LiveJournal

LiveJournal, often abbreviated to LJ, is a social networking site and blogging platform where many fans post their fanfiction, meta, and other works, leave feedback, and have personal interaction. The website gained popularity in fandom in the early 2000s, which declined about a decade later. See also: Timeline of Fandom on LiveJournal.
It was created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, One of the first posts is dated November 23, 1997: Depressing News - brad's life, possibly copied from the founder's personal website. sold first to Six Apart in January 2005, Young Web whiz blogs his way to a bundle, from The Oregonian and posted to LiveJournal (Posted January 7, 2005. Last accessed November 16, 2008.) then to SUP in December 2007. (Accessed 1 October 2008.) Both sales were unpopular among many fans using LiveJournal for their fan activities. Brad Fitzpatrick left SixApart in early August 2007, shortly after Strikethrough and Boldthrough. , August 6, 2007 
Other blog platforms arose around 1999-2001, but LiveJournal, with its threaded comments, friends list feature, and self-expression in the form of icons and interests lists, became the home for the "new" fandom.
LiveJournal is also home to many members of Science Fiction Fandom or other writing genre fandoms, including many professional authors, aspiring authors and fans. While there are many people who would identify themselves as part of both fannish traditions, the cultures of the two can be very different. Professional authors usually post under a version of their legal name or publicly link their legal name to their user name on LJ. They have also adopted integration of Facebook and Twitter into LiveJournal more readily than the more traditionally insular transformative works fans have. When the two cultures collide in large fandom discussions like Racefail '09, the culture clash can become part of the conversation as well as forming a barrier to communication.
==The Migration to LJ==
By the late 1990s, websites, newsgroups, message boards, IRC, AIM, and mailing lists like those hosted on YahooGroups had become more important than zines, cons, and informal in-person gatherings for fannish activity. Fans could now simply search for fiction on the Internet, rather than having to connect with someone who already knew about zines or stumble upon them at a convention or through an ad at the back of a science fiction magazine. (See also fannish mentoring.)
When blogging software started to become more available in 1999, some fans started up blogs on services like Blogger or Livejournal. Blogs on Blogger and similar services offered total control and could be integrated into a fan's personal webpage, for one-stop shopping. Livejournal was restricted to its own site and to specific layouts, but offered something new: the friends list, a site-specific form of RSS feed, and icons, to personalize posts. It also included threaded comments, such as those found on early message boards. 
The appeal of being able to easily read other people's posts gathered into one place, and to take part in threaded conversations (plus the continuing service interruptions on the OneList free mailing list serviceSeveral posts on a private list mention blackouts through June 2001 -rache), began to win out and by 2000-01, there was a steady shift to Livejournal from mailing lists, and from other blogging sites. 
A fan plugs the site in May 2002: 
A fan's comment in 2012: 
===Invite Codes===
One of the aspects of the shift that both added and slowed the fannish progress was invite codes. LJ wanted to control the speed of their growth, so initially, the only way to get a Livejournal account was to get an invite code from someone who already had it. While this did slow the fannish movement, on the other hand, if a friend specifically gave you one of their rare invite codes, you might be more likely to make the move than you would be from a more casual suggestion that you make the switch. Some fans with early LJs made a point of inviting writers in their fandoms to come over. Isis posted about an effort that she led in Harry Potter fandom in early 2003:
:If you would like to be part of the Seekrit Cabal to bring quality fanfiction writers and readers to livejournal, please send two lj codes to me by email - you can find it in my profile. I promise to use them wisely....And, hey, as long as I'm playing coordinator of the Seekrit Cabal, I'll happily take recommendations from those of you who think a Potterverse writer or reader ought to be on livejournal, but who don't have codes to hand out.invite codes, business models, and community: a historical perspective
===Arguments Pro and Con===
The shift caused some tension (to put it mildly) in existing fannish venues such as mailing lists, with some fans polarizing over whether LJ was a good or bad thing for fandom, and for the next few years there were frequent arguments about it. 
