slemslempike pointed out to me the other day that 21 May was the tenth birthday of this Livejournal. Happy birthday to it! This was the first entry, in which I met both Neil Gaiman and the then prime minister of Serbia, though I have since imported into LJ entries from two previous desultory attempts at blogging.Livejournal is not what it was. My backdated f-list page from the day I started it has about 150 entries of the same date; ten years on it's more like 50. Glad to see that some people are still posting just as much now as they did then (and you know who you are, or at least you will when you look at the page); some have drifted away entirely, but others are simply expressing themselves elsewhere these days. I guess the peak may have been around 2005-2006, before the lure of Facebook and Twitter and the irritations of LJ's policies and performance eroded the momentum. I'm aware that I don't post as often as I did in the hey-day, or comment as much as I used to on other people's posts; I agree with whoever it was that suggested that those of us who are now reading stuff online on devices with crappy keyboards (or no keyboards at all) write less than we used to, because it is a less pleasant experience. I detected a modest revival of fortunes in LJ activity last year, but I doubt that it will ever return to former heights.
I've enjoyed it though, and I think I will keep it up until there is good reason to stop. I do like LJ's archiving of my thoughts about life, as opposed to the black hole of Facebook and the brevity of Twitter, and I regularly back up with ljarchive and onto mirrors at dreamwidth and my own site. I have got to know some very pleasant and very interesting people here - most recently I met
webcowgirl, before her I think the aforementioned slemslempike. I'm sorry to have lost those who have gone - particularly thinking here of blue_condition, who I never met but who I had many excellent exchanges with before his unexpected departure from the scene, and also xnamkrad, davidstewart and astromachy. Stay well, the rest of you, and keep writing when you can.