Once upon a time, accounts on blogging site LiveJournal were precious commodities indeed – the site gave out invites for its members to use, but there was no public sign-up page. I got my invite in the autumn of 2003 thanks to sasahara (Account active 2003-2009) from the IRC channel that I frequented at the time.

LiveJournal was the ‘in’ place to be for angst-ridden students like myself, in the dim and distant pre-MySpace past. We were all there; it was our network before Facebook came along and crushed all other ways of swapping awful memes with your friends.

If I recall correctly, on our first encounter, squirmelia (2001-2011) asked for my LJ handle before I was asked for my name. (Though seeing as that night was also my first encounter with eldritchreality_ (2004-2011)_ and charon47 (2001-2010), and my first trip to The Dungeon, that recollection may easily be in error.)

As the place where we bared our hearts for the world to see, there were good and bad times aplenty, all pasted up on the internet – though in the case of the most intense drama, it was locked down for only certain groups of people to see. I recall having “Everyone except X” groups for all three of my University crushes, plus the girl I ended up with.

The LiveJournals we created for characters in a roleplaying game, like my own Kotori (2004-2005) are still there. And aside from an in-character Remus Lupin blog (2003), eldritchreality and I are still the only LJ users to express an interest in combat magic. We spammed countless quizzes and memes together, organised dozens of parties over LJ; my friends and I.

Good times. And yet, in a few short years, it has become nearly irrelevant.

10% of those people I was friends with on LJ have properly closed their accounts; 90% of the rest stopped posting long ago. 20% of the groups I was a member of are closed, 100% of the rest are silent or beset by Russian spammers. 19 of my friends have their own blogs elsewhere. And I irritate everyone I’m sure by syndicating my own posts from my blog to LJ with the accompanying hook link to direct people back to my site.

Scrolling back as far as I go in my LiveJournal friends list turns up a grand total of 10 people still using it, of which 8 post only unprotected entries which I could easily pull using an RSS feed.

Which leads to the conclusion that LiveJournal is taking up its space on my toolbar and in my brain in order that I stay in touch with two people – both of whom I interact with more on Facebook than LiveJournal anyway.

Sad as it is to see LiveJournal wither and die when once it was our companion through our angstiest years, I think it may soon be time to declare it over. Like all technology in our century, it ends not with a bang but with a whimper, simply rendered archaic and irrelevant by its successors.

Like tears in rain, and all that.