
“The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/the-linux-of-social-media-how-livejournal-pioneered-then-lost-web-blogging/
======
JohnBooty
I will unabashedly say that the "Livejournal era" was my favorite era of the
internet to date.

You can still blog in 2019, obviously, on LJ or elsewhere. But your friends
aren't going to _read_ it. That's why LJ worked: it was both _a blogging
platform_ and _an aggregated feed of your LJ friends ' blog posts,_ and you
all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other.
Crucially, LJ had enough marketshare to make it feasible that you might have a
reasonable number of friends that used it too -- but it wasn't designed to
make it trivial for your coworkers or neighbors to find you on there.

LJ felt like a quiet corner of the internet, shared by myself and a few dozen
friends.

Broadly speaking that's obviously kind of what Facebook and other social
networks do as well. But they do it an extremely noisy, public, and
algorithmically-distorted way that... well, to put it diplomatically, winds up
being something quite different. Those platforms have their uses, but if you
attempt to use them as a relatively noise-free blogging platform you are
really attempting to ice-skate uphill.

Of today's social platforms, Twitter probably comes the closest to providing
some of what was cool about LJ.

~~~
pnathan
LJ had a much more pleasant culture in terms of interacting with strangers.
I'd call that an artifact of the number of weirdos, along with the pre-Eternal
September Internet world in general. The text orientation also helped. There
were also a lot of highly knowledgeable people: professors and the like.

~~~
toyg
Eternal September started in 1993, according to wikipedia. It was definitely
in common usage by 1995. LiveJournal started in 1999.

I get what you were trying to say, but you used the wrong signpost. The web
remained a relatively civil place until the mid-00s; there were trolls and
astroturfers, but they were mostly contained. The real culture shift happened
with social networks and mobile, in the late ‘00s, when even people who
couldn’t operate a desktop started to be online 24/7.

~~~
pnathan
Do you have a better term for that late '00s phenom? Because that really _was_
an Eternal September shift, although not in September, and not in '93.

~~~
toyg
I think most people would just use “the advent of social media” or simply
“before/after social media”. It might be cliché, but looking at the dates,
that’s when things changed. FB started getting traction outside schools in
2005, Twitter appeared in mid-2006, the iPhone landed in 2007, and by the end
of the decade the participants and tone of online conversations had changed
irreparably.

(And it’s 2019 already? Damn, I feel so old...)

------
SolaceQuantum
Although this article brings up Dreamwidth it doesn't actually describe the
full relationship behind DW and LJ. When LJ banned adult fandom fanfic, the
group moved to DW and also a separate fanfiction site ArchiveOfOurOwn(AO3).
AO3 in particular is part of an organization that pushes real legal change for
the freedom of derivative works. LJ did not have this explicit in its creation
and so fanfic writers universally went elsewhere regardless of their adult or
non-adult production.

(This also became the moving of many scifi/fantasy writers in general, as the
community is surprisingly small and word travels fast.)

~~~
derivatives
Adult fan fiction, though.

It’s... It’s just...

Honestly, it makes _a lot_ of sense to eschew the genre, no matter your stance
on legality, free speech or whatever.

~~~
sdrothrock
I'm not interested in adult fiction or fan fiction, but I'd still be
interested in hearing what you think that.

------
treve
LJ gave us OpenID, Memcached, MogileFS and Gearman. I was a fan of all of
them. Such amazing technologies. OpenID specifically was (to me) such a BIG
idea that I was convinced it would take over authentication systems
everywhere. On the practical side I was a huge Memcached fan and used Gearman
quite a bit too. It really expanded for me what was possible with PHP. Super
nostalgic for that time. It felt like a new frontier.

Standards for blogging API's also blew my mind. Metaweblog and Blogger API was
pretty awesome.

~~~
nbaksalyar
I still think OpenID is better than OAuth. OpenID was federated, and you could
easily set it up on your own server. And OAuth has become just 'Sign in with
Facebook' and 'Sign in with Google'.

