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There was a note in my reminders today that it is my 10th anniversary of signing up for LJ. 10 years is a long time on the internet and it seems almost ironic that this comes as I am only a couple of procrastinated posts away from wrapping up here. (I have turned off the auto-renew on my paid account - it expires fully in January).
So what will this archive say about me to some future e-anthropologist? Looking at my tag list (tags hadn't been "invented" when I started but I did go back and tag many of my previous posts when they came to LJ) the biggest one is "life". And indeed this is the closest thing to a diary I've ever managed to keep. It is sporadic and incomplete, recording more of the bad than the good and there are certainly things there which time has mercifully buried in my personal memory. (For this reason I'm always cautious about reading randomly back through the archives myself.)
Breaking out more useful topics than life, blather and vent - photos (almost synonymous with party and kaos) of course, links (before Facebook and Google+ made sharing these so much more immediate - if even more ephemeral), family, material things (money, house, car and computer), rpgs and board games. Work. "To do" chronicles serious minutiae as I resorted to publicly presenting and crossing off the chores as a motivational aid. Angst and introspective and more recently "puzzle pieces" deal with self-consciously spitting out the pain, acknowledging and trying to figure out myself (with limited success).
Wider matters are spread among many tags - politics, economics, and the like but I have put quite a few words into some of these posts. Tags are a very imprecise measure of quantity or quality - the meme tag is still quite significant even though it has been years since memes were a thing on LJ. Many of those entries included external content which is now broken.
~~~
Some stats pulled from my logged-in profile.
3,354 journal entries
4,637 comments received
3,473 comments posted
172 tags
16 memories (never used this much)
7,017 photos (now mostly inaccessible due to LJ a) completely borking the transfer to a new scrapbook while b) dropping sub-galleries)
25 userpics
92 friends of which 76 are mutual and about 4 post with any regularity (another handful with some irregularity). A far cry from the day when my friends page could move at the same speed as my Facebook wall now does. "Also friend of" 30 accounts (which I'd lay money have no greater rate of activity on them).
~~~
I still need somewhere in my life to put all this stuff down. I've looked around a few times but nothing else has the same combination of features that LiveJournal has had - Facebook is a pain to read back and temperamental about what it shows your friends (even before the privacy issues). Blogger has recently introduced the ability to have a friends list of sorts but I don't think you make groups or limit who can see your posts. Wordpress.org does sort of but no-one I know "lives" there. Tumblr for all that you can customise your posts page does not allow you to similarly modify the appearance of your friends page (dashboard) - and that is the page where I spend all of my time and that is the page anyone following me will see my posts in - it lacks personality.
This last is the change that LJ is about to force on all its users (but with a far less pleasant dashboard) and this is the change which is forcing me to leave.
Dreamwidth seems to be where it's at. Not where the people are at - a few of my friends have moved but I don't think even they post over there any more. Facebook and to a lesser extent G+ are where the people are. (Hmmm, I wonder if G+ has integrated blogger to the point you can push a post out to one of your circles. That might be worth another look.) Dreamwidth is an LJ clone/fork dedicated to keeping those feature which made LJ so damn useful in the first place. It will apparently let me cross-post the public stuff back to LJ so the people who come here looking for photos can still find them. It will let me import custom friend groups so I might even be able to cross-post back friends-locked stuff.
~~~
So long LJ. Thanks for being there all those times when I had no one to listen to my rants or my woes so that there was at least the illusion that someone might notice. Thanks for giving me that window into other peoples lives and thoughts that I could never get through meatspace interaction. Thanks for improving my typing speed and my writing style, thanks for teaching me how writing thoughts down can clear the head and bring insight or finally, closure.
So what will this archive say about me to some future e-anthropologist? Looking at my tag list (tags hadn't been "invented" when I started but I did go back and tag many of my previous posts when they came to LJ) the biggest one is "life". And indeed this is the closest thing to a diary I've ever managed to keep. It is sporadic and incomplete, recording more of the bad than the good and there are certainly things there which time has mercifully buried in my personal memory. (For this reason I'm always cautious about reading randomly back through the archives myself.)
Breaking out more useful topics than life, blather and vent - photos (almost synonymous with party and kaos) of course, links (before Facebook and Google+ made sharing these so much more immediate - if even more ephemeral), family, material things (money, house, car and computer), rpgs and board games. Work. "To do" chronicles serious minutiae as I resorted to publicly presenting and crossing off the chores as a motivational aid. Angst and introspective and more recently "puzzle pieces" deal with self-consciously spitting out the pain, acknowledging and trying to figure out myself (with limited success).
Wider matters are spread among many tags - politics, economics, and the like but I have put quite a few words into some of these posts. Tags are a very imprecise measure of quantity or quality - the meme tag is still quite significant even though it has been years since memes were a thing on LJ. Many of those entries included external content which is now broken.
~~~
Some stats pulled from my logged-in profile.
3,354 journal entries
4,637 comments received
3,473 comments posted
172 tags
16 memories (never used this much)
7,017 photos (now mostly inaccessible due to LJ a) completely borking the transfer to a new scrapbook while b) dropping sub-galleries)
25 userpics
92 friends of which 76 are mutual and about 4 post with any regularity (another handful with some irregularity). A far cry from the day when my friends page could move at the same speed as my Facebook wall now does. "Also friend of" 30 accounts (which I'd lay money have no greater rate of activity on them).
~~~
I still need somewhere in my life to put all this stuff down. I've looked around a few times but nothing else has the same combination of features that LiveJournal has had - Facebook is a pain to read back and temperamental about what it shows your friends (even before the privacy issues). Blogger has recently introduced the ability to have a friends list of sorts but I don't think you make groups or limit who can see your posts. Wordpress.org does sort of but no-one I know "lives" there. Tumblr for all that you can customise your posts page does not allow you to similarly modify the appearance of your friends page (dashboard) - and that is the page where I spend all of my time and that is the page anyone following me will see my posts in - it lacks personality.
This last is the change that LJ is about to force on all its users (but with a far less pleasant dashboard) and this is the change which is forcing me to leave.
Dreamwidth seems to be where it's at. Not where the people are at - a few of my friends have moved but I don't think even they post over there any more. Facebook and to a lesser extent G+ are where the people are. (Hmmm, I wonder if G+ has integrated blogger to the point you can push a post out to one of your circles. That might be worth another look.) Dreamwidth is an LJ clone/fork dedicated to keeping those feature which made LJ so damn useful in the first place. It will apparently let me cross-post the public stuff back to LJ so the people who come here looking for photos can still find them. It will let me import custom friend groups so I might even be able to cross-post back friends-locked stuff.
~~~
So long LJ. Thanks for being there all those times when I had no one to listen to my rants or my woes so that there was at least the illusion that someone might notice. Thanks for giving me that window into other peoples lives and thoughts that I could never get through meatspace interaction. Thanks for improving my typing speed and my writing style, thanks for teaching me how writing thoughts down can clear the head and bring insight or finally, closure.
