He eventually got his entire floor of his dorm posting, along with friends in different states. The service grew organically from there. These handful of early users shaped the functionality of the site with their behavior.
At a certain point in his college career, around the year , Fitzpatrick realized that LiveJournal had turned from a fun way to mess around with CGI scripts into something approaching an actual business. She happened to make a LiveJournal post right as Fitzpatrick was trying to move his embattled servers out of his dorm room. Needing to hire a full-time sysadmin, Fitzpatrick approached Phillips with the job in Because they were both 21 at the time and he had never hired anyone before, Fitzpatrick brought his dad along to help construct something approaching a formal interview process.
I was the first person paid to work at LiveJournal as a sysadmin for the entire site. As Phillips recalls, keeping LiveJournal online at the time was a hour-a-day job, with brutal hours and an ever-expanding nexus of responsibilities.
And since Fitzpatrick was her only backup, and the site continually ran over capacity, Phillips essentially stayed in contact with him every day, to the extent that she would text him if she was going to a movie for a few hours. Despite the arduous conditions, she believed in the mission of LJ, and that kept her going through long weekends and evenings.
And my sister-in-law told me with tears in her eyes that LiveJournal saved her life. She was a new mom, she had this community of new moms who are living in communities that are really homogenous, and they were a community of moms that are liberal and tattooed and have different ideas than our community. She said it can be lonely being a mom, and having access to these communities are the only things that kept them together.
And that kept me going. As the site grew well into the '00s, the amount of volunteers that both educated new users and policed the site for toxicity swelled. With the core dozen-or-so LiveJournal staff consumed with merely keeping the site afloat, it often fell to the volunteer support staff to set site policy.
And this structure could sometimes cause the fires to flare up even more. I think Brad [Fitzpatrick] just wanted to program. We had problems in those days because what got fixed was based on who yelled the loudest at Brad most recently. But as it turned out, maybe the support team had been asking for that little change for a long time, and the volunteers would feel frustrated, because they wanted it done slightly differently. Eventually, Fitzpatrick tired of the pseudo-management role he had unwittingly thrust upon himself and sold his company called Danga to Six Apart in early At the time, Six Apart was a small software company best known for authoring the blogging software TypePad.
In retrospect, Fitzpatrick says concerns about the increasingly competitive business landscape around proto-social media sites like WordPress established in and Blogger around since also contributed to his decision. For an idea of the greater landscape: Facebook was founded a year earlier in ; Twitter would follow in As early employee Janine Costanzo remembers, staff sentiment surrounding the acquisition was high.
Some hoped that Six Apart would be able to provide a robust roadmap for keeping the service alive for the long haul. The appeal of being able to easily read other people's posts gathered into one place, and to take part in threaded conversations plus the continuing service interruptions on the OneList free mailing list service [5] , began to win out and by , there was a steady shift to Livejournal from mailing lists, and from other blogging sites.
For those of you who have always wanted to blog but not have to worry about costs or updating the hard way, LiveJournal offers you AD-FREE space to do so. Have your posts include cute 'mood icons', post on other people's LiveJournals, and just plain be original! There are also special community groups you can join once you sign up, and you can list your LiveJournal friends and have posts from their journals hosted on a special page of your own journal.
You can use their templates for layouts and colors, or override if you're bold enough to go it alone. One of the aspects of the shift that both added and slowed the fannish progress was invite codes. LJ wanted to control the speed of their growth, so initially, the only way to get a Livejournal account was to get an invite code from someone who already had it. While this did slow the fannish movement, on the other hand, if a friend specifically gave you one of their rare invite codes, you might be more likely to make the move than you would be from a more casual suggestion that you make the switch.
Some fans with early LJs made a point of inviting writers in their fandoms to come over. Isis posted about an effort that she led in Harry Potter fandom in early The shift caused some tension to put it mildly in existing fannish venues such as mailing lists , with some fans polarizing over whether LJ was a good or bad thing for fandom, and for the next few years there were frequent arguments about it.
Some fans felt that fandom was already too balkanized , and LJ increased these separations. Others felt that LJ only increased that balkanization; there was little to no organization on LJ, and it was nearly impossible to find anyone or anything there unless you already knew what -- and who -- to look for. Some fans felt that the fannish focus on LJ was bad as it shifted conversation from older venues:. But there was a problem. At the time, the show was off the air and the listmembers were all "old guard" fans though soon after, the show started running again, and started coming out on DVD, and there was an influx of newbies.
So the lists were pretty quiet. The whole thing about lurking and getting to know a list before you post wasn't going to work. So I was frustrated. It was like being on a porch with a bunch of people who'd known each other forever, sitting in companionable silence until something interesting goes by in the street and they'd talk it over for a bit, and then the conversation would die down again. Some mailing list and bulletin board users disliked LJ for its control of content and lack of enforced manners:.
AFAIK this hasn't happened yet in TS fandom, but I was really surprised to learn that some writers on LJ are putting there fan fiction in locked posts, so you can't read the stories unless you've been friended by the writer. While I agree that that looks oddly possessive and it sorta wigs me out, I also think that that's because I'm fannishly socialized so differently from people who use LJ more or less exclusively. To me, locking something like that looks I can't think of the right word.
Snotty, I guess. Like the author is saying only certain hand-picked people are worthy of seeing her stuff and she's making sure everyone knows it, to boot , and the rest of us can go suck eggs. I know that I get really pissed off when someone points me to a story on LJ and it turns out to be in a locked post, because it's like a slap in the face.
But my guess is that to the author, it's a totally neutral, natural extension of the LJ approach to fandom, which is almost entirely personal in nature, in that you almost have to choose your reading material based on person, rather than subject.
