Wandering back to LiveJournal and the era of online diaries
Long before TikTok creators rehearsed their hooks and Instagram influencers curated their grids, a generation of writers poured their thoughts into online diaries on platforms like LiveJournal, Diaryland, and Open Diary. The late nineties and early two-thousands spawned a curious digital subculture where personal blogs doubled as confessional booths, fan forums, and meeting points for teenagers nursing their first heartbreaks. It was a weird, tender, and oddly intimate era of the internet, and its echoes still ripple through how we share ourselves online today.
Few platforms captured that mood better than LiveJournal. Founded in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick, it offered something simpler than the algorithmic feeds we now know: a chronological stream of journal entries, a friends list, and communities built around shared obsessions. For Australian users in particular, LJ became a refuge during long summer arvos spent indoors, away from the scorching sun and the cricket scores, with the family desktop humming on a BigPond dial-up connection.
The golden age of digital diaries
The original boom in online journaling was almost accidental. As broadband trickled into homes across the western world, curious netizens discovered they could publish their inner worlds without any real technical know-how. Sites like Diaryland, which launched in 1999, and Pitas.com helped pioneer the format, but LiveJournal's combination of friends lists, custom themes, and user-submitted communities made it the dominant home for digital diarists by the early 2000s.
Writers were not just posting diary entries, either. The platform encouraged elaborate mood icons, filtered access for friends-only posts, and long comment threads where strangers became confidants. For many users, the daily ritual of writing a locked post and waiting for replies became as essential as a morning coffee or a round of brekkie before work. The platform cultivated a sense of readership that felt personal in ways that today's sprawling social networks rarely manage.
Communities built around personal journals
What set LiveJournal apart from later blogging tools was its emphasis on community. Users could create or join "LJ communities" centred on everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer speculation to support groups for people struggling with depression. These spaces blended fandom with genuine emotional support, and they often blurred the line between entertainment and therapy.
Membership numbers were part of the culture. Some users wore their follower counts like badges, while others cultivated small, tight-knit groups of mutual support. Comment threads could stretch into hundreds of replies, with regulars greeting each other by handle like old mates at a barbie. The platform also pioneered concepts like friending and defriending as social acts, complete with quiet drama when someone vanished from a friends list without explanation.
Australian voices in the LJ scene
Australia had its own distinct corner of the LiveJournal world. Local communities popped up around university campuses in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, where students traded tips on cheap eats in Carlton and debated the merits of footy codes during long winter shifts. Time zone differences meant Aussie users often woke up to dozens of comments from American friends, giving the local scene a quietly cosmopolitan flavour.
Aussie slang bled into the diaries themselves. Posts peppered with words like arvo, servo, and keen as sat comfortably alongside angsty poetry about unrequited crushes and detailed trip reports from weekend drives down the Great Ocean Road. Several Australian writers gained significant followings for their travel writing, including journals documenting Greyhound bus journeys across the Nullarbor and tales of working holidays in London. The platform gave these voices a stage that Australian publishing of the era rarely did.
Fandoms, roleplay and creative writing
Beyond personal confession, LiveJournal became a hub for creative collaboration. Roleplay communities based on Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and various anime series attracted thousands of participants who wrote characters in long, interwoven narratives. Original fiction communities flourished, with members trading critiques and hosting quarterly challenges that resembled informal writing workshops.
The platform's tagging and filtering system made it easy to curate reading lists, while locked posts allowed writers to share unfinished drafts with trusted readers before going public. Many authors who later published novels through mainstream Australian presses, including several from the small but proud Adelaide indie scene, trace their early confidence to feedback received in LJ writing groups. It was, in many ways, the first true social network for writers.
The decline and diaspora
LiveJournal's slow decline began in the mid-2000s as MySpace, then Facebook, started pulling users toward more visual and less text-heavy platforms. Server migrations, ownership changes, and a controversial 2017 decision to preserve content hosted in Russia created uncertainty that pushed remaining users toward alternatives. Dreamwidth, an open-source fork launched in 2009, became the spiritual successor for those unwilling to abandon the format.
The diaspora scattered writers across Tumblr, WordPress, and eventually Twitter and Bluesky. Each new home carried traces of LJ culture: the friends-only post, the mood indicator, the elaborate tag system. Yet none quite replicated the strange intimacy of scrolling through a friends list on a lazy Sunday, reading entries that felt like overhearing a conversation at your local café.
Comparing platforms then and now
| Platform | Era of peak use | Core format | Community tools | Privacy controls |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LiveJournal | 2000-2007 | Chronological journal entries | Communities, friends lists, comments | Locked posts, filters, friend-only access |
| Blogger | 2003-2010 | Blog posts with comments | Comment moderation, basic follow | Public by default, limited privacy |
| MySpace | 2005-2008 | Customisable profiles with music | Friends lists, bulletins | Limited controls |
| Dreamwidth | 2009-present | LJ-style journals | Communities, comment threads | Advanced filtering, access codes |
| WordPress.com | 2007-present | Flexible blog format | Comment threads, followers | Password protection, private blogs |
| Tumblr | 2010-2015 | Multimedia reblogs | Tag communities, asks | Limited post-level privacy |
| Substack | 2020-present | Newsletter-style posts | Subscriber comments | Email-based subscriptions |
Preserving the digital footprint
For those looking to revisit or salvage their old journal entries, a few practical steps can help.
- Export your LiveJournal entries using the platform's built-in XML download tool before any further changes to ownership.
- Back up comments and community posts separately, as these often vanish when a journal is deleted.
- Consider migrating to Dreamwidth, which allows importing old LJ content with relative ease.
- Archive important entries on personal USB drives or external hard drives, especially if you travelled across regional Australia and cannot always rely on stable cloud access.
- Add DMCA protections to any republished material if you are concerned about content being scraped or reposted without permission.
The most rewarding part of returning to old diaries is rarely the content itself. It is the recognition that the person who wrote those posts is still recognisably you, even after a decade or two of changes. Reading an entry about a failed HSC exam or a first crush can feel like receiving a message from a younger sibling, full of feelings you barely remember having.
If you once kept an online diary and feel the urge to revisit that era, there is no better time than now. Sign back into your old account, dust off that forgotten handle, and see what your past self had to say. Many former LiveJournal users in Brisbane, Perth, and Hobart have started reviving dormant journals as a form of creative practice, treating the entries as a low-pressure writing habit rather than a public performance. The platform might creak a little, but it still loads, and your archived memories are still waiting there, one entry at a time.