GreatestJournal

» see greatestjournal.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

my years of writing in public went to hardware forums, to donanimhaber and frmtr, where i built forum signatures listing every part in my machine. livejournal-style journals were a different internet, more diary than spec sheet, and greatestjournal sat inside that world. i read about it later. i was never a resident.

greatestjournal started around 2003, one of a number of sites that took livejournal's freely available code and ran their own version. the draw was gjpix, image hosting far more generous than what livejournal itself gave you for free. that pulled in the people who needed to post a lot of pictures, above all roleplayers running characters and fandom groups trading art.

the same generosity was the problem. free image hosting at that scale costs real money, and greatestjournal did not have a business under it to pay the bill. by early january 2009 the site was already throwing errors and pointing people back to livejournal, and it closed for good on 30 january 2009. years of journals and roleplay archives went with it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

greatestjournal existed because livejournal opened its code, and for a while it offered the thing livejournal charged for: room to host images without paying. that made it the natural home for communities built on pictures, above all the roleplay scene, where players kept separate journals for separate characters and needed space for icons and art. at its height it counted its accounts in the millions, many of them second and third journals one person kept for a cast of characters.

~ the day it died ~

there was no drama in the ending, just a bill that could not be paid. the free hosting that made greatestjournal worth using was never going to fund itself, and when the money ran out the site did not wind down slowly. it started refusing logins in early january and was gone by the end of the month, sending its users back to livejournal. the roleplay communities scattered to insanejournal and dreamwidth, other clones of the same code, carrying the habit greatestjournal had given them.

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