need to use for writing. I have two projects I'm working on that I hope will be worth time from other folks eventually. One of those is the novel, which I already know needs a rewrite, at least the middle section which is going to go much faster than I currently have it moving. I've got a handle on it and I really almost want to go back and fix those sections now, rather than going to the end of the work and then doing a proper rewrite. But I'm resisting that urge because of the very word "rewrite." You can't rewrite until the writing has concluded. That's my approach.

I am considering a sequel novel already, but that might not be viable or useful because an idea that I thought would make an intriguing television series is, according to a contact in the industry, isn't very salable. So, that might become the next novel. And I think I'm going to want to have a change of pace from the material that I'm working with in this piece. Still haven't ruled it out for a future story tho.

And of course there's the relief of not having LJ Idol to deal with on a weekly basis, now that it has concluded. In case you hadn't heard, the winner was marlawentmad. I finished a very respectable second.

Idol really took a lot more time than you might imagine, as there was the issue of deciding what to write, coming up with a story, then crafting it into the piece I submitted. The great thing is that LJ Idol definitely helps with my process for preparing and executing a story, so that is invaluable, especially where I'm at right now.

Currently, there's no clear answer to if there will be another full season of Idol. Gary, the guy that runs the show, has already stated there will be a mini-season coming soon. But there are a lot of questions, not the least of which is where will it happen? LiveJournal is on the bubble since we are a Russian entity. And nobody, so far, is treating Dreamwidth like it's a reasonable replacement. It is still the attic for your old LJ entries and that's about it.

But that's not for me to figure out. I'm just back here, and, at least for the time being, glad to be back.

“Why?”

This is, bar none, the most difficult question of all. “Who?,” “what?,” “where?” and “when?” Those are all pretty straightforward: that person, doing something, in this location, at an acknowledged, particular moment. Even “how?” isn’t quite as problematic. That’s just the mechanics of it.

No, WHY is the ultimate challenge. Why this and not that? Why not the other? Why is everything the way it is? Why can’t we change it into what we want?

There’s nothing at all simple about “why.” That’s because “why” is the bones of it. It’s the skeleton on which everything is hung. It’s the basic acknowledgement that we all must face, sooner or later. It is The Reason.

It’s difficult to face The Reason, isn’t it? Especially difficult when it’s a difficult circumstance, a difficult choice to make. And let’s be clear: a lot of the choices made are not always reasoned. Sometimes they happen simply because someone did NOT make a choice. Or because someone made a wrong choice.

But even when everything goes as we would want, we still have to examine the “Why.” Why did we get our way when someone else did not? Why are we able to do the things we do and someone else can’t?

I hope you’re realizing just how important, how massive, how colossal “Why” can be and that we should never take for granted the answer to that teenie-tiny query.

That brings us to this, the final episode of this season of LJ Idol. There are three writers that remain: marlawentmad, messygorgeous and me. And it’s time to view each of us through that kaleidoscopic prism known simply as “Why?”

I would say, just on the surface, each one of the three of us presented extremely different offerings to get here. Whether that makes this choice easier or more difficult is, again, a question that is a mix of daunting and delight, depending.

marlawentmad made an impression on me in her Week 0 Introduction, as she wrote an entry about writing, and that’s something we all were here to participate in, either through crafting or reading and ultimately both. And she certainly followed up with a host of unspeakably beautiful/horrific fairy tales, poems with words that were collected like wildflowers, hand-woven into charming bouquets – she may have written more poems than any other Idoler this season (except sestinaqueen) – and scathing commentary suitable for any Op-Ed page in any newspaper that’s still in business.

And when it came to it, that’s what you could count on from her: something unexpected, something meaningful, something always well-crafted and worth reading, every time. They say the devil is in the details, but when it came to her entries, that’s where the heaven always could be found. When it came to any of the pieces she wrote this season, attentive readers were always rewarded with extra texture, precious little intricacies that flavored her pieces with a distinct and perfect palate – a master chef creating a culinary delight with her particular brand of spice that could feed the mind but nurture the soul.


messygorgeous consistently held to the tenets and the traditions of LJ Idol and to what LiveJournal has been, and may still be, all about. She frequently wrote tales from her personal life, about her family and their experiences, about herself and her particular circumstances, and had done that with a tremendous amount of style, heart, warmth, and truth. If you are an LJ Idol purist, on this point alone, she has a distinct advantage. She writes to El Jay, in the manner that made this platform famous, probably better and definitely more consistently than anyone else in the competition has done this season and for that, she deserves great praise. In a sense, she completely captured the concept of LJ Idol!

