JournalFen

» see journalfen.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

LiveJournal open-sourced its code, so anyone with a server could run a LiveJournal. Dozens of people did. JournalFen was one of those clones, started in 2003, with one rule that made it different from the rest: you had to be eighteen. Everything else was familiar down to the stylesheet names, and if you look at an archived page today the JavaScript files are still called livejournal.js.

It existed because of a specific eviction. Fandom Wank, a community that documented and mocked fandom's public meltdowns, had been founded on LiveJournal in October 2002 and was deleted there on 14 January 2003 after abuse complaints. It reappeared on Blurty six days later and was deleted there on 9 March. It sat at CrazyLife for a week. On 16 March 2003 it moved to JournalFen and stayed, and the site became known as the address for the thing nobody else wanted on their servers.

None of this reached me. Turkish fandom of that period lived on forums and on MSN, and LiveJournal never took hold here the way it did in English-speaking fandom, so the whole nested drama of clones and evictions is something I read about later rather than watched. The mechanism is what stayed interesting: a platform bans a community, the community walks to a copy of the same software, and the copy inherits both the users and the reason they were thrown out.

~ the record ~

~ the wank ~

Fandom Wank was not a nice place and did not claim to be. It collected screenshots of fights and fake cancer diagnoses and every other genre of internet self-inflicted wound, then wrote them up with the tone of a bored court reporter. The Daily Dot marked its tenth anniversary in 2012 and called it the web's biggest repository of fan drama, which was accurate and also the reason its hosts kept deleting it.

The site's other communities were quieter and were mostly the same people. What JournalFen offered them was an administration that had already decided, before anyone signed up, that documenting a public argument was not the same as harassing somebody. Whether that line held is a separate question, and it was argued about for as long as the site was up.

~ the year it went quiet ~

JournalFen deleted Fandom Wank itself in 2015, and after that mid-year there was no activity anywhere on the site. The reasons were never posted in one place. The archive shows the last full capture of the front page on 22 December 2014 and nothing but a stub after that.

~ the note that stayed up ~

What replaced the site is the part worth recording. By April 2015 journalfen.net was serving a short note that read "Don't bury us yet, everyone" and explained that the operators were having a rough patch getting a new server online. There was a temporary forum for updates. Later the note gained an update: a bare Dreamwidth installation had been stood up at journalfen.com with almost none of the old content on it, so you could reset your password and post something, while everyone waited for a restore that would bring twelve years of entries back.

That note stayed up, unchanged, for the better part of a decade. The temporary Dreamwidth site at journalfen.com was still answering in April 2021. journalfen.net kept serving the same paragraph until the middle of 2023, when the captures turn into host verification pages and then stop entirely on 10 June. Neither domain resolves now. The restore never happened, and nobody ever wrote the sentence saying so.

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