Arstechnica Article on LJ (and DW, in a small way)

I saw this article on Twitter, and spent an amiable few minutes reading through it. I was fairly late to LJ - I think I joined in or around 2004, having been led there by someone in a Battlestar Galatica RP forum. I started using LJ less when work soft-blocked it, by making it impossible to connect to the page that indicated a successful login, and then gave up completely when the new Russian owners changed the ToS to allow them to block LGBTQIA+ content, because to hell with that.

Arstechnica - "The Linux of social media" — How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging

I remember trying InsaneJournal for a while, but I've always been a bit slow to adapt to new social things/platforms/experiences/etc, but I liked LJ. I was comfortable with it, I knew nice people there, I liked the community. I don't miss the drama that erupted at times...

I'm lucky; a few of the people I got to know on LJ are still around and talking to me via various means, but I have the feeling that I'll never again have the experience that being part of a big BSG shipper community on LJ was. While there are reasons I should maybe be glad of that, they're nowhere near as important as the reasons that I'm sad about it; the people I got to know on LJ made a huge impact on my life, who I am, and what I did/do.

Thanks for all the fish?