Remember the good ol' days?

[pride_of_erin]

So I guess y'all got that email about bribing friends back to LJ with one month of paid time - like wowee, that doesn't reek of desperation or anything. But in skimming comments about it, someone linked to this article: In Celebration of Old-School LiveJournal.

The article itself was a nice piece of nostalgia, although a lot of it I didn't connect to - I wasn't a teenager when I started using LJ, and I was always more focussed on Oz stuff rather than personal stuff - but the ending is a heartstring-tugger, talking about the people she met here:

"Most of us have never met in person or even talked on the phone, but we’ve read each others’ diaries and found ourselves there. It’s true that we’ve only ever known each other on the internet.

But still."

And it just hit me right in the gut, I suppose. I wish the dick moves by the previous site owners hadn't destroyed this place. I suppose it would have lost out to shiny new platforms anyway, but that mass exodus after all the censorship fuckery and pointless site updates makes me feel like I got cheated out of a place that truly built a sense of community, in a way that Tumblr just isn't conducive to without a decent comment function. Twitter is good for quick quips, but shit for anything meaningful. Facebook is full of RL people which means I don't feel free to actually be myself there. I guess I just miss having a place where I could post literally anything without judgement.

But I realised I still do. This place is still here, sleepy and quiet though it is. And maybe no-one is reading this. Maybe a couple of people are, but they won't bother commenting. But I think I'm okay with that. Of all the 'me's online, this place was always the 'me'-est me, and I don't want to let it go, even if it isn't what it once was. If other people want to share in that, great. If not, oh well - I've still got most of my main LJ peeps on Twitter, so it's not like I never 'see' them.

And what led to this realisation? It was the comments section on that article. They really got to me. So many people were overome with feels at the memory of LJ and what it meant to them. I had to share a few gems that really resonated with me:

"People laugh about LiveJournal but the one thing I miss the most is that every step away from that format has had more of an expectation of an audience and feels more performative, less intimate. Communities on the internet seem less tightly-knit now...I used to write about serious difficult things to nobody on LJ, and, somehow, a few people found them, and that more or less implied friendship. Now I say nothing to my actual friends on Facebook."

"I lived in the tiniest rural Belgian town and 'knowing' all these people was amazing to me. Everyone's lives were fascinating to me and somehow my posts about myself seemed interesting to them."

"LJ was so important to me and to fandom and oh god I miss it so much. And I miss my friends--not that I don't still interact with them, which I do, but there was a sense of being involved in their lives in a deep and tangible way. "

"I love the immediacy of Twitter, the chattiness of Facebook, the prettiness of Tumblr, but none of them really allow for the slow development of real friendships in the way that LJ has."

"But last fall I was going through a thing and went and poured my heart out on LJ and it felt so good, even though there were only 4-5 people still around to read it. I definitely no longer have the interest/energy to keep up with it the way I did back in 2003, with as many as 5 posts a day, but I mourn that sense of community it fostered. So many of my closest friends are LJ friends from back in the day. I wonder how different my life would be, and how different a person I would be, if I had never stumbled on LJ and the amazing group of women I found there."

"Certainly as there are more platforms to share your life - instagram, tumblr, they don't feel like safe spaces in the way LJ did. It was a like one big sleepover, to this lonely girl living in rural Ireland - friends in large cities, all over the world. I miss it!"

"I actually still use LJ, but instead of whispering at a slumber party, it's more like shouting into a void most days. "

"I've found that even though all but...maybe three? of my friends have stopped posting, there are a lot of us who still read our (barren) friends pages. And you'll see occasional posts asking if anyone is still out there reading, and they are! They're just not writing. It's like we're all just waiting and hoping for it to become what it once was, but are too scared/apathetic/who knows to actually try to make it happen ourselves."

I guess this is my attempt at 'making it happen'. Like I said, I don't expect anyone to join me, as our lives are so different and busy these days. This is mostly just for me. And in small part to honour the friends I made here - those who are still around, those who are long gone, those who disappeared into the void, and those who are no longer of this Earth (of which there are far, FAR too many - FUCK CANCER). I thank the universe for having known each and every one of you.

And if you'd like to be able to touch base with me elsewhere online, I'm on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, although I mainly use them for following other people, rather than posting stuff of my own.

Comments

[aswanargent.livejournal.com]

Busy at work as usual, and January/February (my busiest time) were especially bad this year. I had a stretch from Jan. 12 - Mar. 6 where I was in the office every single day, weekends and holidays included. Hopefully I will NOT have that happen again....

I'm actually enjoying being able to stay home now on a Saturday and/or Sunday and do chores. :-)