In 2002, Thamiris: was a major cheerleader for LiveJournal: 
===Better Than Mailing Lists?===
A fan in 2005 gave three reasons of their preference for mailing lists over LiveJournal: 
===Fandom Too Siloed, Too Balkanized===
Some fans felt that fandom was already too balkanized, and LJ increased these separations.
 
===LJ's Lack of Organization===
There was little to no organization on LJ, and it was nearly impossible to find anyone or anything there unless you already knew what -- and who -- to look for.
===Shifting Fannish Focus===
Some fans felt that the fannish focus on LJ was bad as it shifted conversation from older venues:
This was something that a fan in 2005 commented upon: 
Some mailing list and bulletin board users disliked LJ for its control of content and lack of enforced manners:
===Gate Keeping and Accessibility===
A fan in 2007 commented upon the gate-keeping that LiveJournal had regarding accessibility: 
===LJ Affecting Length of Fic?===
One topic: did LJ and its posting restrictions and customs start to affect the length of fiction produced? In 2007, a fan wrote: 
Another fan in 2002 wrote of LJ and story length: 
===Lack of Privacy===
Some long-time, more established fans were puzzled, and horrified, by the amount of personal information and lack of privacy they saw displayed with LJ;
===Public, Yet Private===
===Demystifying Fans===
In February 2002, Thamiris wrote about fans finding out too much about authors, and being unable to separate the person from the fanwork they created: 
===Increased Communication and Lack of Self-Imposed Censorship===
Other fans felt that LJ was invaluable as it gave them the freedom to say whatever they wanted and to mix'n'match their fannish interests in single posts without breaking someone else's rules. They also felt that LJ removed the intimidation factor of posting to a list of potentially hundreds or thousands of people. 
A fan in 2008 wrote of increased communication and community: 
A fan in 2012 said: 
==Comms and Other Efforts at Organization==
Even as some fans on mailing lists were decrying the lack of organization on LJ, other fans on LJ were working to fix that. By 2002, fans were creating centralized places for fannish engagement, either by using a regular journal as a non-personal LJ, or by taking advantage of LJ's community featureLivejournal had begun offering a community function as early as December 2000 (official announcement, accessed April 11, 2009), but fandom didn't really seem to notice until 2002, possibly because that's when a support category for communities was created and announced (accessed April 11, 2009), and by then there was a big enough fandom base for that knowledge to start spreading.. For example, in mid-2002, the dsreporter was created to track due South fandom across Livejournal, blogs, and archives: the moderators effectively turned a single use journal into a community by sharing the password. A few months earlier, Lorelei F. had created metablog, a community where anyone could post a link to a post on LJ or any other blogging system that would be of interest to fandom in general (similar to the later metafandom community).
As LJ-based fandom grew, such communities quickly became invaluable. Communities being formed included fic communities for people to post to a central location, noticeboard communities where fans in a given fandom could announce posts made to their personal LJs to make them easier to find, challenge communities to encourage more fiction, etc. The new infrastructure, echoing centralized mailing list structure in many ways, made Livejournal easier to adapt to, and even more fans switched. 
Newsletters, noticeboards, flashfiction communities, and fandom-specific, multifannish, kink-specific, and other rec LJs were all formed to create fannish order out of disorder. In addition to being, typically, fandom-specific, these communities are easy to friend and defriend at will, while individual people are not. Savvy fen also used the community's membership lists as reading lists; this provided a quick and easy way to find people who are likely to have an interest in the same shows as you.
By the mid-2000s, LJ was a thriving center for fandom, as large sections of fandom had moved to Livejournal, and new fans were starting out there without ever having been on mailing lists or newsgroups. Those who consider LJ their fandom home generally conduct all or most of their fandom activity there.
