It’s still there

[supergee]

Livejournal nostalgia

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[weofodthignen]

You or someone else posted this before. I'm of divided mind about it. On the one hand yes, I get it - you go through life stages, you have friends, it's all a mystery, and writing helps, but each generation and each cohort of friends have to do it for themselves, and then you grow further and one day you realize you can't go back, but you can trace friendships and personal learning back to that shared body of experience. On the other, this person was part of why LJ was saddled with that reputation of being all teenage girls, despite being a wonderfully flexible platform for blogging and commenting that attracted some fascinating writers. My f-list used to include not just Shadesong and Merovingian but Diane Duane and a couple of NASA machines, and I got to see Cat Valente actually become a prize-winning writer. This person only saw her own peeps. She also entirely missed why LJ is now such a wasteland; she assumes it was just that her peeps moved on. We had people have their hearts broken, and this writer doesn't care; a generation later, and it would be MySpace she was mourning. I still wish more people would come over here to Dreamwidth, but you can't force it, and thanks to the corporations seeking to monetize and control it, that wave where a huge number of people in the developed world read and wrote online, comparable to the explosion of letter writing and magazine and novel reading in the 19th century after universal education, has passed on and activity has sunk back down to Facebook checking and Twitter clucking.