We come here today to mourn Livejournal.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

 /pour 40.

Well, I finally did it. I pulled the trigger and nuked all my accounts from orbit. 

Everything, all my alts, were backed up here as of mid-January, anyway. I've had a paid account here since then as well. My main journal has been backed up here since 2009.

I was a latecomer to Livejournal. I joined in mid-2004, towards the end of the mass fandom migration from Yahoogroups to LJ. I've mostly used other social media services since 2012, but I always missed LJ as an outlet. Tumblr can be toxic at times, and I've come to the (very belated) realization that it's really geared more towards content sharing than interaction. Facebook feels just as toxic sometimes. I always hoped the LJ diaspora would end someday....but let's face it, LJ Strikethrough in 2007 was the beginning of the end, and we all knew it. It hung on for 10 more years, but the transport of the servers to Russia really was the final nail in the coffin.

So long, LJ. Thanks for the memories.

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Comments

[lb_lee]

By the way, you're more knowledgeable about Internet security than me. Is there a security risk in just leaving my LJ up? Not interacting with it, just leaving it? I'm kinda tech-dumb, and my primary reason for killing the LJ (instead of just leaving it there as an archive) was fears of getting hacked. I have Paypal buttons on my LJ, and removing them all manually would be such a bear; I'd be pretty much guaranteed to miss some.

--Rogan

[numb3r_5ev3n]

To my understanding, the danger is in leaving anything there with personal info (paypal info that could be used to determine banking or credit card info, phone numbers, any of what people call "Sensitive info." If you were already careful, there is not much danger of that falling into the wrong hands. However, there are also the algorithms which can be used to determine search history, interests - the kind of things that could be sold to marketers and advertisers - basically a lot of the same issues with Facebook, except that Russia has also shown itself to be a hostile power willing to try to manipulate Americans to do what they want, and the data is coming back about how trolls working for Russia were able to do that using people's prejudices along with the way Facebook organizes and delivers its information. If the Burner community didn't meet and organize on FB, I'd delete it too.