==Fan Activity==
LiveJournal's casual, unmoderated approach to self-publishing changed the way fan writers shared their work. Most mailing lists had strict rules about what could and could not be sent to the list. For example, some lists didn't allow WIPs, some lists didn't allow stories with more than a PG rating, and some lists were slash-only, or no-slash allowed. Mailing lists were also restricted by their text-only format. LiveJournal allows writers to post whatever they want, regardless of whether it's rated, titled, or even finished. This gave writers the freedom to experiment with form and length, posting multimedia pieces, or stories that were under 500 words. It also meant that a lot of the formality had been taken out of publishing a piece of fic. Writers on Livejournal habitually post snippets of works-in-progress, deleted scenes, and chatroom fics, things that would have been rare or unlikely in the days of centralized archives and mailing lists. For a more in-depth discussion read the series of essays The Impact of Blogging on Fandom posted across Livejournal and dairyland in 2002.
One consequence of the fannish shift to Livejournal is that comments were no longer linear--that is, in the order they were posted. A comment could be addressed to whichever comment it was in reply to, but unlike on mailing lists it would not be sent to everyone automatically. This facilitated sub-discussions that could be joined or ignored, and it was no longer necessary for the entire line of comments to shift discussion together. (It is possible to dethread a comment page on Livejournal; add ?view=flat to the end of the page's url.)
===Memes===
A major facet of LJ community is participation in memes. Out-of-fandom memes include things like quizzes and surveys (e.g., What Color Are You? or the iPod Tarot), and once they catch on they tend to spread very quickly across a user's friendslist. Fannish memes have a similarly rapid growth. Whether a format (like 5 Things) or a challenge (like the first kiss drabble challenge), it is easy for one idea to propagate rapidly across fandom. This usually sparks a backlash after a certain point, with users complaining that the bulk of the posts on their friendslist are just duplications of the meme. Format memes are considered part of the lemon-garlic hummus syndrome.
The friendslist replaced the mailing list, which immediately broadened the scope of a fan's participation because she might have friends who wrote in different fandoms from the ones she participated in off-LJ. As more and more fans migrated to Livejournal, people were commonly "getting into" new fandoms, as well as becoming multifannish and writing and participating in multiple fandoms at one time.See Busker, Rebecca Lucy. 2008. On symposia: LiveJournal and the shape of fannish discourse. Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1. Busker discusses how LiveJournal caused fans to acquire a "peripheral, and sometimes even very specific, knowledge of other fandoms."
===LJs as Archives===
Livejournal's "memories" option, and later its "tag" option—introduced in June 2005See LiveJournal News, archived 02 July 2005 by the Wayback Machine.—allowed people to archive their stories on their Livejournal, without worrying about additional domain space, and because of that, many writers started "fic LJs" — journals or communities that existed simply as archives for their fiction, tagged by category, fandom, etc., at the author's choosing (and not necessarily that of some central archivist's.) Many fan artists, vidders, and more LJ-specific fan participants like icon-makers, and fanmixers created similar journals for their fanworks.
== Disadvantages of LJ as a Fannish Home ==
* On mailing lists, you could usually count on people talking about stuff you found interesting, since you were all there to talk about whatever the ML was made for. On LJ, people talk about a variety of topics, not all of which every person who has them friended will find interesting. So if you want to friend someone because of their posts on A, but they also talk about B, C, and D, which bore you to tears, you're kind of stuck. This problem remains even when all the journals are fannish -- the LJ multifannish culture means that you can have fourteen Supernatural fans friended and all of them will talk all week about American Idol RPF. One fan summed it up this way: This issue has been alleviated somewhat by the introduction of tags and tracking, allowing someone to follow a fan's posts about a given topic without having them friended. Nevertheless, the diffusion of the culture and the voyeurism inherent in the system remain.
* Livejournal is not optimal for archiving fiction (or any kind of fanwork), as many people don't tag properly (or at all) or keep a master list of their fics. Fanworks can also disappear whenever someone temporarily deletes their journal to gafiate, or when someone migrates to an LJ clone.
* The unfortunate "friends" terminology. Because of the (real or perceived) connection when calling someone a "friend" on LJ -- which elsewhere would simply be considered someone whose blog you enjoyed reading, or someone who read yours -- blurs the line between social connections and simply culling fannish information. Therefore "friending" or "de-friending" someone comes with unfortunate emotional connotations and can cause anger and resentment and sadness and woe. As an additional negative side-effect, you can end up with huge, unwieldy flists out of fear of hurting someone's feelings by not friending them back or by culling them.
