meteordust | Ten years on LiveJournal

Today is the ten year anniversary of when I joined LiveJournal.

It was still mostly mailing lists for me back then. But I had fallen hard for a show called Smallville (the glory days of Season One!) before actually being able to get my hands on the source (sigh, dialup) and devoured as many fics and vids and recaps as I could (Television Without Pity! and HoYay!). And quite a few Smallville fans were starting to keep blogs - not just on LJ, but Blogger and Diaryland and other places - but somehow LJ ended up being the gravity well. I spent several months stalking blogs before deciding, hey, I want to be part of the conversation too.

Things I posted about in that first year included: Smallville, Lord of the Rings, Hornblower, Ragnarok Online, parodies and memes. One of the first communities I joined:

aus_cult_tv, now sadly all but abandoned, but back then the place for Aussie viewers to talk about shows currently airing and avoid international spoilers.

On occasions, I've been away for months at a time; on others, I've posted every day for a week.

Stats:

524 Journal Entries
1,577 comments posted
1,028 comments received
109 Tags
168 Memories
59 photos
1 V-Gift
15 Userpics

LJ isn't the same place as back then: there have been waves of mass exoduses due to LJ pulling crap on its users, migrations to Facebook and Tumblr and other forms of social media, and just people drifting away from fandom. I have a mirror journal at Dreamwidth that I backup to every so often, but I still use this as my primary journal. Will it still be here in ten years? Who knows.

I've been a fan since I was a kid. But I'm not sure exactly when it happened that fandom as a community became such a key component of my identity. I just know that LJ has been a part of that.