![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
They build it up just to burn it back down
Hello, Dreamwidth.
Technically I have been here since 2013, but then LJ was home. It is no longer. I have not yet deleted my livejournal of the last thirteen years, but I expect to post to Dreamwidth only from now on. (I'll have to reword my Patreon.) It's a little disorienting. I don't usually spend so time on this side. Everything looks familiar, but not quite right. I'll have to get this journal looking more like itself. At the moment I just seem to feel very sad. I have never lost an online community before—much less one with as much emotional history as LJ—and it really does feel like a death or an exile. So much of my coming back to life was on LJ, my relationships with the people who are now my husband and my lover. It was the first place I was known as Sovay. I expected to stick with it until they turned out the lights, but instead somebody stole the lightbulbs and asked me to sign a confession I couldn't read to get them back. It might have been collateral damage to strong-arming someone else, but it was damage and done. I might be grieving that a while.
But in the meantime I'm here. So who's here with me? Sound off.
Technically I have been here since 2013, but then LJ was home. It is no longer. I have not yet deleted my livejournal of the last thirteen years, but I expect to post to Dreamwidth only from now on. (I'll have to reword my Patreon.) It's a little disorienting. I don't usually spend so time on this side. Everything looks familiar, but not quite right. I'll have to get this journal looking more like itself. At the moment I just seem to feel very sad. I have never lost an online community before—much less one with as much emotional history as LJ—and it really does feel like a death or an exile. So much of my coming back to life was on LJ, my relationships with the people who are now my husband and my lover. It was the first place I was known as Sovay. I expected to stick with it until they turned out the lights, but instead somebody stole the lightbulbs and asked me to sign a confession I couldn't read to get them back. It might have been collateral damage to strong-arming someone else, but it was damage and done. I might be grieving that a while.
But in the meantime I'm here. So who's here with me? Sound off.
no subject
Since then I think I've been commenting on the DW side.
Awhile back, someone pointed out that LJ (at that time) had the online population equivalent to a good-sized city, over a hundred thousand people with a large Russiaville in it. It was a community. People formed relationships and friendships and I've seen people bailed out of tight spots by online trust-networks pitching in to help.
Now we are dispossessed, and the thing that is still making me sad is ... most of us can go, but we leave the dead behind. Suzette Haden Elgin had an LJ; it replaced her newsletters as the place she wrote about linguistics and $life and there was a lot of really good discussion there. Her LJ was actually one of the first places I found, that motivated me to start spending lots of time online, and my gateway to the rest of LJ.
When she died a few years ago, her followers clubbed together to make it a memorial account, preserved online forever in exchange for a one-time fee and the promise that no updates or changes would be made.
I don't think there's a way to port that over, or any other accounts that had been preserved specifically because they were valued by many.
If we can still go read without being logged in, it may not be lost. But I too have that feeling of leaving a soon-to-be drowned town, knowing that you'll never be able to go back again.
no subject
Pleased to hear from you again! You actually commented on the Dreamwidth side to begin with—I don't think I ever knew your LJ handle.
most of us can go, but we leave the dead behind.
That makes me think of the line from Kipling's "Troopin'" that has always stuck with me.
When she died a few years ago, her followers clubbed together to make it a memorial account, preserved online forever in exchange for a one-time fee and the promise that no updates or changes would be made.
I'd known she had a journal; I hadn't known it was made into a memorial. (I have been watching people fret over the loss of community journals, especially ones that perished but nonetheless remained as archives or records of fandoms. Oh, God, I hope somebody backed up Milliway's. I have friends who are married because they met there.) Are the mods with whom this deal was made still involved with Livejournal, i.e., is it possible to re-contact them about gaining enough access to back up the account? I am sorry.
If we can still go read without being logged in, it may not be lost. But I too have that feeling of leaving a soon-to-be drowned town, knowing that you'll never be able to go back again.
Yes. "Take what you can" is a necessary philosophy, but there's way too much of the rest to leave.