LiveJournal was founded in March 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick, a student at the University of Washington, who built it initially to keep his friends informed of his own life. What he created instead was the first great architecture of the personal web: a platform on which millions wrote honestly about depression, desire, illness, fandom, and the daily texture of being alive. At its height it numbered some thirty million accounts, and its comment threads sustained friendships and communities that existed nowhere else on earth.

The platform was acquired by the Russian media company SUP in 2007, and its decline was thereafter gradual, then absolute. When, in April 2017, new terms of service placed all user content under the jurisdiction of Russian law — with provisions alarming to LGBTQ+ users in particular — the remaining community departed in a matter of weeks. The servers had already been moved to Moscow. LiveJournal continues to operate in name, tended now by strangers in a country whose laws would have criminalised much of what made it sacred.