“The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

And eventually, around the time I graduated college, I stopped using LJ and started using Facebook for everything I used LJ before because the social interface was even better. Actually, I'd been using Facebook for a few years before I stopped using LJ, but in the early days of FB, it wasn't really suitable as a blogging platform.

My timeline was basically

- 2003: I started college, decided to self-host a NewsPro blog on the LAN for my freshman-year roommates (freshman apartments at UTD at the time were four-bedroom units with randomly-assigned roommates... UTD didn't have dorms until after I graduated) and I to share stuff with each other. Halfway through my freshman year, I upgraded the blog to Coranto.

- 2004: Freshman year ended, roommates and I all went our separate ways. I ended up living alone in a one-bedroom. I briefly considered putting the Coranto blog on the public Internet as a solo blog, but I ultimately decided to start fresh and self-host a Serendipity blog for myself (and I chose s9y because I was teaching myself Postgres at the time).

- early 2005: Facebook came to my college, and I jumped on it in the first week (I was user #462 at UTD, and I know this because before usernames were a thing, you accessed someone's profile by a combination of their college and their number at that college... I was utdallas.facebook.com user 000462).

- late 2005: I got jealous of all my friends using LiveJournal, so I signed up for an account. I basically stopped updating the s9y blog, though I kept it around. I think I intended to keep updating both, but then one of the officers in the campus LUG that I was a part of decided to set up a Planet instance for us, and since I could only add one of my blogs, I just told him to add the LJ one, and I basically forgot about the s9y blog.

- 2007: I graduated college and basically stopped using LJ. It was a combination of things: more of my friends were on FB than LJ, and FB had picked up a significant amount of blogging features by then, including status updates, notes, the ability to share links, and even the ability to put personality quizzes in boxes on your profile (and yes, personality quizzes were a large part of LJ's meme culture... in hindsight, it's kind of embarrassing, but whatever). From that point on, I'd log in to LJ and post once every few months, and then after a while it was a year before I logged in to write something new, and I didn't want to admit it, but I let my LJ die. Also, at that point, I switched my Facebook account from "visible to anyone in my networks" to "visible to friends only". From that point on, I was starting to care more about my social media presence, and I'd only consider going to LJ if I really wanted to make something public (yes, you can make friends-only posts on LJ, but I'd decided that I'd put my friends-only stuff on FB and my public stuff on LJ... and by then I had little I wanted to say to the public).

- Late 2008: After a particularly awful Facebook redesign, I got a Twitter account and deactivated my Facebook account.

- Late 2009: After being on Twitter for almost exactly a year, my phone died, so I "temporarily" came back to FB to gather phone numbers, and I found that Facebook had been redesigned again to be less awful, so I ended up staying on Facebook. Shortly after I decided to stay, I made my tweets private and basically abandoned that Twitter account.

- 2011: Someone I had a phone interview with mentioned that he found my LJ and made a joke about my drinking habits. I logged in one last time to run a script to make my whole LJ friends-only and threw in an "everything here is outdated" line on my LJ bio.

Since then, I've touched Twitter a couple more times with a few different accounts, but I haven't been a heavy Twitter user because the Twitter ecosystem is just so damn toxic (my current account was created for the sole purpose of DMing with a single friend who I met on Reddit and wanted to stay in contact with after I killed my Reddit account; I don't tweet from it, and I don't follow anyone other than my friend). Other than that, everything has been Facebook.

I worked for Six Apart in NYC a few years after the LJ sale. By that point, Six Apart HQ (in SF) was nearly entirely focused on hosted platforms, and basically left Movable Type to the satellite offices. I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but I could certainly imagine some of the former LJ folks interviewed here may have commented about all the resources being moved to TypePad. So perhaps TypePad kept naturally coming up in these convos, and who knows if the article author had any prior familiarity with Six Apart or MT.

MT was such an amazingly powerful static site generator. Honestly I'd still use it today if it wasn't Perl-based and license-encumbered.

We support indieauth in vouch https://github.com/vouch/vouch-proxy and have a few people that do use that auth flow.

Even back in the day my friends weren't reading my LJ. I wound up discovering the only people reading mine were a few internet friends, ex-girl friends, and a professor I was working for (which taught me the lesson of never writing something on the internet that I didn't want out as public information).