Why’s it in disrepute, aside from “no one blogs there any more because no one blogs there any more”? Just curious.
I have a Wordpress mirror and a Blogger mirror. The environments don’t seem to be any better for blogging, and I haven’t picked up additional readers there by having a blog-presence that isn’t LiveJournal.
What’s so great about WordPress and/or Blogger?
Livejournal used to be very popular with Russians. I’m not sure why and I’m not sure if it’s still the case.
Well, it’s Russian-owned. But I don’t think that’s the reason people look down their noses at it. Correct me if you disagree.
Inspired by this thread, I decided to see if my Livejournal account was still active and it was! I had to reset my password…for some reason the default language was set to Italian so I had to change that as well.
I created that account 14 years ago, and I really haven’t done anything with it since.
So I’m not seeing anything particularly disreputable about Livejournal. If anything, I think of it as a forgotten site…kind of like Myspace which is still around…
The (former) LJ communities that I belonged to migrated because of the new Russian TOS. Basically it would have let the censors flag LGBT stuff as sexually inappropriate, something like that.
I wasn’t aware LiveJournal still existed. I still associate it with oversharing, passive-aggressive college students in the mid-aughts.
My blog is focused as obsessively as I am on the subject of being genderqueer. That’s pretty LGBT-flavored. And I review gay, lesbian, intersex, and transgender books and delve into relevant issues. I’ve never had any LJ interference in anything I’ve done. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s not a reason for people migrating elsewhere.
But I thought it was already regarded as not a place to be by the time the Russian overlords took it over?
There have been a few controversies through LJ’s history: in 2008, not long after being taken over by SUP, an international company that was founded in Moscow (but still housed on US servers), LJ started hiding some interests from ‘top’ lists, and there was kerfuffle around showing pics of breastfeeding - images were blocked.
They didn’t truly move to be Russian-controlled and requiring journals to obey Russian law until 2017, including having to register if you have more than 3000 daily readers. The binding terms of service are in Russian; the English user agreement is specifically flagged as being non-binding, and the ‘valid’ one is the Russian-language one. Bad luck if you don’t speak Russian.
By that stage, though, LJ was largely viewed as pretty old hat - after being around since 1999, they’d gathered some cobwebs.
Yeah, apparently the Russian TOS says that LGBT stuff could be flagged – not that it necessarily would have been, but they could explicitly do it. At this point was when everyone I know started severing links and cross-posting and often just deleting their LJs.
Even before that, though, it was kind of creaky and didn’t work well. If you liked graphics and/or were in a younger crowd, you’d already moved to Tumblr, and if you liked text, you’d already moved to Dreamwidth, which is basically a LJ clone but works better and more cleanly and without all the ads, and lets you import your LJ so you don’t lose any posts/comments. I really like Dreamwidth! There are still some of us text-post lovers knocking around there.
Recently (in the last year or so) there was an LJ password leak (which I was affected by) where passwords and linked email accounts were leaked, so if you share that same password/email with other sites, you’d better change them.
I’m on DreamWidth too. Maybe I should centralize that one. It’s the same blog, just echoed in different places (DreamWidth, LiveJournal, WordPress, Blogger). Of the four, I’m least fond of Blogger; dont’ see much to embrace in WordPress either, although it’s okay.
I’ve found Dreamwidth to have a fairly vibrant fandom community, where “fandom” is a pretty big label – I usually talk about books, books, books; right now I’m involved in Hugo Award reading. If you add people to your circle that you find interesting and comment on their posts, they’ll often add you back and I at least have found it pretty easy to find and feel like I’m part of community there.
One of my DW friends used to host “F/F friday” where she would read and review books featuring F/F relationships every Friday and encourage others to do the same. That’s kind of fallen by the wayside now with pandemic, but that’s the kind of fun thing that can go on 
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Okay, I’ve decided that when I post links to my blog posts (for example in Facebook groups I participate in), I’m posting links to the Dreamwidth versin from now on. The LJ will continue to get updated along with the rest.