#livejournal

I know this post is for a very small audience here on Tumblr but some of my oldest friends I met on LiveJournal are still here, so I'm making it anyway just in case.

But there have been some changes at LJ recently that do not bode well at all. Rahaeli made a thread about it on bsky with some more worrying details. For a bit of background on this, LJ is surprisingly big in Russia. Like way more than on the western side, and it's been owned by a Russian company for a long time now (it wasn't always - there was a big controversy when LJ got sold to the Russians back in the day).

The Russian side of LJ dropped a very big change on Dec 29th without warning on their users, essentially making it so they'd have to register their ID or bank info with LJ to post or comment. Any posts from people outside of Russia, or without Cyrillic services turned on, are invisible and can't be interacted with by people inside Russia. It's nearly impossible to turn Cyrillic services on if you're not in Russia either, so there's a big wall now between both sets of users. Rahaeli speculates that this could mean the Russian company that owns LJ could be considering selling off or just shutting down the western side of LJ soon, thus why they're sectioning it off. There's been no mention of this on the western LJ news comms or anything which is also worrying.

Fandom's moved on from LJ now, but that doesn't mean that a large chunk of old fandom didn't take place there before, and if LJ does go down then tons of fic, fanart, meta, communities, kinkmemes, discussions, rp, goes down with it. Everything up in smoke! I think people underestimate sometimes just how much stuff went on there. LJ being dead is much different than LJ being gone... the thought of it really disappearing after all this time breaks my heart. I've spent so much of my life there, even after everyone else left. ;_;

Hey everyone, it looks like there's some hinky stuff going on with LiveJournal in a way where it might be shutting down relatively soon -- and if not, who knows what will happen to it?

Obviously most of us aren't active users there right now, but a lot of us were active users there at some point, so... if you want to save your blog, this thread includes a few ways on how to do it, as well as a lot more detail on exactly what's going on.

(We also suggest screengrabbing or saving the page of any fics that you care about that are based there, as well as anything else you might have bookmarked.)

Just in general, as a reminder, despite what the old adage is: the internet is not forever. So back up anything you care about!

Note: edited to add screengrabs below the cut in case anyone doesn't want to click on the link.