LiveJournal was such a very different part of the Internet. Substack is maybe the closest experience since, but its not the same. Mine was full of atrociously bad poetry and ramblings about my love life. Would I go back to 2001 if you ever got that time machine? Yes, in a heartbeat... but I suspect I would make whole new mistakes all over again.
Man, I miss LiveJournal and MySpace so damn much...2001 was the year I graduated high school and so much of those late 90s/early 00s was spent on various corners of the brand new internet. LJ though, that was where I found community. Things were so different back then. I miss when the internet was a place you went.
Hey now, we're still trying! I am your age and I still take surveys (the questionnaires from the MySpace bulletins of yore) on LJ with other longtime survey takers, the quizzes are on Uquiz now and almost as silly, I've seen some excellent self-coded Neocities webpages, and honestly the "cringe" confessional spirit lives on on Tumblr (there's something nice about being the pariah of modern socmed, no corpo is trying to polish us up and make us use our government names to make an account). There's even some active bulletin boards!
I think the effort of having to figure out how to exist in this new internet age has been edifying -- we have to be intentional with where we go and how we interact, and I honestly think growing up having to do things like sneaking back online under our parents' noses and breaking MySpace code to make the most chaotic eyebleedingest profile page possible gave us a certain spirit -- to carve out our preferred niches no matter what.
Getting the younger generations on board is another matter, lol, but I think some of them are interested! I saw a Tumblr full of sparkledogs and MySpace-angle scene selfies recently and it warmed my little black heart.
I miss MySpace, where you could search for a random band you liked and find a string of people who also liked them, and just drop a message, chatting about the band's music without worrying they secretly wanted to sell cryptocurrency or that they might be some other type of scammer. It was just connecting with someone who liked the same stuff as you. And without VampireFreaks, making friends in London would have been a whole lot harder.
Celeste, this is so moving and evocative ... I was never on LiveJournal, but I think I should have been. It never really took off in Ireland, to my knowledge, but it seems like when I found Facebook (about 2007), I was always-already late to the party. I think LiveJournal was what I was really looking for, and never knew it. Your essay is funny, witty, skewering the mores of that time and (virtual) place with acuity ... but then, as it ascends to its hidden core/coeur (the loss of your long-ago friend), your use of praeteritio ("I will not tell you ...") brings a skip to the heart and a rise to the throat of strange and breathless emotion ... How beautiful. How true.
The place we grew up in was not a material space, but it was still very real! In some ways it's the same as looking back on your childhood neighborhood from 20 years back that has developed into a soulless and unrecognizable shell under greedy legislation.
What I'm saying is, thank you for sharing your words and giving us a place to mourn ye internet of olde, this found me at the right time.
LiveJournal was such a very different part of the Internet. Substack is maybe the closest experience since, but its not the same. Mine was full of atrociously bad poetry and ramblings about my love life. Would I go back to 2001 if you ever got that time machine? Yes, in a heartbeat... but I suspect I would make whole new mistakes all over again.
Man, I miss LiveJournal and MySpace so damn much...2001 was the year I graduated high school and so much of those late 90s/early 00s was spent on various corners of the brand new internet. LJ though, that was where I found community. Things were so different back then. I miss when the internet was a place you went.
I’d absolutely die if someone found my old LJ. I cannot tell you how much I would die, either. I’d be super dead.
Hey now, we're still trying! I am your age and I still take surveys (the questionnaires from the MySpace bulletins of yore) on LJ with other longtime survey takers, the quizzes are on Uquiz now and almost as silly, I've seen some excellent self-coded Neocities webpages, and honestly the "cringe" confessional spirit lives on on Tumblr (there's something nice about being the pariah of modern socmed, no corpo is trying to polish us up and make us use our government names to make an account). There's even some active bulletin boards!
I think the effort of having to figure out how to exist in this new internet age has been edifying -- we have to be intentional with where we go and how we interact, and I honestly think growing up having to do things like sneaking back online under our parents' noses and breaking MySpace code to make the most chaotic eyebleedingest profile page possible gave us a certain spirit -- to carve out our preferred niches no matter what.
Getting the younger generations on board is another matter, lol, but I think some of them are interested! I saw a Tumblr full of sparkledogs and MySpace-angle scene selfies recently and it warmed my little black heart.
I miss MySpace, where you could search for a random band you liked and find a string of people who also liked them, and just drop a message, chatting about the band's music without worrying they secretly wanted to sell cryptocurrency or that they might be some other type of scammer. It was just connecting with someone who liked the same stuff as you. And without VampireFreaks, making friends in London would have been a whole lot harder.
Celeste, this is so moving and evocative ... I was never on LiveJournal, but I think I should have been. It never really took off in Ireland, to my knowledge, but it seems like when I found Facebook (about 2007), I was always-already late to the party. I think LiveJournal was what I was really looking for, and never knew it. Your essay is funny, witty, skewering the mores of that time and (virtual) place with acuity ... but then, as it ascends to its hidden core/coeur (the loss of your long-ago friend), your use of praeteritio ("I will not tell you ...") brings a skip to the heart and a rise to the throat of strange and breathless emotion ... How beautiful. How true.
Oh Celeste ❤️❤️❤️
Ok, I'm not the only one nostalgic for the old internet. You hit on something here, the sheer, cringe, reckless abandon of it.
The place we grew up in was not a material space, but it was still very real! In some ways it's the same as looking back on your childhood neighborhood from 20 years back that has developed into a soulless and unrecognizable shell under greedy legislation.
What I'm saying is, thank you for sharing your words and giving us a place to mourn ye internet of olde, this found me at the right time.