So where I'm going to think, "but fanfic should be accessible to any fan who wants to read it, that's the whole point of writing it! LJ is just a very different approach to fandom, to me; I find that even people who don't lock their posts are less likely to use central archives happily, this certainly isn't true of everyone who uses LJ -- several are posting to Prospect , or even to have their own websites where it's easy to find all of their fiction in one place or to update them, if they had websites before they moved to LJ.
Things just seem to be much more ephemeral on LJ in general; if you don't happen to see something within 24 hours of it's being posted, you're likely never to see it at all. Again, with exceptions, of course.
And with most feedback coming in via LJ, usually within the first 24 hours of posting, there's less incentive to take the time later to put the story up on an archive or website where you may never hear another word from anyone about it. Better to just move on to the next thing you can post to your LJ and get a response to -- a story, a meme, a really cute picture of your cat, whatever. Again, there are exceptions; I'm speaking in general, and partly in terms of LJ's physical limitations -- e.
And there have always been fans who'll write only for zines so net-only folks have no opportunity to read them such as Tiger Tyger , and fans who'll write only for net, so offline fans have no. Some long-time, more established fans were puzzled, and horrified, by the amount of personal information and lack of privacy they saw displayed with LJ;. Other fans felt that LJ was invaluable as it gave them the freedom to say whatever they wanted and to mix'n'match their fannish interests in single posts without breaking someone else's rules.
They also felt that LJ removed the intimidation factor of posting to a list of potentially hundreds or thousands of people. While many individual fans finished having these discussions in the early 00s, people do continue to migrate to and from Livejournal, and the arguments in the s remain similar.
Even as some fans on mailing lists were decrying the lack of organization on LJ, other fans on LJ were working to fix that. By , fans were creating centralized places for fannish engagement, either by using a regular journal as a non-personal LJ, or by taking advantage of LJ's community feature [19]. For example, in mid, the dsreporter was created to track due South fandom across Livejournal, blogs, and archives: the moderators effectively turned a single use journal into a community by sharing the password.
A few months earlier, Lorelei F. As LJ-based fandom grew, such communities quickly became invaluable. Communities being formed included fic communities for people to post to a central location, noticeboard communities where fans in a given fandom could announce posts made to their personal LJs to make them easier to find, challenge communities to encourage more fiction, etc.
The new infrastructure, echoing centralized mailing list structure in many ways, made Livejournal easier to adapt to, and even more fans switched. Newsletters , noticeboards , flashfiction communities, and fandom-specific, multifannish, kink-specific , and other rec LJs were all formed to create fannish order out of disorder. In addition to being, typically, fandom-specific, these communities are easy to friend and defriend at will, while individual people are not.
Savvy fen also used the community's membership lists as reading lists; this provided a quick and easy way to find people who are likely to have an interest in the same shows as you. By the mids, LJ was a thriving center for fandom, as large sections of fandom had moved to Livejournal, and new fans were starting out there without ever having been on mailing lists or newsgroups.
Those who consider LJ their fandom home generally conduct all or most of their fandom activity there. LiveJournal's casual, unmoderated approach to self-publishing changed the way fan writers shared their work.
Most mailing lists had strict rules about what could and could not be sent to the list. For example, some lists didn't allow WIPs , some lists didn't allow stories with more than a PG rating , and some lists were slash -only, or no-slash allowed. Mailing lists were also restricted by their text-only format. LiveJournal allows writers to post whatever they want, regardless of whether it's rated, titled, or even finished. This gave writers the freedom to experiment with form and length, posting multimedia pieces, or stories that were under words.
It also meant that a lot of the formality had been taken out of publishing a piece of fic. Writers on Livejournal habitually post snippets of works-in-progress, deleted scenes, and chatroom fics, things that would have been rare or unlikely in the days of centralized archives and mailing lists. For a more in-depth discussion read the series of essays The Impact of Blogging on Fandom posted across Livejournal and dairyland in One consequence of the fannish shift to Livejournal is that comments were no longer linear--that is, in the order they were posted.
A comment could be addressed to whichever comment it was in reply to, but unlike on mailing lists it would not be sent to everyone automatically.
This facilitated sub-discussions that could be joined or ignored, and it was no longer necessary for the entire line of comments to shift discussion together. It is possible to dethread a comment page on Livejournal; add? A major facet of LJ community is participation in memes. Out-of-fandom memes include things like quizzes and surveys e.
Fannish memes have a similarly rapid growth. Whether a format like 5 Things or a challenge like the first kiss drabble challenge , it is easy for one idea to propagate rapidly across fandom. This usually sparks a backlash after a certain point, with users complaining that the bulk of the posts on their friendslist are just duplications of the meme.
Format memes are considered part of the lemon-garlic hummus syndrome. The friendslist replaced the mailing list, which immediately broadened the scope of a fan's participation because she might have friends who wrote in different fandoms from the ones she participated in off-LJ. As more and more fans migrated to Livejournal, people were commonly "getting into" new fandoms, as well as becoming multifannish and writing and participating in multiple fandoms at one time.
Fitzpatrick transformed a journaling application he created and was using for himself into a website others could use as well. LiveJournal consists of a journal for each user, which can be created using various privacy levels. Users can join group journals, called communities. Features such as user pictures that can be changed for each entry make the journal more customizable. In the early to mids, LiveJournal was a very popular blogging platform with young people.
However, tension between the managers and the user-base was frequent. In , LiveJournal suspended and purged more than accounts for suspected negative content with no warning or explanation. Because suspended accounts showed up with user names typographically struck through, the event was known as the Strikethrough.
Despite this setback, many continued to use the website, particularly internationally. LiveJournal was bought by a Russian company in , but remained based in the United States and subject to American laws over the following decade.
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