~~~
bnf
You might be interested in [https://indieauth.net/](https://indieauth.net/)

We support indieauth in vouch [https://github.com/vouch/vouch-
proxy](https://github.com/vouch/vouch-proxy) and have a few people that do use
that auth flow.

------
robjan
It seems that blogging for the sake of blogging has been mostly lost, to be
honest. I miss the time when blogs were more than self promotion and content
marketing.

~~~
CM30
Feels like the idea of doing a hobby for the sake of it seems to have been
lost in general. Everything's always got to be about 'making it your main job'
or 'turning it into a million dollar business' or what not.

And yeah, I miss that too. Especially given how much more entertaining it
often is to read a post by an interested expert than by someone trying to make
a quick buck.

~~~
maxxxxx
I think the invention of "like" and "thumbs up" has ruined the internet.
Instead of doing things for fun it's too easy to get sucked into chasing
approval.

------
oytis
In Russia the popularity of livejournal has also dropped with the advent of
Facebook, and there it has nothing to do with obscene fan fiction. Facebook
has just found a more addictive model with a lower entry barrier. On the
bright side we now have Telegram, which allows for a similar communication
style, just without comments (which is IMO a good thing as well).

~~~
seniorivn
Strongly disagree. The reason people moved from livejournal is simply company
policies, they messed with peoples freedoms. People got used to be able to say
whatever they want and rely on ratings by popularity, but LJ excluded some
political bloggers from public ratings and limited their abilities to grow.
The audience didn't like it and started to look around for alternatives. In
addition at that time LJ was already heavily outdated in terms of design and
usability.

Summing up it's not because facebook was better, it's because livejournal got
worse, and secondarily forgot to become better technically.

~~~
oytis
Yes, there were some reasons for dissent, but still most people chose to
migrate to Facebook, and not to Dreamwidth or Blogspot, which were closer
alternatives to LJ.

~~~
seniorivn
If i remember correctly nobody advertised those platforms at that time in
Russia, so most people had a simple choice, you leave LJ because it sucks and
you choose most popular alternative with sane audience, for most ex LJ users
it was Facebook imho

~~~
amyjess
In my own case, I moved from LJ to Facebook not because of any change in LJ
policies but because I found myself naturally gravitating to Facebook. More of
my friends were on Facebook, the UI was better for social stuff, and I found
that I was more interested in writing shorter status updates than I was in the
longer blogs that were popular on LJ.

Over time, I posted on Facebook more and more and LJ less and less. It got to
the point where I'd go months and eventually years without touching LJ.

I think the last time I posted anything was in 2009. The last time I touched
it at all was in 2011 or so when I had a phone interview with someone, and the
interviewer said he saw my LJ and he made jokes about it. So after the call, I
found a script to mark every post on my entire LiveJournal as friends-only,
ran it, and threw a line in my bio saying that everything in there is years
out of date, and that was that.

------
ben_w
Rather frustratingly, LiveJournal managed to leak my real password and email
address at some point. The password was only used on that domain (which is how
I knew they leaked it), but I’m _still_ getting bitcoin scam attempts and so
far 100% have been on the email address attached to that leaked password:
[https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/anatomy-
of-...](https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/anatomy-of-a-scam-
and-livejournals-lost-passwords/)

If I’d known it was leakable, I would’ve used a one-account email address as
well as a one-account password. The scams themselves are getting quite
disturbing.

------
AsyncAwait
As for the headline, I don't know what Linux lost. Loss implies that you had
it at some point, but Linux never really had the desktop, (sadly), so it could
not have lost it.