Not that she can’t do other styles of writing, because she certainly did. But there’s something presentational and inspiring about living a life that is worth telling stories about. It provided great fodder for wonderful, rich and detailed entries whether she’s talking about the real Georgia or the one that she slightly tweaks for the tale, whether she’s referencing a monumental moment with mom or a difficult discussion with dad. And I know there were times that she wrote a piece that I didn’t know how to appropriately react, the feelings were so tender, so emotional, so there. I don’t want to say I was speechless, but.

The fact is, when I did have something to say about either of these writers, their work inspired some of my better comments. The world we dwell in is rife with overt racism and sexism and it all seems so much more out of control now (when perhaps it was just as out of control as in previous years). I think we’re all starting to feel that element of our society much more heavily and our view of how much work we have left to do to have the world we want and deserve is starting to weigh on many of us.

Related to that thought, During week 29, in the midst of the portfolio, I noted to marlawentmad on her Surrender Under Protest prompt, the following comment as it related to a story about a Witch being removed from her community:

//
My revelation from this piece is a simple one. The witch hunts generally were about women, who many of the men in whatever sad villages they lived in at the time, found them "not attractive" or found them "too attractive" or found them "behaving inappropriately," or were people they just didn't like and were likely used as a method of driving said women out of sight of the townsfolk. It is a continual storyline for many - we don't want to see you, now get out. Of course, that would be inhumane for the group leaders to do if those were the reasons for sending these women away, so there needed to be a string attached - she is a witch. " I couldn't help laying with her, I was bewitched." "Her mere presence in our community is a blight. She must be removed."

And it makes sense that those women would at least attempt to find ways to make what would be an utterly hateful practice into something they could use to defend themselves creating a "need" for magic. Self-fulfilling prophesy. You want a witch? Here's your witch! And may the wrath of this witch's powers come down on them.
//

That was a kind of eye-opening understanding I got from the piece that helped me contextualize that historic event in a way that I might not have fully appreciated without it.

Perhaps my response to messygorgeous’ entry of Week 30’s topic, “Impossible” can be recycled right here and now as part of the question of “Why,” even though the topic of the piece was choosing (or choosing not) to have a child or children. Of that entry, I stated:

//
Certainly you have touched a nerve when it comes to this topic and it's one many people have to consider as a part of the situation. With so many angles to view it, and with so many situations to need to negotiate it, it's impossible to say one decision is "right" and one is "wrong." Just like most of life, it's not entirely up to you anyhow. I have a pair of close friends who swore they would never have kids because they similarly felt that the world wasn't a place for them and used both male AND female contraception - and still got pregnant. Their son is now seven and is both their pride and joy and seems like he could be on track to help change the world for the better... Sometimes it really isn't up to you at all! The best we can do is the best we can do when our circumstances are what they are.
//

And that brings me to my efforts in this game. I am still very new to the whole process of LJ Idol, as this is only my second season. The advantage I have in talking about myself is that I know the process that I worked through and I can share what I hoped to achieve through it.

Prompts are the pegs, the clothespins we hung the washing on, and I lucked out a bit because I felt I connected closely with the bulk of the prompts from this season. But more, I especially wanted to take the prompts sometimes in perpendicular ways to how I thought they might be typically interpreted. That’s due mostly to my learning experience from the ninth season of Idol: find a way to use the prompt to tell the story you want to tell.

Using the prompt to get you to find a way to talk about what is on your mind really was worth the experience of the previous season for me, and I wanted to try to do it in as many ways as I could. Sometimes I did it directly, by recounting our political history. Other times I did it in thinly veiled fictional ways about a leader that was down in the Dump. And let’s face it, the outside atmosphere informed a lot of the writing as much as the prompts did! I wanted to be a little more comedic, but current events made that a challenge, if not impossible, some weeks.

