A bunch of teenagers blogging at each other

The Web That Was is a collection of memories of the Internet (yes, nerds, technically not just the web) before it consolidated to 4 or 5 websites. You can learn more about my motivations from this post.
These are mostly a personal retelling of memories and not well-researched information about general topics. If you are looking for something like that, though, https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/ seems like a good resource.
Btw if you want to share some of your own memories, feel free to post 'em to #thewebthatwas on BlueSky - I'd love to read them.

Alright, here's the 11th post on this blog (17th post including my other blog). As someone who has kept blogs on and off for the past 25 years, this is probably the most posts I've made on a single blog in...20 years.

In the past 15 years, I've jumped between blogspot, wordpress (self-hosted and not), ghost (self-hosted and not), static site generators like hexo and jekyll, headless CMSes with custom-written front-ends...probably other stuff I've forgotten. Almost every time, I struggle to find things to write and instead focus on tweaking styles, managing infrastructure and deployments, and stuff like that.

This time, for better or worse, it seems I've got things to say. I don't know that anyone cares to read it, but it's nice to be writing it.

Anyway, in honor of that, let's talk about my very first and longest-running blog from the turn of the century. A LiveJournal.

Wtf is LiveJournal?

It's actually still around (if a bit more Russian these days). Here's what the homepage looked like in 2003

Like the screenshot says

LiveJournal.com is a free service that allows you to create and customize your very own "live journal": a journal that you keep online!
You can update with short entries several times a day, or with long entries a few times a week... however you'd like to use it. It's free, it's fun, and it's easy to use!

You know, a blog. Though I think that term was a little bit less well-known back then. I dunno, have a gander at the history of blogging wikipedia page for a history of the practice and the term, which seems to have been coined in 1999.

Back in high school, LiveJournal was one of the hubs of social activity for my friends. That, and AOL Instant Messenger (surely people still know what I mean when I write "AIM" and I didn't need to define the acronym). This would have been round about 2002-2006. Proper "social media" sites like MySpace and Friendster existed. Indeed I had a MySpace account and remember using it, but it was more of a second-tier destination.

AIM was, of course, for instant messaging - chatting. Typically after school or evenings when friends were likely to be online. You know, on the family computer doing homework and stuff. If you never used AIM, one thing to keep in mind (and that I didn't think of as weird until I started thinking about it) is that you could only send messages to people when you were both online at the same time. At least at that time, maybe they added offline message delivery later and I just forgot.

So AIM was for having synchronous discussions with people. LiveJournal was a good way to share thoughts, information, and reflections in longer form asynchronously with everyone. Then, as a blog, of course your friends could all read and comment under it.

I don't know why I'm explaining the concept of a blog to you, You're already here and blogs maybe haven't changed so much in the past 20 years.

So what's so special about it?

I searched for a while to try to find my LiveJournal. Searching LiveJournal itself, searching the Internet Archive, etc. I didn't end up finding mine somehow, but I did find ones belonging to a few of my friends from back then. I was surprised to find that many of them kept theirs up for years after everyone took their social Internet time to Facebook.

It's been weird scrolling through these posts, remembering little moments, seeing myself pop up as a side character from time to time. I must've deleted my account at some point because I don't show on anyone's friends list. And I guess I wasn't able to find any posts I had commented on. Ah, well, it's probably for the best.

A thing that struck me looking back at these posts now is how mundane many of the posts are. In my blogging post-high school, I've always started with or fallen into a specific topic or area of interest to write about. Back in LiveJournal days, we all literally just wrote about the mundane details of our lives. What classes you had that day, which friends you sat with at lunch, what you got up to on weekends, lots of "funny quotes" from friends. Just, well, journaling.

Another thing that struck me about the posts I read was how Pure Distilled Millennial Teenager many of them were. Like some of them wouldn't have been out of place as a bit of environmental storytelling in a Life is Strange game - except maybe for the occasional derogatory use of "gay."

I want to say these posts were remarkably vulnerable, because they were. But as a teenager how can you be anything but? Aspiring musicians talking about difficult home-lives, how they always feel so stupid, how much they hate school (except that one cool teacher), how they can't wait to graduate and move out west. Love-struck theater nerds excitedly watching their crush turn into their first relationship during late nights at school for Tech Week. Kids learning about what and who is important to them, worried about finding their place in the world as they prepare to graduate from high school.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that there was nothing special about LiveJournal. As I wrote recently: it's about the community, not the platform. LiveJournal was not a website, but a time in my life.

What does that mean?

Well I guess what that makes me think is: does the Internet as it currently exists stand to create times like that for people, by and large?

The hyper-connected nature of the Internet means we can be in near-constant contact with people who are important to us. Text messaging, WhatsApp, Messenger, Facetime, Discord - so many of us are constantly engaged in conversation with our friends and family, sometimes across multiple platforms at once. Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok - we've got ways to share shorter-form, asynchronous content a little more indirectly with larger groups of people.

For me, though, I find it helpful for myself to write more and in longer-form. It helps me get my thoughts straight, then to look at them and reflect on them. And, importantly, to learn from them. Again, you know, journaling in a fashion. Or blogging when I decide to put it on the Internet.

And I'm not sure any of the major social platforms really encourage that these days, even where they do technically support it. Now, as I've shared before I haven't actually used a major social platform in 5 years, but back then you weren't writing a 10,000 character post on Facebook. Or if you were, people weren't reading it. And I can't imagine that has changed much.

And, of course, microblogigng platforms like BlueSky or X aren't really set up for everyone to be posting 30-post threads all the time. And I've never used Instagram or TikTok, but from what I've seen, those platforms are centering shorter-form visual content (though it seems the max caption length on Insta is 2,200 characters, which is impressive).

I'm not aware of any major platform for longer-form written content. And even the smaller platforms trying for that space are more from a "monetize your audience" standpoint than a "connect with people" standpoint. Obviously, blogs still exist. You're reading one right now (thanks!) and I check in with a bunch via my RSS reader every day. But I'm not sure they're especially popular these days.

I'm glad to be able to get back into blogging. Other social uses for the Internet are primarily about connecting with other people (or at least "engaging" with their "content"). But I find that blogging is a good way of connecting both with myself and with other people with more nuance and complete thoughts. It's possible I've just never used another social network properly, but none of those have ever felt quite the same to me.

Lessons

So as I like to do in these posts, what does this all tell me about how I want the Internet to be in the future:

The Web should value genuine human connection. I'm sure I've written some version of this on every other post, because that is really a core message of this series. I have Very Strong Opinions about how much the web has been reduced to looking at ads and "engaging" with "content." That's not to say that people can't make connections on current major platforms, but I think that happens despite the design of the platforms rather than because of them.

The Web should help us connect with ourselves as much as others. Here's a new one I think I haven't had on prior posts. Which, in retrospect, surprises me. But that's why I'm doing this, right? Writing these posts has helped me get back in touch with myself and things that are important to me in a way that writing snarky posts and reposting snarky posts on Mastodon and Bluesky really hasn't (surprise!). And even in a way that simply living my principles and interests has not necessarily done if I don't give myself space to reflect on why I'm doing those things and why they're important to me to begin with.

I really want to add a third one here about re-centering the written word and longer-form formats. I definitely feel strongly about encouraging people to deeply-engage with longer-form works and my personal preference of format is the written word. But I'm willing to entertain alternative that this isn't the best format for most people.

Wrap Up

One thing that was fun about LiveJournal was that, in addition to your post body, there were structured fields for "Mood" and "Music."

So, in that spirit: