Back up your LJs!
I know this post is for a very small audience here on Tumblr but some of my oldest friends I met on LiveJournal are still here, so I’m making it anyway just in case.
But there have been some changes at LJ recently that do not bode well at all. Rahaeli made a thread about it on bsky with some more worrying details. For a bit of background on this, LJ is surprisingly big in Russia. Like way more than on the western side, and it’s been owned by a Russian company for a long time now (it wasn’t always - there was a big controversy when LJ got sold to the Russians back in the day).
The Russian side of LJ dropped a very big change on Dec 29th without warning on their users, essentially making it so they’d have to register their ID or bank info with LJ to post or comment. Any posts from people outside of Russia, or without Cyrillic services turned on, are invisible and can’t be interacted with by people inside Russia. It’s nearly impossible to turn Cyrillic services on if you’re not in Russia either, so there’s a big wall now between both sets of users. Rahaeli speculates that this could mean the Russian company that owns LJ could be considering selling off or just shutting down the western side of LJ soon, thus why they’re sectioning it off. There’s been no mention of this on the western LJ news comms or anything which is also worrying.
Fandom’s moved on from LJ now, but that doesn’t mean that a large chunk of old fandom didn’t take place there before, and if LJ does go down then tons of fic, fanart, meta, communities, kinkmemes, discussions, rp, goes down with it. Everything up in smoke! I think people underestimate sometimes just how much stuff went on there. LJ being dead is much different than LJ being gone… the thought of it really disappearing after all this time breaks my heart. I’ve spent so much of my life there, even after everyone else left. ;_;
But how to do your backups? Dreamwidth is an easy answer as an LJ clone, with an automated importer that’ll snag all your stuff and move it over for you. Another tool I’ve been using is ljArchive, specifically this fork of it which will also save comments and communities, although it won’t get userpics. There’s also LJ Archivr, although that one costs money, and I think some others are mentioned in the bsky thread. Whatever you pick, I’d do it sooner than later.
