LiveJournal
Russian social networking service
LiveJournal (Russian: Живой Журнал or ЖЖ), formerly stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, American blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick.
Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP Media in 2007; the service continued to operate out of the U.S. via a California-based subsidiary, LiveJournal, Inc., but began moving some operations to Russian offices in 2009. In December 2016, the service relocated its servers to Russia, and in April 2017, LiveJournal changed its terms of service to conform to Russian law. As with other social networks, a wide variety of public figures use the service, as do political pundits, who use it for political commentary, particularly in Russia, where it partners with the online newspaper Gazeta.ru.
Features
The unit of social networking on LiveJournal is quaternary (with four possible states of connection between one user and another). Two users can have no relationship, they can list each other as friends mutually, or either can "friend" the other without reciprocation.
The term "friend" on LiveJournal is mostly a technical term, but because it is emotionally loaded for many people, there have been discussions in such LiveJournal communities as lj_dev and lj_biz as well as suggestions about whether the term should be used this way.
A user's list of friends (friends list, often shortened to flist) will often include several communities and RSS feeds in addition to individual users.
“LiveJournal” enters the record as russian social networking service. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what LiveJournal, Russian and social can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“LiveJournal” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, LiveJournal, Russian and social provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q219523. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2005, 2007 and 2009.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “LiveJournal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.