More than a decade ago, I started out blogging on Livejournal.In that time, I met tons of friends, many fabulous writers, talented artists. Many of these people are still my friends today. I even purchased a permanent account when they were being sold for very little money. Back then, Livejournal was the place to be – more than Twitter and MySpace – Facebook was barely a backwater bulletin board at that point. Or maybe it hadn’t even been invented yet. At any rate, Livejournal was an important beginning as to what social media was to later become.
Livejournal changed hands a couple of times and was later bought by SUP, a Russian company that has very strong ties to the Kremlin. Almost immediately that the site came under Russian ownership the spam bots were let loose. Having a permanent account, I was mostly protected, but from time to time I would get spam commentary, some of it with malware links attached. I set my comments on screened and the problem went away for a time. Now, everything has changed. The servers for Livejournal are now residing in Russia.
Now there have been even more changes. The servers for Livejournal now reside in Russia. What’s more is that Livejournal has just recently changed their user agreement so that in order to continue to use the site, you must agree to Russian law. Part of that law is most adamantly against the rights and even tolerance of LGBT folks.
This morning, I got up and deleted all of my communities on the LJ site. The only exception was Writers_Muses, a prompt community that had prompts and responses every week. A little over a year ago I ported Writer’s Muses over to Dreamwidth, mirrored it over on Pan Historia, and just a few hours ago, Writers Muses is its own dot com, hosted here on WordPress. Soon the community that remains on Livejournal will be deleted.
I know that it’s going to be hard, but I also intend to delete my permanent account on Livejournal as well. SUP isn’t making any money off of me anyway. I will probably just need a few more days in order to gather up the rest of my “things” before closing that door and walking away forever. I am quite excited about Writers Muses moving on to possibly better things. I have a client quite interested in my prompts, and there is a Writer’s Muses writing prompt book in the works. I also suspect I will be doing some video work and setting up a video channel for it as well on YouTube. So many things that can rise up from the ashes that are now smoldering somewhere in Russia.
If anyone needs any assistance in porting their content from Livejournal over to Dreamwidth, or if they are curious about PanHistoria, or want to follow the Writer’s Muses blog, please feel free to drop me a line at fannyfae at gee mail dot com. I will be happy to help. It’s hard to leave those memories and those friends behind, but the future could be even brighter, I think.
Fanny Fae 