I think I’m the only contestant that referred to this season as “LJ Idol X.” But I wanted to use that not just for the Roman Numeral element, like a Super Bowl, but also because “X” is the symbol for a kiss. Related directly to that, I want to use this second to last moment to say thanks and send Valentines to some very special people. First, I must thank brad for creating this place a millennium ago. Without that, where would we be? I want to thank all of my fellow writers and competitors in LJ Idol over this two-season arc. Reading your words and following your stories, whether they were stand-alone pieces or continuing tales with recurring characters, always provided useful insights, unique perspectives and all of that is grist for the mill. I hope whatever comments I provided in response to your entries helped you as much as your writing helped me.

Extra special thanks to my Intersection partner xlovebecomesher for working with me fearlessly during both of these seasons. And likewise, extra special thanks to halfshellvenus for providing a great story that I milked for two weeks.

I wanted to also include a heartfelt note of thanks to the people who read and commented to the two excerpts from my novel that were entries in this season’s competition. I won’t complete the first draft by the first of Autumn, but at 75,000 words, I’m close enough that I won’t mind. Thanks also to our two younger idols, kfp_rawr and yamyam_kat for participating and for inspiring us all to be better, and we’ll see you both writing again soon!

And last and most certainly least, that hippie-kicker, that hurricane dodger, that continually confounding cohort who makes everything happen and who makes everyone happy (not), the Louis Renault of LJ, clauderainsrm who keeps us all askew, even when we ask you. Thanks Gary. And thanks to your lovely wife.

Finally, there’s nothing left to say except the answer to the question. But I fear the answer can’t be answered by me, and that’s the secret: it was never meant to be answered by me. Only you can decide how you want to survey it, when you think is the right time, where your heart takes you, what you find important to the choice, and who you want to vote for.

Thanks again for everything, and see you at the why.

I can remember, way back to the day when I was setting up my Dreamwidth Journal account. It was during the madness that was the SixApart era, when we all believed that company was going to destroy LiveJournal with advertising and its overt capitalist practices.

Little did we know.

But that threat passed and things seemed to be a bit better when 6A sold LJ to SUP. Sure they were a Russian company, but the two halves of LJ were operated separately and nobody said much of anything to us. In fact, I started to see some Russian posts by users and it seemed like a way of seeing into a different world!

My DW account sat dormant with a single entry for about 5 years until the scramble over the LJ servers being migrated to Russia occurred at the end of 2016. Currently, my DW is *sorta* a mirror of my LJ account. I say sorta because I transferred my account over there via the transfer tool they have at DW. I did a post about the transfer, but to sum up the pertinent points:

1. It was very easy to do.

Despite having 16 years worth of LJ material, the transfer was simple, didn't seem to interfere with my being on the internet doing other stuff while it was happening and, even now, seemed to have gotten all of my entries properly - as well as the vast amount of comments. It took about 3-4 hours for the transfer to go through completely.

2. Could it be because I have a paid DW Account and a permanent LJ account?

I did spring for a year's worth of paid service from DW which I'm sure didn't hurt the process of transferring all my material. I have heard that some people have had problems with the transfer but I don't know a lot of details. It could have to do with other factors specific to those journals.

3. All of your LJ Links are unchanged.

If you reference a link to another LJ post in an entry, the link will continue to point to that LJ link in DW. If you want to make your DW "self contained," you'll have to meticulously go through each and every entry you made with a link to any LJ entry and manually transfer those to your new DW link. Sounds like fun? Try it for 16 years worth of entries.

Of course, that makes sense, because if you're referencing a journal outside of your own, it might not exist on DW or might exist under a different name. But it's just something to remember when you're considering this transfer.

Not to mention the photo hosting, which, if you're anything like me, would require another massive series of transfers and posts, and that's just to get the photos visible! Then, you'd have to link them to your entries.

4. LJ Username links remain unchanged.

This is sort of specific, but if you have referenced someone's LJ username in a post somewhere, and that person changed their name - here on LJ the username is updated to the new name or at least it was... on DW the original username is linked and again, it points to the LJ user, not to a Dreamwidth account. This is more anecdotal than anything because this issue won't come up that frequently, but if you're reading through an old entry, it might be a surprise to see a "former" name listed for a person you mentioned.

5. When you edit your entry on DW, it is automatically updated on LJ!

That's a huge time saver: If you edited a post on DW that was linked to your LJ, it automatically also updated your LJ with the edit! I tested it again and that interface still works. You can still post directly to LJ from DW and make edits. The reason I wasn't sure is because I posted a DW entry that didn't go through to my LJ, but that was because I hadn't yet signed the Russian TOS.

Now that I covered the technical, the bones of the story, let's get to the meat: the psychological. Here's where the story gets a little spooky.

Let's be brutally honest. DW is not really a community. It's a storage container. It's an attic. It's a safety net for your words and entries and memories of the glory of LJ long since past. If something were to happen to your LJ account, Lenin forbid, at least you still have the cadaver of what you created. And really that's what it is, because nobody is interacting with your past entries. And the problem is nobody on DW is really posting stuff that's current, unless it's just a mirror of their LJ entries, which people are still reading on LJ.

Several of my friends on LJ opened accounts on DW at the same time as my transfer and for the same reason, but there hasn't been any real interaction between us there. Everyone prefers to stay on LJ because this is home.

Now, I think if LJ actually were to disappear, DW *might* become something like a community. But, for now, that process is like attempting to colonize another planet. Why would you do it if you didn't actually need to do it?

Sure, there are always going to be the daring and intrepid few who are willing to leave behind the familiar and boldly go somewhere where nobody is. But that's sort of the opposite of what a social media site is supposed to be about. You're supposed to go to where people are!

So.

I have an idea. We could make Dreamwidth work. But it would take a drastic step. Here's the plan.

We have to make a pact.

We'd have to agree to go, to leave LiveJournal and we'd have to never look back because that's really the only way we could make it work. We'd have to drink this Kool-Aid together, all of us, or it won't happen.

If we all don't go, it will collapse, because we know that people stayed behind in the old place and the temptation to return would be too great. And once a few people started going back, then everyone would. And it would be over.

Doing this will not be easy. It's going to feel a little bit like killing a parent. After all, we all grew up with El Jay. It's like a constant, always there for us, ready to accept us as we were, to listen to what we had to say, to share our stories with people who cared about them. Now, we're talking about turning our back on it completely? This is a harsh choice.

But LiveJournal isn't that blog service any more. It's LiveJekyll and it feels like it's time to Hyde. Think about it. If you won't go now, with all that has happened already, what would it take to make you leave?

Yes, it's possible that everything will remain as it has. But when they migrated the servers to Russia, we were told that the "western" side of LiveJournal would remain its own entity, and we now know that is no longer true, as we all had to sign that Russian TOS to retain our journals. Who can say what other "adjustments" are on the way?

Okay. I mixed up a batch of Dreamwidth Drank. Here it is.

http://www.dreamwidth.org/

But, and I'm completely serious about this, we ALL have to drink it, and drink it freely, because we think it's the right choice to make. This isn't an ultimatum. You can still say no and ignore it all. Remain on LiveJournal until Vladimir gets tired of allowing it to exist.

But if you want to retain a blog community on a platform like LiveJournal and be free of whatever Russian influence is about to happen, think seriously about where we're going.

Those are the alternatives as I see them. So tell me. How will this story end?

//

This entry was written for LJ Idol using the prompt Campfire stories

By now, everyone you are knowing that still an active account has on LiveJournal mentioned at least the new Terms of the Service. This is not for to create no worry and no concern. Anyway, you must agree to be reading this!

Before, people ask why servers were sent to Russia. It is to provide better, what word it is? surveillance? Nyet! Not yet. It provide better support.

People believe that the Russian side of LJ and the so-called western side go separate. But we are friends and so now, Russian side help on other side by being better support. We work together and we prove that we are good and very good for you.