* It can be difficult to find the right balance between public and private on an easily searchable blog site. If you friends-lock an entry, sure, your dad won't find it, but then neither will a fan not on your flist who might be looking for fic in that fandom.
* On Livejournal, there's no neutral ground; everyone feels qualified to comment on everything else, because they're making posts in their own journals. Fights skip here and there like wildfire, making wank harder to control.
* In December 2011, igrick, the SUP staffer responsible for LiveJournal's design announced on his Russian-language LJ that soon it would no longer be possible to give comments a subject line and that existing subject lines in old posts would disappear. This was listed as "non-negotiable." Many fans immediately commented to explain the importance of subject lines to fannish communities such as RPers, kink memes, and anon memes."Soon-to-be-implemented changes in lj comments: no more subject line" thread at Fail-Fandomanon, 12 Dec 2011 (Accessed 15 Dec 2011)Livejournal to do away with subject line in comments post by heeroluva, 12 Dec 2011. (Accessed 15 Dec 2011)Oh, LJ post by havocthecat, 13 Dec 2011. (Accessed 15 Dec 2011)Новый ЖЖ. Шаг первый — комментарии - original post by igrick from 12 Dec 2011, with an English-language addendum from a day or two later that says "A note to users of RP, Meme and other communities, where subject line is crucial for operation: for the moment we are developing only standard commenting representation, well know in LiveJournal as S1 styles, but we will keep subject lines, both in terms of form and representation, in advanced — S2 — styles, and provide an ability to keep it forever for certain communities, as well as, by request, will develop an extra functionality for such communities thru OpensSocial applications going public next year." (Accessed 15 Dec 2011)
==2008: Changes and the Russians ==
==2011 Changes and 60 Pages of Negative Comments==
See 3046 comments at Release 88 sneak peek, Mashable Awards nomination, Holiday promotions, ONTD Games (December 14, 2011) (scroll down).
==LJ and Privacy==
Also see Fandom and Visibility.
A fan in 2001 wrote about LJ as a journal, one that she felt was safer than a paper diary: 
A comment from 2005: Newsletters...How Public Are Public Posts? is a September 2005 LiveJournal post by cathexys. It was picked up by Metafandom and excerpted on their roundup of links with this excerpt: 
A comment from 2008: 
From 2009, concerns about content from locked journals being displayed in searches: 
==Migrations away from LJ==
Fannish backlash against LJ policies and the availability of other sites lead to some splintering, but LiveJournal remained a major hub of fan activity until Tumblr finally supplanted it around 2012, though some fans and fan communities remain on LJ as of 2014.
=== 2000s ===
On several occasions over the years (see Strikethrough, Boldthrough, and Nipplegate as examples), a large group of fans spread across many fandoms would threaten to jump ship to other journaling services, such as DeadJournal, InsaneJournal, Journalfen, or Dreamwidth. Some communities, especially those whose members were directly affected by the content restrictions, e.g. Snape/Harry communities allowing chan fanart, saw large number of fans move to other services or switch to a crossposting model, where the content itself was not on LJ, but an announcement was still made there. Some fandoms became more splintered across journaling services, while others, especially those not affected by the bans because their content wasn't problematic, just remained on LJ.
Fans and fan communities have moved to new sites because the sites have features they like, such as Dreamwidth's split friends list or Tumblr's ease of image posting. Fannish avoidance of sites is sometimes because of features or site rules too. While many fans have Facebook accounts, or have tried out Google +, those sites policies on pseudonyms have kept them from becoming major fannish homes, while Twitter has siphoned off some of the casual fannish chat from other sites because it is open to pseudonyms and is easily integrated into Livejournal itself.
