Where Oh Where Have All The Bloggers Gone...

[aggienaut]

   Well that's depressing. So. After having admittedly rather neglected LJ for the last year or so, sometimes only posting once a month and not looking at my friends list much at all, I've been getting back in it (in my defense I was busy adjusting to life in a new country and all). And I've been aggressively trying to find currently active LJers to friend and follow and ... it's been depressing. I've found the overwhelming majority of accounts haven't been updated in years.

   It recently occured to me to look at the friends feed from my original LJ, emosnail, which I used during Ye Livejournal Golden Days until about 2008 or so, and sure enough, the ONLY one of the 200+ once active friends of that account is... myself.

   Today it occured to me (for the first time in 15 years of LJing!) that there might be an LJ community dedicated to travel writing I should investigate and maybe meet some like-minded people there. ...of the two general communities I found, both had almost exclusively Russian language posts (even though the second one explicitly stated in its profile that it was English only and non-English posts would be deleted!), and by the tenth post down one was in 2015 or so.
   I found one travelogger whose writing I really really liked and I was very exciting ... and then I realized he left LJ in 2012 for wordpress, and that's when I started to feel like I really am among the last ones on an abandoned planet or something.

   Are there really better places for blogging with community interaction out there? Obviously anyone here is by definition also among the LJ die-hards. I see a lot of people posting to dreamwidth and crossposting to here, what's dreamwidth like?
   It has occurred to me the empirical way to investigate this would be to think of like 10 bloggers I quite liked from Ye Glory Days and figure out Where Are They Now, and thus I wouldn't be talking to fellow stubborn holdouts like myself. ::Sigh:: I don't know, I really like LJ, but maybe there IS something else out there and that's why people leave and never come back?

Comments

[ryl.livejournal.com]

Most of my friends from Ye Glory Days went to FB which is horrible for any kind of long-form writing. I'm beginning to think that we dedicated LJers are going to have to get together and create the new platform ourselves.

[spaciireth.livejournal.com]

I use Wordpress for more "professional" (for want of a better word) blogging, but I don't feel that any of the other platforms really cater to the same type of engagement that LJ does/did, unless you manage to hit it big. I've supposedly got over 700 followers on my book review blog, but about 20 of them actually talk to me. There's no reciprocity on those ones the way there is much more often on LJ. I keep a backup of my LJ on DW, but I've never really used it properly so I can't say if it's more active or anything.

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

This. The only active people on my LJ are us diehards, and I've noticed that even some of them aren't posting as much as they had been. Then again, it's summer, and LJ engagement has always dropped this time of year.

Most people are using Dreamwidth as an archive as opposed to Glory Days LJ clone. There is very little, if any, community there.

Instagram and FB, however, work surprisingly well for micro essays with a photograph. A few people -- and one Idoler I know of -- are doing that rather than posting here. It's like a nonfiction form of flash fiction.

[meisje-viktoria.livejournal.com]

It seems to be an issue with blogging in general, that people just seem to find instragram and small comments in Twitter is easier than in depth entries in a journal, which is a real shame. I love LJ, and even with what one of my fellow LJers called "The Russo-Scare", I stayed here. I tried to use Dreamwidth also, but he interface was not to my liking. It a shame, because this used to be an archive for a lot of great ideas and concepts, but it seems only the diehards are here and there are not that many here anymore ;-(

Keep up the journal though, you have people who still enjoy your view into the world.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Yeah I know FB and twitter took away a lot of people who just wanted to express themselves in short messages (to this day I don't understand why twitter is so popular), and so I don't concern myselves overly much with the people that left for that, but I miss all the people who would write about a page or so about whatever was on their mind and it would be funny and readabile and we'd bounce inside jokes and references to eachother around.

As I mentioned I'm on a big push right now to find people who are still around (which is how I found you!), but where to find them in this big wide LJ-o-sphere that is just liiiiiittered with dead journals now.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Hmm could be a thing! I'm sure there are programmers amongst us. And wasn't the LJ software once open source? I remember there was a clone for awhile called deadjournal. But I think we can all agree none of us feel our Russian lords and masters have our best interests in mind any more.

[meisje-viktoria.livejournal.com]

You are more adventurous than I when it comes to finding people on LJ. I used to be also be more outgoing, but it seems like a lot of people were/are not as dedicated as they protray. They would make a post or two and poof...they were gone. If you get any hot leads, would you share them? I am always looking for different points of view and outlooks.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Haha I've noticed the inverse of the summer effect -- it's winter here in Australia which might be why I'm on so much now, it's dark all the time! When it's summer I admittedly am sorely tempted to be outside as long as the sun is shining.

