The Great LJ Migration...

[sireesanwar.livejournal.com]

So I have a question and I want some honest opinions.

Why does everyone seem to think Live Journal is going under?

Maybe I'm missing something but it seems like ever since LJ moved to Russia people just assume it is going under. However, I feel the migration from LJ is going to be a self-fulling prophecy. If you fear LJ is going to disappear the worst thing you can do is abandon it. Now I'm not saying you can't take the precaution of backing up to Dreamwidth, and I admit I've done this for my journal and several comunities, not all yet, but I have no intention of leaving LJ because then I'm just making it's downfall a reality.

Now, having said that maybe I'm missing something? Has something major happened that pretty much ensures it's downfall? Or are we just so upset they are now in Russia because frankly it matters very little to me where they are based as long as I have my Live Journal.

Please be respectful when responding, I have been absent for a bit so it is highly likely I've missed something.

Get others in on this conversation:

Comments

[penderies.livejournal.com]

I think the biggest worry I've seen is just the servers shutting down and all entries being lost or something. But I'm staying! I just have a DW there as a backup but I doubt I'll use it :p

[digthewriter]

For me personally, and many of my friends, the freakout that eventually made them go to DW has more to do w/ the fact that LJ is now owned by Russians, Russians hate the gays. DW is friendly, not homophobic, and even though it's not the best platform, it's not owned by a country/idea that homosexuality is wrong.

I have a paid account on LJ that I will not be renewing but I will be renewing my account - paying DW and IJ b/c as a person from the LGBTQ community, I support a platform that doesn't kill people like me.

I stil use LJ and will use it AND continue posting all my gay smut there for as long as they'll allow it but it's more of a matter of principle, and the fear that my GAY GAY GAY SUPER GAY LJ might get deleted.

[youmustbemad.livejournal.com]

Very well decribed!

[bluefire986.livejournal.com]

People are scared due to the ToS that they made everyone sign. Since a lot of fandoms tend to be LGBTQ and the ToS is against it, they fear that one day they will log in and posts or journals will be gone. I know of a few that are leaving for good, but more seem to be in the just backing up their LJ onto DW, so if worse comes to worse, their stuff won't be gone.

Here is a link of some of the breakdowns... https://digitaldiscipline.tumblr.com/post/159171049669/suricattus-majesticduxk-hey-there-other-lj

[evilcoc0nut.livejournal.com]

[sapphire-heart.livejournal.com]

[yeuxdebleu.livejournal.com]

Personally, I don't think LJ is "going under." I just don't like their new terms of service and the fact that all disputes and mediation will be handled in Moscow. They even give a Moscow address for snail mail. There used to at least be an office San Francisco, but it's gone now.

Many people post slash fiction and slash photos and since Russia has laws about that, they're afraid their LJs will be deleted. I'm at DW for the same reason many others are: backup for LJ.

The two people who own DW (Denise and Mark) are former LJers and have designed DW using the same platform as LJ, as much as the open source coding allows. It doesn't censor anything, has no advertisers, and is entirely supported by its membership. Its similarity to LJ is why, I think, people who leave LJ are going there rather to a journaling site like WordPress.

[dbzxenaman2.livejournal.com]

I hate DreamWidth with a passion and I left and I'm not going back. LJ might actual began getting new features, new look, a make-over if you will and it will probably be better than before. People hate change but will eventually adjust in time.

[2-on.livejournal.com]

People aren't leaving because they think LJ is dying, they're leaving because there are new Russian TOS that state you can't post anything critical of the Russian government or pro-LGBT. A lot of users on here are LGBT so they're not comfortable with that and fear their journals getting deleted because of this. Also https has been removed so now your password and email address aren't safe anymore. The servers moved to Russia in December as well and if you've been following everything that's been going on in the world then you would know that Russia has a very sophisticated internet program that tries to damage other countries and influence things through hacking, spreading disinformation, etc. They were behind the big Yahoo hack a few years ago and used the information for their own gains. The Russian government is corrupt and has a lot of ties with big businesses in Russia so people aren't comfortable that the Russian government is going to be able to access their email address, passwords, and personal things they have posted on their journals. That's cool if you don't want to leave but I don't think you should judge other people for doing so.

