Livejournal's Russian owners announce new anti-LGBT policy, fandom stages mass exodus

How many different kinds have you capitalized? Oh, you’re amazed by what other people do and don’t do? Yeah. Breaking news!

1 Like

I remember when Livejournal was first sold to SixApart. A lot of people were angry and wanted LJ to be a member’s co-operative, and wanted to raise funds to buy it. This was a politically diverse group, not just the usual lefties who like co-ops (like myself)

Of course, when we found out that LJ was going to be sold, it was too late to do anything.

In hindsight, that was when things started going wrong.

3 Likes

They weren’t covered by the same laws when they were Russian owned but
their servers were located in the US. Moving their servers changed things.
At least according to Wikipedia and the reportage.

1 Like

I am not an expert on this and don’t pretend to be, but AFAIK the Russian government adopted a copy of the EU data protection laws, around the time I retired. As there is no safe harbour agreement between the RF and the US, Russian companies are not allowed to hold personal data on Russian (or EU, I think) citizens on US servers. You may be aware that post-Trump the EU is having doubts about the safe harbour agreement because he has stated (unwittingly I am sure, by implication) that he intends to break it.

Of course, if US citizens don’t want their data hosted on Russian servers - which I can easily understand - the remedy is obvious. As you see, I am posting information to servers hosted in the US. But I am not involved in activities that the US might regard as hostile.

I am not sure you fully understand the complexities of what is going on here. (Until I retired I had a responsibility for DP and the matter of server location is not trivial. For instance, when we adopted Microsoft Azure we had to ensure that our instances were held inside the EU. The customer would not permit us to host them in the US in case personal information was stored. Currently the US, and the UK, are regarded as “unsafe” harbours for personal data by a number of security professionals.)

edit - @KathyPartdeux. I think you’re missing a very significant point when you say they have a choice. Assuming that they want to get Russians using their service, they are required under Russian law to host their servers in Russia and the rest follows.
This does argue that this is nothing to do with intelligence services, who would not be inclined to do anything that would prevent targets of interest outside Russia from posting.

The headline of the blog is exaggerating - the owners aren’t engaged in an anti-LGBT policy, they seem just to be trying to get Russian Federation users, and to do this they have to comply with Russian law. There’s a separate issue of whether it’s a bad law - I think it is - but it is immaterial. Nobody suggests that Baidu host its servers outside China despite it operating under much tighter control than Lj.
Activists in Russia are, as I understand it, engaging in a policy of gradualism. One tactic is to try to identify anti-LGBT activity with skinheads, who are a big problem for the authorities, and link it to a wider attack on minorities. Whereas nobody cares if a load of US or European users desert, not while sanctions are in place.

2 Likes

To be honest, I thought LJ died around the time Emo did.

2 Likes

I actually preferred LJ to Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes friends/acquaintances don’t want to know about certain parts of your life and LJ could accommodate that, unlike Facebook.

Also, didn’t Facebook used to have LJ code in it? Or am I having false memories of seeing it on their open source page?

2 Likes

https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=127 This is the FAQ page for dreamwidth that shows you how to import your old LJ entries.

Oh I agree LJ or similar blog software performs a different service than many other social programs. I just didn’t know it was really used much - sort of like MySpace. But unlike myspace I haven’t heard of it in years.

No idea about the LJ code in FB. You mean like for mark up? Probably to bring people over. You used to be able to make “notes” which were long form posts. I wrote an essay about my medical issue once and posted it that way and link people to it now and again. Also had a short series on great 90s electronica.

Memcached was originally written for LiveJournal but has since been used in lots of platforms, including Facebook.

2 Likes

I think that was my point- they do have a choice. They can move their
servers. They can have their corporate headquarters moved.

It was a business decision (assuming the intelligence orgs aren’t involved
with the biz) to move. They may rethink that decision.

2 Likes

I split the difference, I backed up my data and then deleted all my entries and not will post gay meme’s of Putin.

2 Likes

I don’t remember anyone being terribly pleased when they sold out to the Russians, and some did leave at that time; but since the initial sale there has both been a series of shifts in terms of company operations(in 2007 it was just a change in the org chart; the servers and staff didn’t start moving until some time later) and in terms of just how cheerful and friendly Russia is seen to be. A lot of the really high quality cozying-up-to-the-reactionaries stuff is newer than the livejournal sale.

2 Likes

It isn’t a fundamentally personal problem. Capital is a largely pre-scientific notion that resources can and should be hoarded because people are very different. But we are 99.999% the same person. So the answer would depend upon our systems for symbolizing and distributing both resources and consciousness.

I never said “by whom”, so there is no implication of “other” people. Perhaps I do it through them. Perhaps they are also amazed. Perhaps the ego/tribalism of assuming that I am a separate and distinct unit is not even an accurate basis for formalizing any economic or social activities.

1 Like

I did not know there really was a DeadJournal.
I thought I was being extremely clever. :nerd_face:

3 Likes

There are a lot of places based on LJ code. Deadjournal is one of the still active ones (although looking at the numbers on Wikipedia it’s barely being used).

2 Likes

Just because he got rid of the stupid bowl haircut doesn’t mean he’s dead!

2 Likes

George r. r. martin - i thought he was a long standing livejournal resident.

3 Likes

I would suggest that you replace all your old posts with these as you migrate away…
putin kiss

11 Likes

So when you wrote: “It amazes me how few kinds of business are tried.” you didn’t mean yourself? I don’t think I understand how you pronoun. No worries.

2 Likes

DJ had a lot of people head there after a kerfuffle at LJ (I don’t remember what about - there were quite a few), but they were inhibited by being invite only, so it probably wasn’t a massive number.

1 Like