Yeah I like to use instagram for photo sharing and facebook definitely has a clear role in sharing posts with all of one's friends, but it doesn't suit for anythging longer than a few sentences and I've found it's extremely difficult to try to go back and find something you posts more than half a dozen posts back.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I've been seriously considering posting to dreamwidth or blogspot or wordpress also for a "more professional" place to have a blog.... but I don't want to have to learn how to navigate another site d:

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Honestly right now I am literally friending every LJ I come across that is in the english language and has been updated in the last month or two, and then I figure once they're on my friends list I can get to know them ;D ;D It's kind of a net fishing method ;D

[meisje-viktoria.livejournal.com]

Well I hope that me posting too much is not a issue. I try to do it at least once a day, but sometime it can be 3

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

I did **try** to crosspost from dreamwidth. It did not work for me.
I did get a kick in the teeth from photobucket, who sent me a nastygram that said unless I pay therm $50 per month, my pictures will no longer work on LJ.
So now I am dithering.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Rude! I used to post pictures to photobucket that I wanted to host but not have on my flickr account (if for example it's a picture I didn't take but I have on my computer or something). But I always found photobucket tedious to work with so now if I just post to flickr in the private setting and then I can still post them into entries and things.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Lol haha that's just fine. I can't believe I posted almost every day back in Ye Glory Days, and all while I was in college with everything else going on! These days I'm lucky for once a week (though I've really been on a roll the last week or two).

I feel bad because I was totally going to make a post other than this one today (either the next leg of the roadtrip or this satire I've though of about Trump) but I got lost looking up other LJ users all afternoon pretty much. But hey I still got a post up and feel I made some sort of vague progress in the search for life on LJ... ;)

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

I haven't gotten that email yet but I heard about it elsewhere. I took down all my personal photos the other day. The royalty free ones can disappear.

[meisje-viktoria.livejournal.com]

There are times I want to make a better post, but then I end up posting something hum-drum. I think sometimes just keeping a regular posting schedule each week just keeps me focus on checking back here daily.

Greetings!

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

You ain't kiddin'.

“My friends list looks like a marquee with maybe
three bulbs still lit, and all the rest dark.”


        In this case, the darkened windows and rusting pipes of Old Town are eclipsed by the lights and tumult
        of Новый-Город, the “New Town” built by the new owners and very much a going concern, like a larger
        crater overlapping the smaller, older one. There's where it's at nowadays - but there's a barrier.

        They're nice enough folks, but like us, if you don't speak the language you'll not get far. 
        Meanwhile, we remnants over here go quietly about our affairs, past the innumerable disused LJ-
        community centers and boarded-up individual apartments…



    

“I can play my music as loud as I want!”



«Но нет в пустынном мире никого»

<=\\=\\=\\=\\=>

Edit to Add:

Oh, yah - “Antwerp”

[mdlbear]

Dreamwidth is a fork of the open source version of Livejournal. (So are deadjournal and insanejournal; I believe the former is defunct now.) DW is where most of the former LJers have gone, in part because one can import from and crosspost to LJ, so the transition is very easy.

These days I use LJ only to read the few people who haven't made the switch, who still get interesting comments there, or who post different content there (no idea why one would do that).

BTW I noticed that you added me as a friend, but I don't remember who you are (if indeed I ever knew).

[bleodswean.livejournal.com]

*nods* It seems all the screaming and complaining of the past seven or so years is finally culminating in this quiet gasping. It's pretty terrible for those of us who love it here and don't use other platforms.

Re: Travel Comms

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

I assume travel_writing is one of them.  As they invited “fictional travel stories,” I was going to have some fun with that…


            


- but when you're grown up real life has a way of interfering with such pastimes!

Re: “learn how to navigate”

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

As mdlbear says, it's the same program code as LiveJournal.

And as they admit themselves, they've perforce become “LiveJournal II.”  I'm over there now also; so are many others.

[ani-mama.livejournal.com]

Most people, myself included, seem to use Dreamwidth only as a backup. I have looked around other places, but I still enjoy the connections I can make with people here the best. It really is too bad that so many journals have gone dark.
Of the hundreds of people still listed as "friends" I talk to maybe 20.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Hmm well maybe I'll investigate this Dreamwidth thing then. Honestly I realize now that even at this moment I don't think I've ever once been there. I didn't realize it used the same original livejournal code, so it has friends lists and all that just like LJ then?

Also I had actually just added you yesterday! I think after posting this I was thinking about what I had said about looking up people that were big in ye olde days and theferrett was one person who came to mind (even though he hasn't actually even been on my friends list!), so I checked out his recent entries, I note he ALSO has moved offsite and is autocrossposting to LJ, still gets a few comments to each entry but doesn't appear to come back and respond to them? Anyway obviously everyone commenting to his posts is still alive so I friended them all :D

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Oh my gosh I didn't realize they use LJ code, I've never actually even peeked at Dreamwidth but it sounds like perhaps I should go investigate!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

This comment is epic!

Are those abandoned city pictures Pripyat?