[tilmon.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reminder about https. I kept forgetting to install HTTPS Everywhere. But even after having installed it, I find that if I also block unencrypted requests, LJ won't load. :/

[saurgristiel.livejournal.com]

LJ has been owned by the Russians for quite some time now (like 2010). Brad (creator) sold to SixApart (us?) who sold it to SUP (rus), then it was transferred to rambler (rus), now it's back with SUP. Used to have offices and servers in the us, not so sure of that now.

LJ is the biggest journaling/blogging platform in Cyrillic countries and the Russians don't seem to care about their English+ users. Release notes and any policy or layout changes were always discussed in Russian first with LONG gaps between launch and translation into English. You can also see this by a note that I saw at the beginning of the new tos that the translation is not legally binding, the only binding version of the tos is the Russian one. Which could really say anything. The Russians have burned a lot of bridges with non-Cyrillic users WAY before now.

Onto present things. The politics in Russia are also worrying, with their newer laws (anti-gay, hardcore pro-orthodoxy, internet censorship). There is a huge clash between what westerners think and what Russians think.
I don't know if you were here in 2012, but I was still paying for LJ then and I got a month of extension on paid time because they kept getting DDoS attacked by people (probably pro-nationalist Russians) trying to shut up navalny, one of the most prominent, still-alive, Putin critics.

So, there is a history here, it's really nothing new. I follow like 40 people here and only 3 post regularly (2 are the same person...) or at all.

(And the text in the textbox for the captcha is in Russian, perfect example of not caring about English users).

[kindmemory.livejournal.com]

They haven't an update in any LJ news journals for years, and they have been owned by SUP for 7 years. At the time I was really in an emotional mess and wasn't paying attention. But since then they have gradually had less and less information sharing about the site and what's going on with it.

This sort of change to the ToS is an example, it's taken a couple weeks to find out what the change was, I am not that big a fan of reading ToS, but I did want to know. The old LJ would have said so in advance of the change.

I finally decided to go to DW at the time of the change, my friends are gone, the communities I love are just gone to nothing.

[soobiebear]

Politics/Nationalities/EULAs aside, I migrated over to DW because suddenly, coincidentally, the android app I was using for LJ was terminated and my employer cut off my access to the website. There used to be a workaround by going to zhezhe.ru and logging in but now work even has that blocked. That's why I moved. Timing is rather suspicious and I just got spooked, but obviously I'm still luring on LJ.

[rainbow-teatime.livejournal.com]

I don't believe that LJ is going under per se. Rather than that, it is the swinging of the blunt suspend/delete hammer on existing accounts that I fear.

While LJ has announced in the TOS that there are no major changes to the privacy policy, I found it too ambiguous to be comfortable with. What they meant by "minor" and "major" changes, I don't think I will ever know.

And I do NOT like knowing.

Especially as a slash fanfiction author whose works could be considered under Russian laws as "gay propaganda". ._.

One of my friends already has her journal suspended by Livejournal. I don't even know how or why it even happened. But it is minimally quite clear that LJ is enforcing their new TOS, and I do not like that.

[jingle-jangle.livejournal.com]

"Ambiguities are the idle hands with which the Devil plays."

-Mathie Tremas

Aside from that, your points are the exact reason as to why I backed up my old journals to DW. I've been away from the internet for roughly a decade. My original LJ account (stellie) is too precious to me to have it forcibly eradicated for no reason - especially since I don't use it any more, but it has a FAR too much information gathered in the small timespan that I used it to just let it *POOF!*

I'm keeping this one here for goofing off.

Yes, I read the new ToS completely - and I wish I knew russian so I could have gone over their platform basis with a fine-toothed comb. Even though there's no credence to some of the terms...

...once you click "I Agree" you cannot fight against them for making your account go *POOF!*

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

Mine was suspended without warning too, I messaged them about it and they re-activated it and claimed it was caught in their "spam filter".

But who's to say.

[manubibi.livejournal.com]

For me it's because of the TOS change telling people not to post anything that might be considered "immoral" (and considering this is Putin's Russia it definitely means homosexuality is "immoral") so I backed all of my fics on DW. The only reason I still have an account on here is that my friends haven't switched over yet...

New user here...

