Nobody has to read you.

[andrewducker]

I'm a chatty bastard.

Before I had a Livejournal I ran a small mailing list for a bunch of university friends so that we could keep in touch and chat while we were stuck at our desks. We all had IT jobs, so it wasn't a hassle getting email (this was in 97-ish, before email was pervasive), and we used to chat back and forth about what we were up to, what was in the news, etc.

I was introduced to Livejournal by broin in 2001*, and pounced on it like a crazy pouncy thing, immediately stealing half of his friends list**. It solved the only problem I had with mailing lists, which was "What if people weren't interested in the contents of my breakfast this morning?" With Livejournal people had the opportunity to just not read the bloody thing in the first place, and if they did, they could just hit page-down in the hope that someone else had had a more interesting breakfast.

As LJ was the solution to this problem for me, I'm sometimes bemused that it hasn't solved this problem for everyone - with some of my friends sending me fascinating emails from time to time, but utterly neglecting their livejournals, as their friends "probably wouldn't be interested in that kind of thing."

To which I can only say that your friends will mostly be interested in anything you write, particularly if it's something you care about. If they aren't interested then they, too, will learn the secret of the page-down button, and they certainly won't think any less of you for having posted.

And if they do complain about you for talking about your interest in 18th century steam engines then, franky, fuck them, because they aren't actually your friends.

*Before LJ I had played around with Dave Winer's Radio Userland, a combined RSS reader and blog-posting tool. But frankly it was a lot of hassle to use, and lacked pretty-much all of the things that I love about Livejournal. Pretty neat for last millenium though.

**I think I still have a few of them on here. And lovely people they are too, putting up with me for nearly 9 years so far.

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I felt like part of a community on a couple of newsgroups and a mailing list, back in the day. I've never really felt that on LJ or on Facebook. Facebook "communities" or fan pages or whatever just seem to be people posting about themselves and not really interested in all the other people there except in the most minimal and superficial ways. LJ communities seem mostly the same to me, but maybe I've never seen the right ones.

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

I guess my experience with Live Journal has been different. For example, I'm part of a "chronic pain" group that is very supportive and tries to be helpful to its members.

I also have a lot of close friends, (both local and far away) who are on LJ. So maybe that's why I feel LJ is a viable community.

It's no replacement for real human contact, though.