lj terminology

friend

adding someone as a friend was more or less the equivalent of following someone on livejournal.

obviously, "friend" is kind of an emotionally charged term to be using with people you don't really know online, especially in the early 2000s when basic internet safety was actually being drilled into people! as such, people would also refer to the act of friending someone as "adding them to your watchlist"

adding someone as a friend meant that they could see all the posts, information, and privileges you had set to friends-locked, even if they didn't friend you back. so, like, yeah obviously asymmetrical power is asymmetrical lol.

flocked

stands for friends-locked. this took me a hot second to figure out back in the day, but you see it quite often when reading abt ancient lj gossip.

it was very common for people's entire journals to be friends-locked back in the day. most people who did this would usually have a public post stating that this was a flocked journal, and that if you wanted access, you could just comment an intro on that particular post.

anyway, yes, the obvious "spreading screenshots of people's flocked posts" wank did happen back in the day as well. but as one might imagine, it was considered just as much of a dick move and privacy violation back then as spreading screenshots from someone's locked/private vent account or discord server would be today.

friends-of

this is the livejournal equivalent of one's "followers". like, you had your friends list (people YOU followed), and your friends-of list (people FOLLOWING you).

watchlist

another word for one's friends list.

on livejournal, you had this thing called the "friends page", which is not (to my knowledge) what we might imagine it to be today (idk abt you guys but when i first read abt people's "friends pages" on livejournal, i thought they were referring to a page that listed out all their lj friends like facebook).

rather, it was the lj-equivalent to one's tumblr dashboard: the posts your friends (the people you were following) made showed up there. i saw fanlore describe it as basically being a special rss feed for lj users, which really is a funny way to describe one's social media feed these days but like. as an rss feed user, i don't think they're wrong!

comms

short for "community"; these were user groups that people could join to post about whatever subject said comm was about. the rough tumblr equivalent to comms would be the Tags.

obviously there are some major differences here. not all comms were open to the public for posting, and obviously, these were moderated by people with mod powers.

said mods could, at the very least, delete your posts— i remember once reading a post about some wank happening in a bandom comm back in the day, where overnight, someone (either a mod pissed at all the wank or someone with a grudge against the comm members hacking into the comm) meticulously went through the entire comm's archive and manually deleted every. Single. Post.

dreamwidth

like i said earlier, it's a fork/clone of livejournal. it was founded in like 2008/2009 in direct response to strikethrough.

it has some qol differences from lj, like the ability to subscribe to someone's journal w/o granting them access to your locked posts (or vice versa), but otherwise i'm under the impression it was designed to just be The Most Optimal Version of Livejournal For Fandom.

*g*

this is something i spent like 2343426542749 years trying to figure out and i'm still not 100% certain what it means. i see it around all the time as like a little aside when reading old lj posts, so i presume it's like one of those things no one thinks to write down the definition for bc everyone knows it (like really who needs to define "lol" these days? we all know it stands for "literally only languishing").

however, at some point when digging around i think the ffa wiki…? i saw it defined EXACTLY ONCE, and then never again.

anyway i think it stands for "grin". probably originated in rp groups, since we all know that asterisks are universal shorthand for describing one's current gestures/actions to the internet *cackles*

strikethrough & the fandom environment circa 2007

okay so we're done w/the glossary now okay cool let's talk about strikethrough because we have to talk abt strikethrough. like, learning abt strikethrough is kind of highkey why i'm so deeply fascinated by this time period for fandom and the internet as a whole LOL. there is obviously a very long write-up of the event and its effects on fandom on fanlore, but i like to explain it as i've absorbed through reading abt it from others, so i'll obviously recount its events n fallout here, too.

so just as tumblr had the porn ban back in december of 2018, lj had a similar fandom apocalypse on their website in may 2007, an event that was later dubbed strikethrough, after the way that purged journals had their names crossed out, or stricken through. the reason this happened is more or less because some conservative group called "warriors for innocence" was pissed off abt all the "nasty porn" in the various big fandoms (like harry potter), esp w/stuff like incest and/or age gaps and/or abuse. regular conservative shit.

anyway, so then lj banned several hundred accounts and comms overnight without warning. a lot of them were in fandom, doing their nsfw fandom things (famously, there was a harry potter one called pornish_pixies that got nuked), but there were also, like, perfect bystanders who got killed as well. i remember when doing some internet fandom spelunking some time ago that a lj comm dedicated to breastfeeding mothers got hit by strikethrough bc titties i guess. groups for rape and abuse survivors, discussions about famous nabokov novel lolita, and so on were banned for having "sexual content" inappropriate For Children or whatever.

