The Rise and Fall of LiveJournal
Saying the fall of LiveJournal is a bit dramatic considering it still exists, but considering it is rarely used in America anymore due to it being sold to a Russian company, I think it is fitting.
LiveJournal was created in 1999 as a result of the founder, Brad Fitzpatrick, getting kicked off of America Online for messing with the servers. It was created it as a sort of personal diary entry platform that allowed users to pretty much do whatever they wanted. Fitzpatrick shared what was the beginning of LiveJournal with his friends, and then when we attended college, he shared it with his entire dorm to post and share with their friends all over the country. Originally, there wasn’t even a post button, just using the enter key on the keyboard. Fitzpatrick relates the very beginnings of LiveJournal to the early Twitter, with very short, one sentence type posts.
As the website began to grow into a company and people were hired on to work as a staff, and later on a volunteer support staff was necessary to keep the site afloat and to create and maintain policies across the platform. In 2005 it became so overwhelming that Fitzpatrick sold the company to Six Apart. This was around the time that multiple other blogging type sites were popping up such as Wordpress and Blogger.
LiveJournal blossomed into one of the most popular blogging sites, with over ten million accounts. Things like celebrity deaths would crash that site due to the high traffic they brought to the community gossip pages, and it also takes credit for being the first site to publish scandalous news such as the pregnancy of actress Jamie Lynn Spears.
At the same time, LiveJournal was beginning to become the social network in Russia. LiveJournal’s servers were located in California, which was out of the jurisdiction of the Russian government. In a time where the government was cracking down on the press more and more, LiveJournal offered a place for Russian users to speak their mind without being censored. In 2007 though, LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company called SUP, and to this day it remains a Russian run site. Further on down the road in 2016, the servers were officially switched from California to Russia. Apparently bloggers began to get arrested for things they were writing in their blogs, and a rule was implemented that any blog that has over 3,000 followers was deemed a media outlet. This means they are subject to censorship and prosecution like everyone else in Russia. Many people began to leave the site when it updated their terms of service to censor many subjects including LGBTQ+ and political talk in compliance with Russia’s laws.
So technically, yes, LiveJournal still exists. But it definitely isn’t the uncensored, open-air blogging site that gave it it’s fame back in the early 2000’s. That being said, it was one of the most influential early blogging sites on the internet, opening a gateway for other sites such as Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and other blogging sites alike.
When I think of LiveJournal I think of it as the place I discovered what fanfiction was, and this is pretty much why I decided to write about them. It was such a large part of me growing up, and at one point I felt like it just disappeared. As previously mentioned, this was a place where people could post whatever they so pleased, and that’s exactly what they did, especially in the fanfiction realm. Eventually places such as Tumblr and Archive of Our Own took the place of LiveJournal for me, but I will always give it the credit of fulfilling my preteen years with fictional stories of my favorite fictional characters and band members.
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