5 ms·

As someone old enough to remember and have used Livejournal, the Facebook experience is very different.

by ethbr0 5y ago

amatecha 5y ago
LJ was awesome! I feel like Mastodon is kiiiinda similar modern-day equivalent (despite the Twitter-mimicry). Huh, now that I say that "out loud", that's interesting - I had never thought of it until now. It seems to really capture that "share your world but also bring in others and socialize as narrowly or broadly as you want", along with sharing media and so on.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Whenever I looked at Mastodon, it seemed cool technologically, but I couldn't really imagine anybody outside of the tech crowd using it. Is that an accurate perception? LJ was cool because you had quite a diverse group using it. Artists, musicians, teenagers, etc. This was before MySpace siphoned away the youth crowd, fifteen years ago or whenever it was. I wouldn't see them ever coming back to blogging. In fact I don't really see anybody returning to blogging. (No disrespect meant to blogs. Blogs are awesome. That was a really good era for the internet.)
grvdrm 5y ago
The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ?
- webmaven 5y ago
  > The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ? https://dreamwidth.org https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.
  - grvdrm 5y ago
    Thanks for the tip!
JohnBooty 5y ago
LJ was "peak internet" for me. I had a smallish network of friends on there and we read and commented on each others' stuff. You could be as personal or as detached and anonymous as you wanted. You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself. Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it was mostly crap, but it was often thoughtful and personal if you had the right friends. It felt like nothing was ever created on Tumblr; it was just endless pithy comments and jokes about things created elsewhere.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Livejournal, to me, was a fusion of three things: a simple HTML editor (aka posts) + a time-sorted view and access controls + discoverability through your network. The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested / push), & (3) access controls were simple, understandable, and obeyed user intent.
  - vram22 5y ago
    I enjoyed LJ for a few years (my first blog, 2005-2008). Wrote a good deal about startups that I explored as a user in that period (this was the APG era, where APG stands for After Paul Graham, meaning after he wrote his early influential essays about startups and his launching YC - called Startup School at the time, IIRC) and other software topics. But later, after a Russian group acquired LJ: https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html (2nd post on the subject, there was a previous one on the same blog, IIRC). Interestingly, some years later, I mentioned the same point, on my next blog or on Twitter, and then suddenly my old blog became accessible again (it was not, for a while, after the above-linked incident).
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Why can’t we have this on Facebook? What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.

As someone old enough to remember and have used Livejournal, the Facebook experience is very different.

by ethbr0 5y ago

As someone old enough to remember and have used Livejournal, the Facebook experience is very different.

LJ was awesome! I feel like Mastodon is kiiiinda similar modern-day equivalent (despite the Twitter-mimicry). Huh, now that I say that "out loud", that's interesting - I had never thought of it until now. It seems to really capture that "share your world but also bring in others and socialize as narrowly or broadly as you want", along with sharing media and so on.

JohnBooty 5y ago
Whenever I looked at Mastodon, it seemed cool technologically, but I couldn't really imagine anybody outside of the tech crowd using it. Is that an accurate perception? LJ was cool because you had quite a diverse group using it. Artists, musicians, teenagers, etc. This was before MySpace siphoned away the youth crowd, fifteen years ago or whenever it was. I wouldn't see them ever coming back to blogging. In fact I don't really see anybody returning to blogging. (No disrespect meant to blogs. Blogs are awesome. That was a really good era for the internet.)

grvdrm 5y ago

The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ?

webmaven 5y ago
> The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ? https://dreamwidth.org https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.
- grvdrm 5y ago
  Thanks for the tip!

JohnBooty 5y ago

LJ was "peak internet" for me. I had a smallish network of friends on there and we read and commented on each others' stuff. You could be as personal or as detached and anonymous as you wanted. You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself. Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it was mostly crap, but it was often thoughtful and personal if you had the right friends. It felt like nothing was ever created on Tumblr; it was just endless pithy comments and jokes about things created elsewhere.

ethbr0 5y ago
Livejournal, to me, was a fusion of three things: a simple HTML editor (aka posts) + a time-sorted view and access controls + discoverability through your network. The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested / push), & (3) access controls were simple, understandable, and obeyed user intent.
- vram22 5y ago
  I enjoyed LJ for a few years (my first blog, 2005-2008). Wrote a good deal about startups that I explored as a user in that period (this was the APG era, where APG stands for After Paul Graham, meaning after he wrote his early influential essays about startups and his launching YC - called Startup School at the time, IIRC) and other software topics. But later, after a Russian group acquired LJ: https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html (2nd post on the subject, there was a previous one on the same blog, IIRC). Interestingly, some years later, I mentioned the same point, on my next blog or on Twitter, and then suddenly my old blog became accessible again (it was not, for a while, after the above-linked incident).
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Why can’t we have this on Facebook? What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.