fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6558 ]

[ SECRET POST #6558 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6558 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 06 secrets from Secret Submission Post #937.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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03. https://i.imgur.com/ELqkxTH.png

Nah, it was the pictures. LJ was always down due to DDOS, so we all moved to DW but DW was an imperfect copy of LJ. It didn’t include features LJ users depended on but it did have pretty much the same basic themes, they were just coded differently so it was difficult or even impossible to use most of the hundreds of thousands of LJ themes out there. But the worst part was that DW didn’t have any photo hosting. This happened right about the time that Photobucket became an absolute nightmare to use and you had to have an account and they set a really small allowance. So everyone moved to tumblr where they had native image support and the blog themes were fresh and new.

I think it was both, personally. I remember a lot of my friends being bummed that no one was talking about fandom anymore and people on tumblr were.

That sounds like people who didn’t make the jump to DW. Or maybe their fandoms were dwindling so the fandom didn’t find traction on DW, which is what happened to one of my fandoms at that time. It didn’t revive with the migration to tumblr, either. That was about a year after the LJ exodus.

Yeah, as a fandom translator who kind of depends on being able to upload and embed images, DW just really doesn't work for that.

I agree with this. Right when LJ was becoming less reliable, I also was struggling with migrating thousands of images to a Photobucket alternative, which didn't really exist. Nowadays I use Imgur pretty heavily, but it wasn't big back then. Back then, the other alternatives people had when Photobucket exploded were, like, Mediafire. 😬 LJ had a HUGE icon-making community, and even now, I think one of the very few things LJ and DW offer over other basically every other socmed site is the ability to have multiple userpics. But the icon-making community collapsed on LJ because of Photobucket's issues and icon makers suddenly finding all their icons watermarked because they had gone over Photobucket's miniscule bandwidth cap.

Dreamwidth was slow to roll out image hosting and it still *sucks* for icon hosting. For one thing, it is a huge pain just to get the URL of the original size image you uploaded, when it should be the main thing the site provides and available with a right click at worst (it is not, because DW displays a different-size image on the "view all your imags" page). And there are no albums, which is absolutely necessary when you're uploading hundreds of images rather than dozens. The image upload is geared toward uploading large photos and not uploading icons that are already tiny-sized and don't need to be resized. It is shit.

SA

Also, a bit of a sidenote but I recently had a friend on Tumblr lament the icon-making days on LiveJournal and I had to bite my tongue and not be like, "But you can still do that on Dreamwidth??" because I'm sure they already know about Dreamwidth but just have no interest in joining.

Despite my grumblings above, there IS an actual icon-making community on both DW and even LJ still (much smaller than it was at LJ's peak, but still enough to support quite a lot of challenge and rec/sharing communities). But yeah, I think a lot of people no longer have friends on Dreamwidth, while they still have people they talk to on Tumblr, so it's hard to make someone who is happy on Tumblr switch to Dreamwidth, even if they remember being active on LJ and miss that fandom experience.

>there IS an actual icon-making community on both DW and even LJ still (much smaller than it was at LJ's peak, but still enough to support quite a lot of challenge and rec/sharing communities)

[DA] I've always been willing to come back to LJ solely for the small pockets that are still active, but I've never known which ones.

>But yeah, I think a lot of people no longer have friends on Dreamwidth, while they still have people they talk to on Tumblr, so it's hard to make someone who is happy on Tumblr switch to Dreamwidth, even if they remember being active on LJ and miss that fandom experience.

Yep. I hate Tumblr but my friends are there. Hardly anyone I know is on DW. I tried to bring a friend over here, but they abandoned their journal after a few months and blogging alone makes me feel like a nutcase talking to myself. At least when I post stuff on Tumblr I have a few mutuals interact with it.

Image hosting is a pretty big reason, especially when you start to think about how much of LJ used a site like photobucket for A LOT of fandom communities.

DA/Not OP

I can definitely agree, mostly based upon what my fandom friends reported to me what was going on with LJ/seeing how FS struggled with LJ and migrating to DW as well as hearing from a IRL friend who worked at Photobucket.