and like, the thing is, it was pretty obviously more about censoring sex than it was about actually protecting children, because although i'm gonna pull the source: dude trust me card here yet again, i recall hearing around that the journal of an Actual Known Pedophile remained untouched by strikethrough (and its sequel a few mere months later, bold­through) and was active for years after the fact, literally only going quiet because its owner was sent to prison.

not long before strikethrough happened, there were some other noteworthy Fandom Historical Events that i'm a lot less familiar with involving fanfiction websites establishing themselves with the intent of making profit off its users. people these days are obsessed with The Grind™, and turning a profit off one's hobbies is generally seen as like, The Dream by the modern mainstream, but in case you were not aware, it is super fucking frowned upon to profit off of fandom. like yeah a lot of us do it these days, but this technically puts us in the legal wrong, and ao3 will not have your ass's back if you get in trouble for making money off fandom.

which, like, leads me back to the point i was trying to make: in response to companies trying to profit off of fandom, lj user astolat made a post proposing fans make a fanfiction archive fans owned and ran the servers. that post, titled An Archive of One's Own, is quite literally how ao3 came into existence. the post was technically made a few days before strikethrough itself began, but from what i've read from older fandom peeps who were around at that time, the LJ purges helped it gain traction and seriousness.

and that's how ao3 and the environment we have for fic today came to be.

you also have to remember that ffn was like, The Only large panfandom archive at that time. back in those days, it was use the million scattered archives, dig through various (probably locked!!) lj comms and journals (which— good luck if you were just a lurker and thereby was never let into anyone's flocked journals), or use the Pit of Voles known as ffn.

remnants of lj culture on tumblr

because of course these exist. tumblr was not the successor platform to livejournal for fandom, and fandom was Not such an enormous (and annoying) part of tumblr for years (like, the hipster vs. fandom blog wars were a thing a long time ago For A Reason) for there not to be clear remnants of lj culture on the site.

that's kind of what human beings do when immigrating somewhere new, or are fleeing from their homes: they try to recreate the culture and traditions of their homeland the best they can in the new spaces, even if they aren't the most conducive to replicating them perfectly.

some quirks of lj that i don't think have carried over to any other socmed aside from maybe dw

now, i don't think i've mentioned this on this site before, but i do actually have a dreamwidth of my own that i use on very rare occasions. every so often i hope that the crochety anons who use ffa never find this site because i'm absolutely certain they'll tear me a new one for talking abt lj and its fan culture the way i do (and also for just. not daring to ask real people who were active during lj's heyday abt their experiences on the site lol).

anyway, dreamwidth being a fork of lj, something i wanna mention here abt my experiences using dw that i don't think i've ever seen explicitly stated when people talk abt lj is the existence of like. this page on someone's journal where you can see what their followed feed looks like.

that sounds bizarre, i know. it's a little hard to describe, but it's kind of like if you could go to like https://sincerelyandyourstruly.tumblr.com/dashboard and see what my (anon account) dashboard looked like!!! it's the, "if you were logged into my account, this is what you'd see on my dashboard" page!!!

why did they have this? i have no idea, but i know it still exists on dw. i think it's called the circles page or whatever. and, like, granted, you'd only see the public (not the flocked) posts on this… i'm gonna call it a "proxy dashboard", but like, seriously, what the hell???

and honestly, if i had to guess, this feature was probably how the concept of a taste curator role in fandom evolved as an intuitive niche to have.

so i was reading this post from like 2008 describing lj etiquette, and i'm so fascinated by this that i'm going to translate one of its statements to our modern social media language.

Original Statement:

When you add someone as a friend, it's generally polite to inform them, especially if they have a small number of friend-ofs, and doubly so if all their friends are mutual. Some people don't care. Some people do. Use your best judgement, but a "Hi, your writing looks nifty, I've decided to read it; I found you via ___" is rarely considered out of place if public comments are enabled.

Translation:

When you follow someone, it's generally polite to inform them, especially if you're following a small number of people who are also following them, and doubly so if they follow everyone back. Some people don't care. Some people do. Use your best judgement, but a "Hi, I like your posts, I've decided to follow you; I found you via ___" is rarely considered out of place if asks are enabled.