Some reading about changes to accounts in 2008: 
* Livejournal Bigwig Says "You're All Sockpuppets and the Lurkers Support Us in Email" by Melissa Wilson ("They're the dog, we're the fire hydrant. Anton Nossik, the director of the blog division of SUP corporations, went on the record with Russian-language publication Izbrannoe about the Basic account kerfuffle and the planned user strike on March 21. The interview is a PR disaster made in Fandom Wank Heaven. Translated by Livejournal user RussianSwinga and verified by AltaVista's Babelfish, the interview makes one thing very clear: Livejournal users are not welcome at Livejournal anymore as far as Nosik is concerned. ") (March 19, 2008) 
* Livejournal Apologizes For Lack of Communication by Melissa Wilson (""Our Bad," Says Company. Livejournal made an official apology this evening for the lack of communication leading up to the loss of Basic accounts.") (March 19, 2008) 
The late 2000s also brought a new game in town, Archive of Our Own. In 2009, a fan wrote: 
=== 2010s ===
As of 2011, there were still fans who conducted all their fannish activity on LJ, but there were also fans with multiple accounts across many sites loosely interconnected by mirrored posts, cross-posting features and interoperability features like OpenID. Twitter and Tumblr were becoming popular.
Some journal fans began noting an overall decrease in fan activity on journal sites. In August 2011, Slash Report guests commented that they didn't have as much trouble keeping up with their friendslists and that they were noticing signs of people leaving for Tumblr."It's not like LiveJournal is dead, though I mean I will say my flist even though I follow the same number of people is not as active as it was a year ago." Conversation starting around minute 41, Episode 1x03 Hurricane Safari with Merelyn and Twentysomething, 28 August 2011. In 2012, Slash Report speculated that the decrease was due to fans posting their fanfic to AO3 instead.218 Mobile Fandom. Slash Report. July 22, 2012. LJ discussion starts 32 minutes in. Mklutz also reports that "The way that I use LJ and Dreamwidth is so minimal compared to three years ago." In December 2012, another fan started a friending meme specifically to encourage more discussion on Dreamwidth and commented, "It's pretty clear, though, that fandom has been migrating again, this time to tumblr, and that this means that there are fewer fannish posts here on the more text-based journaling sites."kouredios. Being the change I want to see in my f-list. Posted to Dreamwidth 6 December 2012. (Accessed 21 December 2012)
In a 2013 interview with the MIT student newspaper The Tech, Flourish remarked,
In 2014, anons on Fail_fandomanon discussed the timing and cause of LJ's demise as a fannish hub:
In late 2016 was also migration from LiveJournal (and to Dreamwidth Dreamwidth Studios. raw Dreamwidth statistics (Accessed 5 April 2017)) following the move of LiveJournal's servers to Russia morgan dawn. Deleting Your Livejournal: You Don't Have To Set Yourself On Fire On Your Way Out Of The Building Posted to Dreamwidth 29 December 2016. (Accessed 4 April 2017)., as well as LiveJounal no longer allowing access to https when posting or browsing.swan_tower. a note for those who read this blog via LiveJournal Posted to Dreamwidth 30 December 2016 (Accessed 4 April 2017)
=== 2017 Russian TOS ===
In 2017 there was further migration following LiveJournal's 4 April 2017 Terms of Service, banning political writing including pro-gay propaganda and adding an explicit risk of being spied on; the true TOS was in Russian with a non-legally-binding English translation, and required acceptance before users could log inRussian-Owned LiveJournal Bans Political Talk, Adds Risk of Spying on IO9 by Beth Elderkin, dated 4/08/17 accessed 2017-04-16After Moving Servers to Russia , LiveJournal Bans 'Political Solicitation' in Global Voices AdVox by Kevin Rothrock, dated 4 April 2017 (Accessed 16 April 2017)Users are fleeing LiveJournal over Russian owners’ possible anti-LGBTQ terms in The Daily Dot by Ana Valens, dated 6 April 2017 (Accessed 16 April 2017)It Might Be Time to Delete Your LiveJournal in The Mary Sue by Marykate Jasper, dated 8 April 2017 (Accessed 16 April 2017)Blogging platform LiveJournal’s new user policy threatens pro-LGBT content in Las Angeles Blade by Mariah Cooper, dated 10 April 2017 (Accessed 16 April 2017)This Week in Fandom, Volume 46 (2017-04-11). suricattus said
===2022 Termination TOS===
On January 20, 2022, the website's TOS was updated, bringing for some users a long-overlooked threat, accounts without activity deleted now with a 2 year period of inactivity responsible for this termination. The lack of crossposting option was already a reason for many to abandon the platform, and now many are saying that this is the end of LJ and that with it the definitive migration to sites like Dreamwidth will be inevitable.