It still dominates in the server, supercomputer & embedded markets.

~~~
ubermonkey
I'd love to peek at the alternate universe wherein Apple _doesn 't_ migrate to
the FreeBSD-based OSX.

In the late 90s I got so worn out with stability issues inherent to Win98 on
laptops that I switched to the Mac, largely because a co-worker was using one
and I could SEE how much it didn't crash, and how sleep actually WORKED, and
how good the hardware was, etc. Since my job at the time was primarily project
management, and I lived in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, I had no compatibility
issues, and my work life got better.

Then the dot-com crash happened and I found myself coding again as a
freelancer on web projects, all of which were LAMP-stack efforts. My Mac had
shipped with OS 9, but by then I'd upgraded to OS X -- which could run the
same frameworks we were using on the server. My dev environment was my actual
laptop, which was GREAT.

I feel like that was the moment that the Mac pulled in a lot of very technical
and very influential people, with good reason. If OS X hadn't happened, I
suspect desktop Linux would be further along because lots of people like me
would've been kinda forced into it ca. 2001-2002 instead of having the Apple
option.

~~~
devereaux
> I'd love to peek at the alternate universe wherein Apple doesn't migrate to
> the FreeBSD-based OSX. (…) > I feel like that was the moment that the Mac
> pulled in a lot of very technical and very influential people, with good
> reason

You can look right now at what's happening to these very technical people. The
ones I know are giving up on Apple and moving to Microsoft instead: because
the WSL subsystem works, and the keyboard has most of the keys they want.

We are living in interesting times!

~~~
chrisfinazzo
WSL certainly helps as the same or very similar toolchain works everywhere,
but what does the keyboard have to do with anything?

Any keyboard issues w/ Apple are hardware reliability concerns, but that's
really a separate issue, I think.

~~~
aasasd
> what does the keyboard have to do with anything?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/59pipx/app...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/59pipx/apple_touch_bar_for_developers_will_look_like_this/)

~~~
chrisfinazzo
Has anyone ever tried to measure share among the various text editors on the
Mac? The vi/emacs crowd makes a bunch of noise because it messes with their
workflows, but the rest of us just soldier on with BBEdit/VSCode/Sublime/etc.

~~~
aasasd
Funny thing is, with proper use of touch typing you wouldn't need the top row:
Esc is either Ctrl-[, or some map it to Caps Lock. And hardcore Vim users are
definitely supposed to be deep in touch typing. So this ‘noise’ is actually
just people making fun of Vim's idiosyncrasies in light of the touch bar
thing.

Emacs, afaik, doesn't need the top row at all.

~~~
chrisfinazzo
Touch typing would be OK, if Apple's keyboards (going back into the 90's)
didn't suck, because flat keys are _terrible_. Almost all keyboards have gone
this way save for the mechanical nerds, so I might take another look at that
soon. Emacs is powerful, but Stallman's love of Ctrl prefixed commands and
hatred for mice make it a challenge and Vi's key combinations are obtuse as
hell (compounded by Apple's hardware).

I'm more than happy with a real Mac application like BBEdit, but it's
interesting to see how the other half lives.

------
BossingAround
Blogging has transformed and moved. Twitter is a kind of blogging--only more
concise, and consequently, much easier. Facebook, as well as Linkedin, may
scratch the same itch as blogging. And, the bonus is that your content is much
more visible and accessible.

Even if you post a link to your blog on linkedin, maybe 5-10% of people will
click it, from my experience.

This is mostly a response to the comments, saying that blogging for sake of
blogging has been lost. I don't think it's been lost; it's moved and
transformed into social media.

~~~
scottlocklin
Twitter is the comments section most media outlets have removed. Media likes
it because it's usually all about them, and screencapping it often makes their
jobs easier (aka "look at this twitter thread" between X and Y). Otherwise,
it's disqus with a different distribution model.

Blogs are doing just fine. LJ simply became a Russian blog platform rather
than and English language one. It did have some social media aspects back in
the day, but it assumed a couple of standard deviation higher IQ (or at least
attention span) in its users, favoring long form posts with lots of imagery.
It didn't become a disgusting FB megacorp because it didn't cater to the
lowest common denominator, or hire people to make it addictive. FWIIW Brad did
fine.