[arcturussoul.livejournal.com]

I am a new user. I opened up my account in October as a way of venting secretly, and it wasn't until yesterday that I made my first entry. I just want to say my first impressions are not very flattering: the website is not user friendly, and I am already asked to pay for the service? If I make a public post, why do I feel like unless I have paid to boost said post, no one is reading it? I can post on my fb page (for free) and it gets ten likes in the first hour. Where is the userbase gone? I read an interview that Perenchenko was in, and I really feel like this is a business model, not a project to benefit the user. Also, I do not like being forced to translate my page from Russian every time I log in. I didn't know about Dreamwidth, but it looks like I am moving on faster than the die hard LJ fans. This will probably be my last contri to LJ. Just sayin...

Re: New user here...

[manubibi.livejournal.com]

LJ's anglophone userbase has pretty much entirely and slowly moved away in the last decade. It's not even a convenient move to start an account here, now, because the anglophone community just moved to other platforms so if you're looking for interaction you should probably look at tumblr because that's where the communities are, and truthfully Dreamwidth has a niche userbase too.

Re: New user here...

[uponadreamxd.livejournal.com]

The problem with that is I LEFT Tumblr after using it for, what, five years?

I hate Tumblr, I hate the majority of people on there, the community is manipulative and disgustingly harmful, it has turned once nice, kind, chill people into toxic assholes. I was hoping to start using LJ again, but upon realizing nobody was here anymore, guess not LMAO.

DW doesn't seem as active too, and honestly seems more of a Tumblr 2.0 as far as its community goes.
Even people/users on old websites I used to love have converted over to Tumblr. Basically everything is about Tumblr nowadays, I'm so sick of it.

I'm just gonna sit here every day for the rest of my life hoping a new, safer, positive website for communities and fandoms can come out and that Tumblr disappears completely.

Re: New user here...

[manubibi.livejournal.com]

I am SO with you there. Tumblr turned into an abuser's wet dream. Like seriously, it's so easy to manipulate people, and staff doesn't seem to give a shit for people being seriously harmed by others on there.
But yeah, unfortunately fandom seems to be mostly there, and there are so many different websites now that a complete migration from one platform to another seems unlikely because if that happens the userbase (and fandom) will just end up splitting to different platforms and it won't be a community experience anymore. At least that's what I foresee for fandom in the future, because tumblr won't last forever. The only site that seems to go strong with fandom is AO3, but by nature that's not really a place of conversation and it's pretty impersonal as far as communication goes. LJ was great, but it's not user-friendly anymore (it actually wasn't user-friendly 5 years ago, but this new TOS is the last straw considering a lot of writers and artists are LGBT and produce LGBT-themed works). Dunno, I guess we can only hope a new platform for fandom communities pops up and has a decent TOS and moderation...

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

LJ was always slowly dying but now everyone's jumping ship (again) due to the new terms of service, from what I've heard. Some are afraid of censureship and stuff that's going to happen due to the server location but now there's stuff like they're shortening how long you can be inactive before deleting your journal... Russia's doing stuff like falsely imprisoning people and claiming stuff like "well we think you did it x y and z, you're just good enough at computers that you could delete your info!" and ignoring all proof to the contrary, so I can really see why GLBT-interested Russians would immediately leave for DW. I think us people in other countries are pretty safe at least, but I also understand that we don't know how it's going to be 5 years from now. I mean even YouTube and Google are "censoring" tons of stuff now.

For me personally, the last straw was when my LJ account was somehow "caught in their spam filter" a few weeks ago, so they suspended my account without any explanation or notification Email despite that they supposedly always notify you unless you "did something super bad". A few other people had this happen to them too. I managed to get my account back but even if there was no weird, secret reason for doing it that just screams ineptness to me.... I have basically no friends left here and those that ARE here already have a DW account (or were really easily convinced to switch), and I'm only following one actually active comm on LJ and they're switching to DW as well.

I've only ever been on LJ because of the comms. I'd come to LJ every day if I just had really active friends here, but apparently all the comms are dead and Twitter/Tumblr people just CANNOT be convinced to get a LJ account. So, self-fulfilling prophecy, yeah maybe.

[kseenaa.livejournal.com]

I hear you. It's what I've been shouting for years. It's a Catch 22, isn't it? Everyone is leaving LJ because everyone is leaving LJ...

But here I understand it in a way. I don't mind it being in Russia as such. But since they've changed the TOS, I felt a need to at least copy over my LJ to DW. I've crossposted for years anyway, so why not? Also, I'd hate to lose anything since I've been writing on LJ since 2003. :-P

I don't think the site will die, but it will shrink. Even more.

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[eurasianlaura.livejournal.com]

I think you're kararinochka or labeled_girl! 24th comment!