As LJ came under a lot of ddos attacks, PB was affected and investors/advertisers began departing from working with the company.

The subject is a bit of a joke, but also serious.

LJ was on a downhill slide and the plans the company had were awful and not what a lot of the fandom userbase wanted. There were so many posts of discussions on where to go and DW was still invite only I believe. Plus there was a chunk of people that had beef with some of the creators of DW. That and tumblr was a big draw with gifs and photos and generally a lot more low effort posting.

So you are partly right, LJ lost the spark due to the owners changing things up (and the strikethroughs and ddos attacks etc) and tumblr was right there waiting. But I think there was just a lot of upheaval in fandom and the internet at large during the time too.

And now fandom has changed so much I can't see it ever changing back to the more LJ style. Which is a shame because I think you had better actual discussions and circles and friends there, but it could just be that I am very biased with my own fun times during the LJ heydays.

+1

I also wish that the fandom at large would revert back to journal sites. I let people know DW exists anytime it's relevant to what they want.

Me too, nonny. Nine times out of ten, I have no use for images on the internet, and my reading speed is insanely fast, so ... the old-style journal sites were perfect for me.

I feel like on DW, people haven't managed to establish the same trust and expectation that if they say something vulnerable, most of the people hearing what they say will understand them (or at least not judge them), and so the perception is that the "safe" level of conversation is also a fairly impersonal one.

Yep. And YMMV, but personally I wanted to stay on LJ or just jump to DW. I snagged an invite to DW in 2010, but my account collected dust because no one on my FList then used it. My friends at the time and fandoms I was in moved to Tumblr, so I reluctantly packed my bags to there. I disliked Tumblr then and still do now, but hardly anyone I know uses DW and my fandom or non-fandom interests don't have much of a presence here. The short time I used LJ was 5x better than the 13 years I wasted on Tumblr, geez.

You sound like me, because my experience is the exact same.

Ironically enough fandom Russians fled not to a dreamwidth or tumblr but to a Russian site. Because of course people choose their own language more.

I remember when the first Strikethrough happened, I wasn't on livejournal, but I remember how scared people were.

Live Journal went downhill because of the Russians. Nobody wanted them owning anything we wrote or fucking other shit up, so we all fled.

It was home to several prominent Russian citizen blogs, the DDoSes came from the Russian Security services. This helped silence internal dissent and the people leaving lessened the ability of native Russians to resist and reach channels of resistance.

Congrats fandom, and FS in particular, you helped with the invasion of Ukraine and the elections of Trump. You must be so proud.

da

you must be the bad faith anon that secret is talking about

hi!

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-12-20 07:35 (UTC) - Expand

Congrats fandom, and FS in particular, you helped with the invasion of Ukraine and the elections of Trump. You must be so proud.

I cannot stop chuckling at this. What a wild ride.

Uh? I get that you're a being a bad-faith demoralizing troll, but no? People, including Russian users, used to be relatively secure in relative anonymity on LJ because it was governed under US (California?) law, and Russia going "hey tell us everything about your Russian users" was met with "nope!" and maybe a middle finger.

Then a Russian oligarch bought the site, over the objections of a lot of the employees who knew what would happen, and the servers were moved to Russia, and all those anonymous Russian users were arrested or driven underground for daring to criticize their government. The average non-Russian user who left because they didn't want the Russian government to have their info wasn't to blame for Russia's actions.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-12-20 19:00 (UTC) - Expand

All I'm getting from your response is a series of clicks, grunts, and bleeps.

Wow no. LJ got blacklisted due to strikethrough, ownership changes, DOS attacks, all sorts of bad juju, and nobody wanted to jump to DW because it was like the librarian's version of LJ -- fewer features including no pics. It wasn't a fandom spirit problem, it was capitalism.

No, it coincided with fandom spreading all over different networks, with one quickly becoming their main place. Many people had already moved to Twitter by then for example.

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No, it was the Russians.

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