So… after many many years since I last noticed/bothered with my old livejournal account I get an email from them out of the blue. It is, indeed, from livejournal. Even so, I was suspicious. When I went to look for livejournal I was a bit surprised to see some Cyrillic font on the site.
Did you know it now has a Russian owner? And that the new terms of service insist on compliance with Russia law? I didn’t. Hell, I didn’t even know the company still existed.
Yep, I closed my LiveJournal once I found out about the sale. It’s interesting that you should bring this up though; I recently had a security scare on the email account that used to be associated with my LiveJournal, and one of the login attempts originated in Russia.
(“No need to worry,” says Microsoft, since a password wasn’t used. But something triggered my authenticator app, which made me check my account activity…)
I wonder how many people even bothered to delete their accounts? If you stumble into old threads here, often former posters have links to their LiveJournal accounts. A great many are still there but haven’t been used in 15 or twenty years. Heck, a lot of people that post now have Facebook or other social sites in their profiles that haven’t been posted to for years but are still valid.
In order to delete my account I’d have to sign back in, retrieve my password, and otherwise come to the attention of the owners. There’s nothing there I don’t have copies of elsewhere (including here), and unlikely anything that would call for being banned. And if I was banned? I don’t think I’d notice.
I’m pretty sure I killed my account years ago. There’s no saved password for it on Firefox so it must be gone. Not that I had anything of much interest there. Not even to me, which is why I dumped the account.
Password recovery was very quick if anyone feels like posting a last “FU Russia!” on their account.
I actually went with “Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine is International Terrorism” as the title and the google translation into Russian as the body. If it’s been censored they haven’t emailed me about it. I was hoping I could join John McCain and Orrin Hatch on the “no visa to Russia”-list, but maybe it’ll just take a little time …
You took the right decision: Better to join John McCain and Orrin Hatch on the “no visa to Russia”-list than where they are now.
I wonder whether deleting a LiveJournal account is as difficult as deleting a Facebook account.
I post LGBTQIA content to LiveJournal several times per month. I have a free account. I echo my posts on DreamWidth and WordPress so if they “disappeared” all my posts, nothing gets lost.
The Russians aren’t my favorite people (or their nation isn’t my favorite nation at any rate) but I don’t see any reason to harbor fears about posting there or see how my participation in LiveJournal aids the Russian War Machine or whatever.