LiveJournal nostalgia

Yesterday I checked up on my LiveJournal blog (no link please) and noticed that there was only one person left on my friend feed who had only one lonely post which was apparently just an annual life summary.  As for many folks back in the day (err... around 10 years ago or so), LiveJournal was the beginning of the whole social media mania.  It was a blog like this, except I kept mine quasi anonymous so I could say stupid things and have plausible non-association (which is not the same thing as deniability).  It was different in that at the time most of the people blogging didn't have all their friends following them, so the social part came from connecting to complete strangers, often from the friends lists of other complete strangers.

This community of on-line folks became an actual community, completely artificial and detached from any real-life association, but has to this day remained the most genuine community of people I have ever associated with on-line.  We ended up following each other through our mainly incredibly mundane lives, occasionally with members going and doing adventurous stuff.  For example, I went to Afghanistan, another person went to the UK for a year.  We would meet people in places and from social groups we would normally not have the opportunity to do, for example a caterer working in Iraq or a kind hearted soldier serving in aforementioned Afghanistan (which also gave me a connection to someone familiar with something from my own life that few around me has experience with).  I mostly ended up running with a loose group of people from the Chicago area.  But also some people from various parts of the country including DC, New York (of course) and Florida.

I don't know if those kinds of communities for on-line anymore, though I'm sure they do.  I am not involved in any such community anymore.  Eventually, new types of social media appeared, especially in the face of the crumbling LiveJournal application, which was of course acquired by an odd Russian company.  There was a time when those media types could integrate with live journal, so I was able to post twitter summaries every day and had a custom article posting mechanism via PubSubHubbub.  But I don't remember what happened to the twitter feed, which I had actually forgotten I even used!  I never use twitter now.  And the article publication was via Google Reader, which was cancelled (no comment).  So LiveJournal is dead for me.

I think there is only one pure LiveJournal friend that I have kept in touch with via other social media.  I can see what he's up to on Facebook.  The rest have vanished in to the unfathomable deeps.  I miss all of you!