Happy New Year!

[sholio]

It's 2026, and the winter-spring exchange cycle is getting underway!

Candy Hearts / candyheartsex is now in signups! This is a low minimum relationships exchange (gen or ship) that reveals on Valentines Day.

purimgifts is also in signups! This is a low-minimum exchange for fanfic and/or podfic with a side helping of art, focused on characters who are at least one of: women, Jewish, or persecuted (preferably by evil viziers).

traumaticexperiences is a new exchange currently in nominations. Does what it says on the tin (an exchange about characters dealing with trauma).

amperslashexchange still has two lingering pinch hits, if anyone is interested! One is for Guardian (book, show, or RPF); the other has some various video game and book fandoms. At the current time, PHs are due on Jan 2 for a hopeful Jan 3 opening, but another extension is possible.

In other news, it sounds like LJ might be in its final death throes - see this bluesky thread from rahaeli/synecdochic about it. She recommends that you save anything off there that you want to keep.

I've kept my LJ account all this time despite being aware of the risks because a) I want to keep my blog links active as long as possible since I had so much fic posted on there back in the day, and b) I don't want to lose the ability to manage the various communities I used to run or co-run (sgagenficathon and stargategenrec among them) just in case of a troll takeover or similar. It's still useful for me to be able to log in occasionally to view locked posts, and I've really appreciated LJ's continued existence as a fic archive as I've gotten into some older fandoms over the last few years. (Torchwood was especially that way - a *bunch* of fic was only on LJ and had never been ported over to other archives.)

So I was feeling a little wistful about no longer having that option in future fandoms, but then I got to thinking about the sheer longevity of it. It was 20 years ago when I got into LJ, circa 2005 or so. 20 years before 2005 was 1985. In 2005, almost nothing about the internet as I had known it in the mid to late 90s was still the same. So the fact that I could go dumpster diving for 15-year-old fanfic in Torchwood fandom was really extraordinary compared to the experience I would have had in 2005 looking for fic from 1990. The most important rule of the early internet for me was that nothing lasts forever, and while it's been nice to have the longevity of certain aspects of its current incarnation, all things internet will still pass eventually.

Still, if there's anything over there you want to save, of your stuff or someone else's, now would be the time.

Edit: As per a question in the comments, does anyone know a way to save an archive of pictures from LJ without having to do it manually? A tool, technique, etc ... this is not for me, but I'd like to help if possible!

Comments

[sovay]

Still, if there's anything over there you want to save, of your stuff or someone else's, now would be the time.

Do you have any suggestions for offsiting a photo archive? My entire journal in terms of posts and comments has been backed up to DW for years, but the pictures famously did not auto-transfer and there is stuff there that I care about.

[sholio]

Alas, I do not - I never really used the picture function much - but maybe someone here does! I can edit the question into the post in case there's someone with expertise hanging around.

[sovay]

I can edit the question into the post in case there's someone with expertise hanging around.

Sure! I would greatly appreciate that. I lost a lot of otherwise and accessible photos in the death of Bertie Owen.

[sholio]

Done! Hopefully there is someone with know-how hanging around. And that is really awful about losing the photos - I'm so sorry about it.

[queenbookwench]

How would you save something by someone else?

[sholio]

Like if there's a fic you don't want to lose, copy and paste it into a text document, or download a piece of fanart. Basically, if there's anything on LJ that you have bookmarked/memory'd or might ever want to revisit, you should probably save it to your personal files because it may not be there forever.

[foxmoth]

On macOS, if I'm pressed for time, I use a lot of File - Print - "print to"/save as PDF to just grab content off J. Interesting Webpage (especially with images) and deal with the formatting later. I don't know offhand if there's an equivalent for Windows or Linux etc. (This is no good for video embeds or audio, obvs...)

[sheron]

End of an era. My profile on there is from 2002, since I was invited by someone I knew back when it was still invite only.

I actually feel like it is a lot harder to navigate the fanfic written on LJ in those days than it ever was with older pre-LJ fandoms since they were either on mailing lists (which tended to be backed up to websites) or later on individual archives and ff.net. Whereas I could never find anything on LJ ever again...

I had a lot of good times on LJ back before it was sold.

[cornerofmadness]

thanks for the community recs and the LJ info

[sallymn]

I do back up, but am not mourning yet - as I said elsewhere if I had a dollar for every time someone here (or to be fair other sm sites) has predicted LJ is about to die I would be a much wealthier person.

So I'll wait and see. (And regarding the question about saving pictures, I am not sure there is a wau - another reason for hoping LJ survives in some form is I have thousands of icons on my scrapbook there, I used it for years to store and link the ones I made. I do have copies on my computer of course, but my links to them on DW would also vanish...)