I was looking around for a particular blog (Samantha Irby’s bitches gotta eat) only to discover that it’s a Substack now. It used to be a blog. Which led to the big brain thought: Substack is LiveJournal?
An ode to my LiveJournal
I stopped writing in my LiveJournal in 2022, when the one friend I would read posts from/they would read mine remarked that the whole being-Russian-owner factor of modern LJ was … making it weird to keep using an olde tyme blogging platform even more than it already was.
But from 2002 to 2022, I wrote in my LiveJournal for myself and talking with other people. Over time, it dwindled from my middle school friends reading each other’s journals to a couple hangers-on, until finally that friend called it done. I put some effort into exporting my content so that I have the files themselves, if I want to print them into something or do … whatever with them if/when my account disappears one day.
There is no other place where I’ve kept such a long and consistent (…ish) chronicle of my life.
I sometimes read past posts as a way to listen to my past self and how she felt at a particular time (usually sad). What was going on when I first moved to the East Coast in 2010? How did I feel in the months leading up to my divorce? What was I thinking when I was starting that relationship?
Over time, writing on LJ became less and less about sharing out, and more about sharing with myself (and that one friend). To that degree, I figured out a system very much inspired by a skit from the Office … my new “LiveJournal” is a series of text files I sync to iCloud.
Yet, with LiveJournal … there was something there about writing about my life in a place where other people could (in theory) read it, particularly during the active years when people connected with each other through LiveJournal communities. Writing has always appealed to me much more than the current hyper-visual trend of connecting through photos and video. I’d prefer to write, and to read what other people write.
Platforms suck, except that they insist on being a thing
I have a biiiig chip on my shoulder about platforms. Possibly something to do with the monetization of attention and the way online voyeurism can end up taking up the space of actually, you know, seeing people.
In my vision, I want everyone to have their own server that they somehow magically host themselves (even though I do no such thing, and have a forever-free hosting account for my tech blog).
Google Reader exists again so it’s easy to follow blogs and read them, no one has any questions about that and it doesn’t do anything evil, everyone uses it, influencers don’t exist, and people can write on the internet and share it and sometimes make friends and if you don’t like something the close-tab button is RIGHT THERE and you can just, you know, not.
However, this is not the world I exist in, so I’m experimenting with Substack after somehow the chain of someone’s blog → Substack made me think: Wait … is Substack just LiveJournal? People appear to write about lots of different things here, up to and including essays (a la bitchesgottaeat) just … talking about stuff.
While I’m biased against platforms, I could think of them as online spaces for gathering. They don’t have to be inherently good or bad, much like the quaility of a bar depends very much on who is there and what’s they’re up to.
Doing the thing anyway
And so here’s an experimental first post! We can see if I write another. The consequences are very low.
After all, that’s the evergreen great thing about life, you can just do stuff! And you don’t have to be good at it! At least, there’s not really terrible consequences to creating things that are mediocre or bad. In fact, they hopefully serve as an inspiration for people who want to create things.