What made LiveJournal different from a blog in 1999?
Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way to keep his high school friends up to date on what he was doing. He was 18 and could write the code himself, so the site grew feature by feature around what its users kept asking for.
Online diaries already existed. What LiveJournal added was the layer around the writing: friends lists, security filters that let one entry go to six people and the next go to everyone, communities any user could start, mood indicators, and user icons. Facebook did not launch until 2004, and by then LiveJournal readers had been managing separate audiences for five years.
The engineering mattered too. Fitzpatrick wrote memcached in 2003 to stop LiveJournal's databases from buckling under load, released it as open source in 2004, and watched it spread to Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube. Anatoly Vorobey, then a LiveJournal employee, rewrote it from Perl into C. Most sites of that era left nothing behind in anyone else's stack. LiveJournal left a piece of infrastructure that large sites still run today.
What was the Strikethrough of 2007?
Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type and TypePad, announced on January 5, 2005 that it had bought Danga Interactive, the company Fitzpatrick had built around LiveJournal, for undisclosed stock and cash. The combined user base was more than 6.5 million.
On May 29, 2007, users logged in to find hundreds of names crossed out on their friends lists. Six Apart had permanently suspended more than 500 journals and communities, picked out by the interests listed on their profiles, after a group called Warriors for Innocence complained that LiveJournal was hosting predators. The sweep took in Harry Potter fanfiction communities, role-playing journals, discussion of Nabokov's Lolita and journals kept by survivors of abuse. Nobody was warned and nobody could appeal.
Two days later Barak Berkowitz, who ran Six Apart, posted to the LiveJournal news community under the heading "Well we really screwed this one up." He wrote that a planned cleanup of a few journals had turned into a mess and that the suspensions would be reviewed. The apology arrived. The trust did not come back with it.
How LiveJournal ended up in Russian hands
SUP Media, a Russian company, had already licensed the LiveJournal brand and software for the Russian market in 2006. On December 2, 2007, roughly six months after Strikethrough, Six Apart sold it the whole platform. Terms were never disclosed.
Fitzpatrick was already gone. He left Six Apart in August 2007 for Google, where he worked on the Go programming language team, and in January 2020 he left Google to join Tailscale as a co-founder. He has had no role in LiveJournal since the sale.
Ownership kept moving after that. In 2013 SUP Media merged with Rambler-Afisha to form what is now Rambler Group, a holding company that also runs Lenta.ru, Gazeta.Ru and Championat. Sberbank, the Russian state-controlled bank now branded Sber, took a large stake in Rambler Group in 2019 and bought the remainder in October 2020. A site written largely by American teenagers in 2003 is now one line item inside a Russian state bank's media division.
What changed when the servers moved in 2016
In December 2016 LiveJournal moved its servers from California to Russia with no announcement. Users worked it out for themselves before the company confirmed it. The California subsidiary had been the last thing keeping the platform under United States jurisdiction, and it was gone.
In April 2017 the terms of service were rewritten to match Russian law. The new agreement bans political solicitation, requires anything deemed unsuitable for children under Russian law to be flagged as adult content, and requires any journal drawing more than 3,000 visitors in 24 hours to register as a media outlet. The English version opens by telling readers exactly where they stand: "This translation of the user agreement is not a legally binding document." Only the Russian text carries legal weight.
The risk was not hypothetical. In December 2016 a court in Tyumen sentenced blogger Aleksei Kungurov to two years in a prison colony over a LiveJournal post criticizing Russia's campaign in Syria. "We call on Russian authorities in Tyumen to immediately release Aleksei Kungurov and drop all charges against him," said Nina Ognianova of the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2016.
Who owns LiveJournal today?
LiveJournal is owned by Rambler Group, which Sber has owned outright since October 2020. The site is still online. Registration is open, journals from the 2000s still load, and the Russian-language communities are the busiest part of it.
The audience sits where the ownership does. Similarweb's June 2026 figures put Russia as the top country sending traffic to livejournal.com and rank the site within the Russian social media category rather than against global platforms. The English-speaking side has not recovered since 2017.
Security has not helped its case. In May 2020 a file holding credentials for 26,372,781 LiveJournal accounts circulated on hacker forums and was added to Have I Been Pwned, which warned those account holders to treat their passwords as compromised. Rambler Group has never confirmed that a breach happened. Anyone still holding a LiveJournal login from the 2000s should assume the password attached to it is public, and should certainly not be reusing it anywhere else.
Where the fanfiction and journal communities went
Dreamwidth was the direct answer. Denise Paolucci and Mark Smith, both former LiveJournal staff, announced it on June 11, 2008 and opened the beta on April 30, 2009, building on a fork of LiveJournal's open source code. It kept the access filters and the communities, dropped the advertising, stayed in the United States, and it is still running and still importing journals in 2026.
Most of fandom took a different route. Fanfiction moved to Tumblr through the late 2000s, then to Archive of Our Own, run by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works rather than by an owner who can sell it. The personal-journal crowd scattered. Xanga, the other big journal site of the era, went subscription-only rather than foreign, and MySpace emptied out under a string of owners.
The pattern repeats across all of them. A community builds on somebody else's platform, the platform changes hands, the community rebuilds somewhere it controls. LiveJournal is the clearest case, because the exit had a destination written in the same code the users were leaving behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is LiveJournal still active in 2026?
Yes. LiveJournal has run continuously since April 1999 and still accepts new accounts in 2026, but it operates mainly in Russian. Similarweb's June 2026 data shows Russia as the largest source of traffic to the site.
Who owns LiveJournal now?
LiveJournal is owned by Rambler Group, the Russian media company formed when SUP Media merged with Rambler-Afisha in 2013. Sber, the Russian state-controlled bank, completed its purchase of Rambler Group in October 2020, so LiveJournal has sat inside a Sber-owned company ever since.
Can you still log in to an old LiveJournal account?
Old LiveJournal accounts from the 2000s generally still work and their entries are still there, under the Russian-law terms of service adopted in April 2017. Credentials for more than 26 million LiveJournal accounts leaked in May 2020, so change the password before logging back in, and export the journal if you want your own copy.