The Livejournal Effect

A peek at an oft-ignored early 2000s incubator for online norms.

Whether it’s the ephemeral algorithm or an actual uptick in discourse, I keep seeing takes on Tumblr and fandom from many corners that don’t have much background knowledge on the matter and don’t seem particularly interested in the history behind the conventions being criticized.

I can’t help but feel like we are short shrifting Livejournal and its contemporaries and predecessors by only looking at Tumblr. The patterns we see play out today have adapted over time, and we can see how much more intensified everything has become in retrospect.

That’s why I really appreciate when

Katherine Dee

makes the podcast rounds, because she knows her stuff. Recently, she made a great appearance on

Meghan Daum

’s Unspeakable podcast.

One of the questions that tickled my interest was, “When did social justice get mapped onto obscure fandom for fictional characters?”

It’s as good angle to look at Livejournal’s role in the current landscape.

Activism and campaigning has been part of fandom since the golden age of Hollywood; it was just primarily centred on fandom itself and the source material itself. This took the form of campaigns against cancellations to demanding better (or any) representation of LGBT issues and people of colour, fans have been vocal about what they want.

One of the earliest cases of online era organized social justice activism is that of The Harry Potter Alliance, which was founded by Andrew Slack in 2005, and rebranded to Fandom Forward in 2021. An early mission of theirs was to raise awareness about the Sudanese genocide of the early 2000s, as well as human rights violations in Burma and Congo.

Ryan Gosling at the MTV Movie Awards, 2005. Darfur was a big celebrity cause.

Usually when people talk about online social justice (especially the fannish kind) they aren’t referring to actual non-profits that may have been set up, but I don’t think you can talk about fan activism without mentioning HPA/FF because of how deeply rooted in fandom its creation was:

“The world needs a Dumbledore, and then when I read that fifth book, where Harry starts an activist group named after Dumbledore - Dumbledore's Army - I thought, the world needs a Dumbledore's Army, and I began imagining myself going into the Room of Requirement and meeting with young people as if we were part of Dumbledore's Army - and each of us could be like Harry Potter - could see ourselves in the hero role, not where we're the chosen one to bring down all evil or anything like that, but where each of us plays a valuable part in changing this world, where we are the shapers rather than the spectators of history.”

— Andrew Slack, interviewed by Henry Jenkins, 2009

I don’t think we can discount the influence it would have in empowering fans to use their fandom as a driving force to accomplish change.

When online social justice is discussed, what is usually referred to is horizontal peer-on-peer call-outs. Tumblr was absolutely essential as a landscape for this to flourish, from accounts such as Your Fave is Problematic, the popularity of “receipt blogs” and the interface of the site.

But this tendency to target your peers has roots in Livejournal wank and meta communities, it just took some time to hit critical mass and spread beyond contained spheres.

Livejournal was an early incubator of the online climate we see today, simply by default that it was so early. Aside from Tumblr, Livejournal predates Myspace, Facebook, 4chan, YouTube, Reddit, Bebo, Twitter, and Friendster.

Livejournal was open source, ad-free and branded itself as socially conscious, even having a social contract in place. And this was a big deal because the exodus from Livejournal was marked by violations of these promises.¹

Most of its features are now commonplace, such as icons, a central update feed, and threaded comments. Some of its best features never made the jump to mainstream, such as personalized filtering and variable privacy settings. The use of “current mood” settings added perspective, “currently listening to” added background context, and icons were often used for additional flourish. (Did my cohort and I pay for extra icons? Yes, yes we did. Icons were a big deal.)

Before gifs, there were icons. The 100x100 size allowed for more creativity than today’s smaller icons. There was an actual “scene” for icon makers, much like for gifmakers today. All above icons by me.

Discussions about the shifting landscape of online fandom were being had as early as 2003. User prillalar explored the difference between mailing list fandom and journal based fandom. Mailing lists were insular, “content flows into it, but doesn't flow out -- it's all in there, and it doesn't mix with all the other mailing list bubbles.”

Journal based fandom centred around users themselves and content became transitory, flowing through your feed. You would absorb a lot of content that you weren’t necessarily interested in, inherently cross-pollinating topics across networks.

Mailing list bubbles vs the transient journal landscape, Graphics from prillalar.

This user-centric interface is the most common online today, and has spawned many think pieces about how narcissistic and antagonistic we’ve become as a result. Livejournal users were not immune to this phenomenon.

This new interface brought on a shift in fannish behaviour in moving away from “One True Fandom” into multifannish behaviour because your fandom participation wasn’t siloed in insular communities; everything shared the same space and the same importance.

Part of why Tumblr has been so influential is the frictionless landscape of endless content, and while Livejournal wasn’t as bad—there was no reblog/retweet/restack function, so posts remained static—you would still be exposed to so much more content than you signed up for. Following people meant learning about their interests. It was easier to dabble in multiple fandoms simultaneously—which to me was always the “healthiest” way to fandom because it meant your attention and investment was diversified and not tied to a single community or tribe.²

Livejournal was not a stranger to meta content and self-referential analysis. The more serious discourse would take place on Metablog, Metafandom, and Fanthropology among others. These were typically more good-natured communities interested in discussion and understanding, but people still considered these communities as “merely a way to assemble a mob.”

And these are the accounts that never set up to be antagonistic.

Then there was Fandom_Wank and its associated offshoots, of which there were plenty. F_W was created in 2002, and defined wank as, “Self-aggrandizing posturing. Fannish absurdities. Circular ego-stroking. Endless flamewars. Pseudointellectual definitions.”

This wasn’t a community intent on social justice, but the normalization of call-outs (albeit over ridiculous things) turned outsiders onto “fandom spectating.” The community was banned from Livejournal pretty quickly after being reported for abuse and harassment. Undeterred, they took up on different pastures, but still used Livejournal as a primary source for content.

A tipping point into what we would call social justice happened in 2009 with what became known as Racefail 2009. Combating racism is a worthwhile cause, but just like such attempts are often derailed and co-opted today, Livejournal was no better. Dogpiling was morally justified, even if the crowd participating in it had ulterior motives.

A comment in a 2008 post in favour of more shunning said it best:

“I think part of the problem with fannish dogpiles is that there is no way to isolate them. Once they've started, there's no way to predict in which direction they will spill -- or how flists³ will overlap. They tend to function more like volcanoes, where there's a single point of erruption but the lava flows out in multiple unpredictible directions and people either try to stop the flow or get the hell out of the way.”

No matter how well-intentioned the call-outs might be, the result of those efforts was questionable then, and now? If Livejournal was a conduit for these lava flows, then Tumblr removed all the barriers for an even wider spread.

And nowadays, everything is a fandom greenhouse waiting to be inhabited.

1. The 2007 sale to Russian SUP was the nail in the coffin in my corner of LJ. 2007 is also when fandom accounts were terminated en masse, escalating migration and directly leading to the foundation of the Organization of Transformative Works (OTW), “a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fan works and fan culture in its myriad forms.”

OTW has become a target of Tumblr’s purity culture as well, a topic that deserves a deep dive of its own.

2. This could definitely be a personal bias of mine.

3. Colloquial term for “friends list” also known as individual unique feeds.