Looking back, these former LiveJournal employees all agree that the service’s more insular nature was never going to be able to compete with the public-facing, data-aggregating might of Facebook and Twitter. Hassan recalls the day that Facebook introduced the concept of the “news feed,” which allowed users to see their friends' updates in a more cohesive (but arguably voyeuristic) way. According to him, LiveJournal’s staff was planning to roll out a similar feature, but they feared the community backlash. “They took the heat for us, in a way, but it also changed the model of privacy in a way we didn’t expect,” he says. “These sites changed the world, but we didn’t try to adapt.”

Despite that, the LiveJournalers Ars spoke to look back at the platform as something more pure than the ubiquitous social media services of today, and it remains a professional experience that they won’t soon forget. “It really comes down to Twitter and Facebook wanting to be the Walmart of social media—everybody has one,” says Paolucci. “We wanted to be the mom-and-pop corner store of social media, but we sold to somebody who didn’t understand that. And that’s where Dreamwidth comes in.”