It’s a daily morning ritual between First Cup of Coffee and Brushing Teeth: Check Livejournal Friends List. When habits get thrown off-kilter, a kind of disconnect develops. It’s like an older pair of glasses you keep around as your spare. When you put them on, they still bring everything into focus, but you get a little dizzy trying to adjust.
Livejournal is down (or running extremely sluggish) at the moment, and the void it left in my life is tremendous. Where will I read my RSS feeds? Where will I find the latest fanfics? Where will I complain about my NaNoWriMo wordcount? What will I do while my main social network is missing?
Users flee to other networks in the interim. We have our usernames reserved on GreatestJournal and JournalFen and even Vox, and you know what? It’s not the same. The vibes of online community and discussion and yes, even the flame wars and the wank don’t feel right on these other sites. And that’s because the communities and the friendships were forged on LiveJournal. The people and the source code might be the same, but not the URL. For some, that’s enough to make any other site a shallow knockoff of the original.
Users complain about LiveJournal “selling out,” and yet when crashes occur, we miss it. Livejournal is not only a major social network; it’s a measure of Intarwebs Zeitgeist, of what’s on the minds of thousands of people at a particular time. Load up a random community’s friends page and take a snapshot of the thoughts and lives of dozens. Ultimately, it’s voyeurism. Unfortunately, I’m addicted. And desperately waiting until those guard monkeys report no problems.
It’s especially bad if you are a comic book fan and read the “When Fangirls Attack!” blog. Links of great headlines go to LJ entries that I can’t read, so not only am I missing my friends, my efforts at getting alternate geek reading are also hampered.
Okay, I admit, I’m a Blogger kind-of-girl. However, I use Livejournal to get the latest deals on anime, j-pop and san-x merchanise from communities at “garagesalejapan” and “cute_stationary”.
Communities are what makes LiveJournal so great for me and there’s hardly a place I can go to where I can buy the entire set of “Alice 19th” manga for $40 (which are 7 volumes running at about $10/ea retail) and buy $100 worth of Sanrio stationary and sticker sacks all in one place.
Thankfully, things got back to normal and I can get back to shopping… Does anyone else shop at garagesalejapan?