So if see you something that sounded not normal, it is. Welcome to new normal!

Welcome to LiveJournal.

Hey!

This is my first ever cross post from my account at Dreamwidth, my alternate home on the internet. When I first got this Dreamwidth account, I did do a "First Post" on March 24, 2006, in what was my 5th Anniversary of my LJ. Unfortunately, that post was devoured when I transferred the entirety of my LiveJounal to Dreamwidth so that record is gone, but my journal is preserved, which I guess is the important thing.

It doesn't feel like almost 16 years of blogging. Or maybe it does. Or it really hasn't been because I took off months at a time when I wasn't writing here at all. But I do need a place to write, and there really isn't another like LJ er, DW.

I would make the following notes about the transfer.

1. It was extremely easy.

Despite going back through 2001 (and the handful of entries dated prior to that), it was just a couple of clicks to get the transfer set up and running.

2. It was successful.

Though I have heard that some people have dropped entries, my journal was transferred successfully without any issue - a feat that could be because I have a permanent account on LJ and now a paid account on DW. Though I also transferred a couple of free LJ accounts over (with a lot fewer entries, of course) and that seemed to have been fine.

3. All your LJ links remain LJ Links.

If you reference a LiveJournal post in one of your archived entries being transferred to DW, that reference will still point to the LJ link. That means, if you actually want to turn your DW journal into one that is self contained, you would have to go through and change those links manually to connect to the DW post you were referencing.

I expect that the same would be true going from DW to LJ. So that would be inconvenient, for certain... especially for me because I have linked pertinent entries to each other frequently and it would take a lot of patience to comb through all of the archive to adjust them all!

4. LJ user links remain unchanged.

If you have written the name of an LJ user in an entry, and that person had since changed their username, the original name still shows up in the DW post. I think that if you clicked the name, the link goes to a "non existent" user page. Again, this would have to be corrected on a post by post basis, manually.

5. When you edit your entry on DW, it automatically gets updated to your LJ!

I discovered this just now, but I had a typo on my DW entry and I noticed it when I was reading through the LJ version. I corrected it there, then found another on Dreamwidth. When I corrected THAT one, and came back to the LJ version, it was already fixed! Handy Dandy!

Meanwhile, are you on Dreamwidth? if you are, please add me to your journal there... I know a couple of folks like binaryorchid, jazzy_dave and ragdoll have done so already!

And yeah! On DW, to link someone's journal name in an entry, the term is

[user name=username] with the "[ ]" standing in for the "< >," just to get you up to speed on the HTML.

And if you have any other questions about transferring your journal to DW, let me know.

Dean and I have been trying to pinpoint the time frame that he and I added each other on Livejournal. He found a post from 2003 and I am still positive that it was sometime in 2001. For close to 15 years we have followed each other's lives and cheered each other on through jobs and relationships.. ups and downs. Through loss and expectations, our own and other peoples..

We are still here. We are older and we have smile lines and life under our belt. And we are here.

I remember the fantastical birthday posts that he used to write and I still remember the first one that he did for me. Seattle made me feel very alone. But Livejournal was this balm that made everything that was hard just a little easier. You had this social safety net that you could pour your heart out to and they helped get you through.

Dean was one of those people for me. I am thankful for his friendship and for his continued part in my life.

I am very thankful that I got to hug this person today that has been a part of my life for so very long.

** Note: This entry was written by theda for my blog! It's a science experiment!

Sunday, May 15 2016 and Cyn and Kevin, aka cynnerth and low_delta were in town, had a bit of free time that afternoon and evening and we spent an unseasonably cold afternoon and evening together!

( a skosh of the scotch! )

True confession: Sometimes I like to read through my mrkilborn journal. I have to admit, I did some of my better comedy writing just pretending to be a talk show host that no one remembers or cares about now for a bunch of anonymous people who were also pretending to be stars. It was ideal for what I was doing at the time. Maybe I could have put that sort of effort into writing a novel or screenplay or something. Probably. I probably should have! (I am now.)

( I am a bit proud (if I can use a Kilbornism from that era)... )