Excerpt seen as worrying by LJ users extracted from their new TOS: 
==Common LJ Terms==
*The name of the site is styled variously as LiveJournal, Livejournal, LJ or sometimes as el-jay.
*Icon - A small graphic that displays next to a user's posts and comments. (The official term used by the site is "userpic.") Livejournal icons are limited to 100 by 100 pixels.
*GIP - Gratuitous Icon Post. A post or comment whose entire purpose is to show off an icon the user likes, is proud of, or finds relevant to the conversation.
*Flocked - Friends-locked. A post that can only be read by other Livejournal users on one's friendslist.
*Flist - Friendslist.
*Commentfic - A short fic posted in a comment to a friend's LJ post, or in your own with another person. (See also tigging.)
*Comm - Short for community, an LJ discussion forum.
*Friend - v., To add someone to a friendslist.
*Defriend - v., To remove someone from a friendslist. This, obviously, may be the cause or result of some tensions.
*Master Post
* ETA - "edited to add" (commonly used when a post is updated after commenters have already started responding to the original version)
* Banner - an image (often of fannish favorite BSOs) at the top of a user's journal.
* lj-cut - a way to hide most of the text of a longer entry or post behind a cut tag (some other blogging platforms use "jump"). Often the lj-cut tag's text will say "read more." Used to avoid cluttering up one's flist with the entire text of a fic or long post, or to hide NSFW items behind the cut. Not using cuts is seen as a sign of newbie-ishness at many LJ comms.
==Meta/Additional Reading==
*Livejournal Meta; reference link; posted by cathexys in metabib (a collection of links between 2002 and 2005) 
* Exhibitionism, Performance, and More Clowns by Cesperanza (2003)
* “Beggars in the economy of attention” and my love/hate relationship with LJ; archive link 
* Because I'm feeling cliquish and exclusionary...; archive link by bluster (March 2003)
*three years, three months, and 1,188 entries later; reference link by sophia-helix on LJ (2004) 
* by Ptyx (2005)
* The Price of LiveJournal; archive link by cereta (2005)
*The Basic Do/Don't Post reference link -- the draft post with a list of suggestions from the community is here; reference link by devildoll in newbieguide (2005)
*LiveJournal vs. the mailing list; reference link; Wayback at fanthropology (2006) 
* How to Win Friends and Influence People. Sorta.; page 2; archive link page 1; archive link page 2, by cereta (2006)
*Seriously fandom: What what in the butt? (2007)
* by copperbadge (June 7, 2007)
* Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure, part one; archive link part one; part two; archive link part two; part three archive link part three; by synecdochic (July 2008)
*On symposia: LiveJournal and the shape of fannish discourse by Rebecca Lucy Busker, Transformative Works and Cultures (2008)
* by Keidra for The Learned Fangirl (2009)
* LiveJournal's DDoS and Russian Politics; archive link page 1; archive link page 2; archive link page 3 by synecdochic (April 2011)
 
* Things You Should Know When LJ Goes Down--; archive link page 1; archive link page 2 by caras galadhon (April 2011)
* at The Daily Dot (2012) 
* by charlotte-frost on livejournal (2012)
* by fjbryan in a dreamwidth comment (2014)
* anon discussion at Fail_Fandomanon (December 2015)
* (March 2018)
* (May 2021)
* A Brief History of Online Fanfiction Platforms by Fangirls Anonymous (May 2021)
==Notes==
==References==
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