LiveJournal

LiveJournal is a declining blogging silo.

Notable Events

2006 switch to subdomains

In early 2006 LiveJournal switched all their user's profile home pages from Livejournal.com/username to username.livejournal.com.

See lj2006 for the details of why they switched to using subdomains instead of paths for different users.

Remember LiveJournal

In April 2015, LJ began a promotion to try to bring inactive users back. They sent out an email offering 1 month of paid membership for successfully inviting a friend to start posting again.

Is your Friends page feeling a little empty? Do you have friends who haven't posted in a while you'd like to hear from again? Invite them back, and you can both get some free Paid account time as a bonus!
Our new Remember LiveJournal promotion lets active members like you send their long lost LiveJournal friends an invitation to return. If they accept, both you and your friend will receive a free month of Paid account time!

Criticisms

Deletion of inactive accounts

If your account is inactive (haven't logged in or posted in a while), LiveJournal may delete it, including all posts & permalinks, with only a 15 day email notice.

Thus it appears LiveJournal is slowly and quietly deleting post permalinks from the web.

On 2014-05-05 Tantek Çelik received an email apparently from "lj_notify@livejournal.com":

Subject: Purging of your LiveJournal account

We noticed that your account tantek has less than three entries and hasn't been logged into in over two years. LiveJournal is deleting inactive empty accounts. Pursuant to our housekeeping policy, your LiveJournal account tantek is scheduled to be deleted in 15 days.

If you wish to reactivate your account to avoid this deletion, please visit http://www.livejournal.com and log in within 15 days of this notification.

If you do not remember the password for your account, you can reset it: http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=17. Best regards,
LiveJournal Team
www.livejournal.com/

Controlled by Russia

Not sure about how much (if any) worse this makes LiveJournal as a silo, but it has been offered as sufficient reason to self-host:

2017-01-04 https://twitter.com/Jimminy/status/816828705079173120

@mortonfox @Pinboard yeah, but LiveJournal is controlled by Russia. I'd rather self-host.

2017-04-06 http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/04/random-excuses.html

Livejournal pushed out a revision to their terms of service that emphasize the service runs under Russian law, and specifically requires compliance with Russian law on minors—which makes any discussion of "sexual deviancy" (aka LGBT issues) illegal or at least a violation of the ToS.

2017-04-08 https://io9.gizmodo.com/russian-owned-livejournal-bans-political-talk-adds-ris-1794143772

... the user agreements were changed to prohibit “post[ing] advertising and/or political solicitation materials unless otherwise directly specified in a separate agreement between User and the Administration,” or “perform[ing] any other actions contradictory to the laws of the Russian Federation.” In addition, any blogs that get over 3,000 visitors per days are now classified as media outlets, so they can no longer publish anonymously, use obscene language or share “extremist materials.”

Articles

2019-01-22 Ars Technica: “The Linux of social media”—How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging / George RR Martin's platform switch reminds us of an early blogging giant greatly changed.

Export

In early 2014, Jesse Vincent found that exporting from LiveJournal through WordPress's LJ importer generated a cleaner eventual export than any of the direct Livejournal export tools he found.