Tools like this should be the goal, not evil garbage like FB.

~~~
dvtrn
_Media likes it because it 's usually all about them, and screencapping it
often makes their jobs easier_

I hate how true this can be.

"The internet is _furious_ at celebrity"

Article sources the entirety of two mildly annoyed nobodies on twitter.

------
matthewn
"At the time, Six Apart was a small software company best known for authoring
the blogging software TypePad."

Oh my. Is Movable Type really _that_ forgotten by history?

~~~
evanelias
I suspect it's just inaccurate journalism... in the big picture, Movable Type
had a much larger impact than TypePad. And Six Apart wasn't exactly a tiny
company; at peak it had over 200 employees between offices on three
continents. Not huge by today's standards, but not small for a post-dotcom-
burst startup.

I worked for Six Apart in NYC a few years after the LJ sale. By that point,
Six Apart HQ (in SF) was nearly entirely focused on hosted platforms, and
basically left Movable Type to the satellite offices. I don't want to put
words in anyone's mouth, but I could certainly imagine some of the former LJ
folks interviewed here may have commented about all the resources being moved
to TypePad. So perhaps TypePad kept naturally coming up in these convos, and
who knows if the article author had any prior familiarity with Six Apart or
MT.

MT was such an amazingly powerful static site generator. Honestly I'd still
use it today if it wasn't Perl-based and license-encumbered.

------
nanomonkey
If anyone misses this sort of interaction, I suggest looking into the Patchbay
client for scuttlebutt
([https://www.scuttlebutt.nz](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz)). It's easily
described as a P2P/decentralized version of LJ.

------
nailer
> LiveJournal exodus seemed to be triggered in part by actions like the mass
> banning of several figures in the X-rated Harry Potter fanfiction community
> under pressure from religious groups (ostensibly for writing erotic stories
> about underage characters).

Well sure, but a large part of the regular userbase (not religious folk) were
not comfortable with adults writing pornography about fictional children, and
having a LiveJournal became not cool because of that.

~~~
coldtea
> _Well sure, but a large part of the regular userbase (not religious folk)
> were not comfortable with adults writing pornography about fictional
> children, and having a LiveJournal became not cool because of that._

I seriously doubt that. It might have made it not "safe" for some small
circles, but hardly "not cool" to the coolness-seeking people. Teenagers for
example and younger people could hardly care about that.

(There's also the fact that you very easily skip all those. I read several LJ
blogs religiously (e.g. ClickOpera), but have not chanced on the HP fan-fic
ones at all).

~~~
5040
>I seriously doubt that. It might have made it not "safe" for some small
circles, but hardly "not cool" to the coolness-seeking people. Teenagers for
example and younger people could hardly care about that.

Sites can get a negative reputation for being the place where certain strange
and distasteful fanbases gather. In time, outsiders might come to identify the
site with these groups inside of it making the place undesirable. Compare
Tumblr.

~~~
coldtea
I think Tumblr lost most of its mojo and following in the exactly inverse
scenario: when they (recently) said "no more porn". The backslash was big...

~~~
evanelias
Numerically, that's incorrect. Tumblr includes posts-per-day stats on their
/about page, and banning adult content was a drop of about 20-25% of posting
volume. While that's a big drop for something that was an overnight change,
it's still dwarfed by the drop comparing current stats vs heyday stats of
years back.

At peak, going by public posts/day stats, Tumblr was about 5x larger than at
present. It was more of a slow bleed than a sudden drop-off though.

------
acheron
I loved LJ and had a paid account for several years. I quit shortly after they
got bought out and started shoving ads in everyone's face.

------
jqt
[https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2019/01/Scree...](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2019/01/Screen-Shot-2019-01-01-at-7.20.58-PM.png)

The guy just used archive.org and posted a version with broken css as if it
was a regular past screenshot of the site.

~~~
dluan
I don't think many people keep screenshots of their livejournals around.

------
Tharkun
Pioneered? VirtualKid had blogs for their user base back in 1997. I'm sure
others were around even earlier.

