Open call to anyone still listening - archiving old LJ comms

[tenlittlebullets]

If you modded LiveJournal communities back in the day, please consider archiving them to Dreamwidth NOW. So much 2000s internet history lives there, and if LJ falls off the internet (as it very well might, depending on how things go in Russia in the near future), links will break and vast amounts of it will be lost. Wayback Machine only captures public posts; a Dreamwidth import can pull in locked posts and comments, and allow people to view them by joining the comm.

If you don't want to go to the hassle yourself, I will happily do it for you - just DM tenlittlebullets on DW and temporarily add 10littlebullets on LJ as a community mod. I can do it under this account, a catchall archivist account, or a specific one created just for the comm. If you want the Dreamwidth version to be co-maintained or transferred to your DW account, I can also do that.

If Dreamwidth's importer locks up, as it might if there's an archiving stampede, this Tumblr post (+reblogged mirror just in case) has instructions for exporting comments in XML format. LJ still has a built-in page that lets you do the same for posts. Dreamwidth won't let you import from these XML files, but they're still human-readable and can probably be imported to Wordpress if you want to host an archive later.

(Pre-emptive permission: Feel free to link, copy, repost, and spread this post wherever you want. Also feel free to translate it into any language you want. I would be both gratified and extremely relieved if any Russian speakers want to spread it around to people who were active on ЖЖ back in the day and are in a position to safely back up their old content; the offer to help with importing is still open, even if we have to communicate through Google Translate!)

Comments

[tenlittlebullets]

Thanks!

Man, there's a special kind of nostalgia that comes from digging back into posts you were too young to have been there for, isn't there? (Granted, I'm old enough that for me it's mostly Usenet, mailing-list archives, and ancient BBSes, but still. A surreal experience.)

[luckyzukky]

yeah it's definitely a weird kind of nostalgia, almost like you wish you were there, and that it feels almost familiar, but obviously you weren't there and it's just some sort of false nostalgia mixed in with whatever real memories of the old internet you have. if that makes any sense haha

but i really love looking through icon posts and backing them up, i even wrote a whole post about ripping photobucket icons off lj posts lol (shameless self promo of that because i kinda just posted it into the ether but i might as well share it on a post like this i guess)

[tenlittlebullets]

Total sense. And there's enough continuity in online culture that some of the norms/slang/discussions are achingly familiar, mixed in with relics you've only heard about or don't even recognize. Uncanny wandering in a partially-strange land.

(There's also the suuuper surreal experience of diving into stuff you could've been there for, but weren't... the Fark 9/11 live-reaction thread haunts me, fascinates me, and every so often unceremoniously body-slams me back to the Bush administration.)

[luckyzukky]

oh gosh i read that thread some time ago since i was curious, and as someone who lives in nyc and wasn't alive for 9/11 it was definitely a surreal read haha

[goodbyebird]

Bless you for saving old icon posts. I recent deleted my icon folder by accident and still pretty heartbroken over it. Will give the photobucket a try later with a mood theme or two :)

[luckyzukky]

thank you, i really appreciate it! the tutorial's a bit cumbersome if you don't know much about command line applications but once you have it installed i think it should be pretty easy to follow :) feel free to comment on the post if you need help ^^