Привет! LiveJournal imports may be slow

[denise]

Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)

Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.

I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!

С Новым Годом, and welcome home!

EDIT: Большое спасибо всем за помощь друг другу в комментариях! Я ценю каждого, кто предоставляет нашим новым соседям информацию, понятную им без необходимости искать её в Google. :) И спасибо вам за терпение к моему русскому переводу с помощью Google Translate! Прошло уже много-много лет со школьных времен!

Thank you also to everyone who's been giving our new neighbors a warm welcome. I love you all ❤️

Comments

[phd_ru]

Thank you! Thank you!! Thank you!!! And Happy New Year!!!

[svensk_vanja]

👍
🎄!

[planeta_terra]

Thank you! Спасибо!

[ride_4ever]

Good that you've posted about slowing those imports. Unrelated to the immediate situation, one of my New Year's resolutions was to import a comm to DW that I've maintained "over there". Now I know to wait a while longer for our Russian friends to get settled in their new Dreamwidth home.

With all love for Dreamwidth, my fandom home! <3

[soc_puppet]

Hello, and welcome! I don't know any Russian, but if you want to practice English (or maybe Esperanto), you're welcome to do so at my account 🙂

[exorthodox]

Thank you, your sticky post with the links for newcomers turned to be rather useful! Though I am not so strong in fics, I've got no less fantastic things about our reality, and I will be grateful for anyone who will support my attempts to post it in English by fixing language inaccuracies.

[sixbeforelunch]

Привет, новые русские друзья!

It has been years since I studied Russian so sadly I cannot converse, but welcome. :)

[abuela]

спасибо)

[hygiy]

They will block DW in Russia in case of some significant activity here.

[denise]

We are very familiar! We were on the Rozkom block list for many years, because we delete their emails without reading them. (I actually got very suspicious when they unblocked us, because we didn't do anything to make them unblock us or delete any of the content they supposedly objected to.) I started working on LiveJournal in 2001, and we made Dreamwidth in 2009 -- we have told the Russian government to fuck off many, many times.

[juan_gandhi]

Thank you so much for doing all this! Yes, people are coming here. It's like a renaissance.

[nondenomifan]

I won't be happy until the nekid_spike LJ community makes the conversion. They've lost so much of what used to be a thriving community over there. I've tried to tell them they'd do much better if they moved here, but they don't seem to believe me. I hate having to sign into LJ to post links to my DW in their community, but their prompts are good.

[sisterxsunshine]

Добро пожаловать нашим новым русским друзьям!
(Welcome to our new Russian friends)

- Ryn

[lapsa]

Thanks!

[nedosionist]

Much thanks for keeping DW going!! Happy New Year!

What may help, medium term:
>>We will not require identification for you to post or comment.
1. Please consider codifying that pledge into the DW Terms of Service. This may be especially pertinent, given recent proliferation of nefarious Digital ID projects in many far away places.

2. Some Russian residents fleeing LJ may start frequenting DW as readers/lurkers. So it can be anticipated that Russia may then attempt to target, censor and blacklist DW. It may help for DW to do some forward-looking planning soon, on hardening the site. Unfortunately, the state got pretty good at their bad behavior.

Many of this wave of "Russian" folks fleeing LJ to DW may actually be living all over the globe, having previously fled Russia/USSR. So English translation may not be of high priority, especially given that historically the current instrument LJ is abusing is precisely "cyrillic" services - trumpeted initially as a service to this very community.

[denise]

We have needed to make very minor updates to our Terms of Service and privacy policy for a while to adjust it for some law changes, but it's a really annoying process and I've been putting it off because it isn't incredibly urgent and they're all minor updates. :) I had it on my list for 2026 already; we'll see if I get to it!

We have been fighting "age verification" laws for a long time! We've helped to sue multiple US states over them, tried participating in the UK "consultations" on the implementation of the Online Safety Act and why their proposals would be harmful, etc. I agree with you completely: "nefarious" is exactly the right word. I can't absolutely promise that we'll never require age or ID verification from anyone, because the US is trying to fling itself off the same cliff and we're a US company: if our own idiot politicians pass a nationwide law, instead of just individual states doing it, and if we lose in court enough times, we may eventually have to in some form. But we can promise you three things:

1. We are a US-only company, and we will only ever care about US law. Which is not much consolation, because we have our own idiot politicans, but it means people living in other authoritarian countries only have to worry about our authoritarians, not the ones who have direct control over you.

2. We will fight any US law, federal or state, that tries to force us to identify and deanonymize our users. We will fight it with everything I've got. I've helped to sue seven states over those laws so far (one of them twice!), and we mostly keep winning. Except in Mississippi, where the appellate court overruled the district court (who agreed with us that the law was unconstitutional), but even that fight isn't over yet. We specifically joined Netchoice so that we could fight these laws, and I've helped out every single lawsuit over every single law that we qualify for since. (We were even cited in the latest victory over a law that doesn't even apply to us, that's how hard we're fighting these!)

3. If another country ever does go through the trouble of trying to get a US court to issue a court order saying that we have to turn over information about one of their citizens, and the reason is anything other than "something that is also extremely illegal in the US" like distributing child sex abuse material or something on that level of severity, we will fight that just as hard as we are fighting these US state "age verification" laws. I have many, many, many lawyer friends who have done that kind of international work for years, and they are all just as eager to fight as we are. We might not be rich in money, but we are very, very rich in friends. :)

I see that you made your account seven or eight years ago, so I can give you a story from before you joined to help show that we mean what we say: when we'd been open for about a year, back in 2010, PayPal decided that we would have to remove "adult content" from the site or else they wouldn't process payments for us anymore. We told them to go fuck themselves, went without income at all for three months while we got set up with a payment processor that would allow us to keep allowing users to post what they wanted, and paid outrageous fees to take payments for a decade before we found someone else who would take us at a lower fee structure. It was terrifying! We'd only been open for a year! But we'd planned for it, and we'd made promises to our users that we weren't going to break unless we absolutely had no other choice. We really do mean it when we say we'll fight for you as hard as we possibly can. I know a lot of places say it, but the only people we have to keep happy are our users, so we can genuinely mean it.

Mark and I both started working on ЖЖ back in 2001, so we're both very familiar with the tactics the Russian government uses. We don't talk publicly about our ways of handling them, because it's a bad idea to hand an adversary information about your tactics, but I was there for the entire process of Russian-language ЖЖ becoming such a cultural force. I quit in 2007, just before the sale, and I'm a little bit sorry, because I think me quitting played a big part in Six Apart's decision to sell to СУП in the first place, and we all know what happened there.

But yes, we have been on this ride before, and we know the risks. For the last 20 years, I've been planning my international flights very, very carefully to avoid flying over Russian airspace, or the airspace of Russian-allied countries, if that helps you feel more confident in our risk assessment! The chance of the Russian government doing something to an international flight just to get their hands on the devices belonging to the owner of one tiny website may be pretty low, but given how many Russian users we have, it's not zero. That's how seriously I take my obligation to protect our users.

[strider]

Unofficial translation (неофициальный перевод):

Привет и добро пожаловать нашим новым русским друзьям с LiveJournal! Мы рады быть вашим новым домом. Мы не требуем удостоверение личности для того, чтоб публиковать комментарии или посты. Так же, мы не предоставляем российскому государству никакую информацию про ваш аккаунт, если этот запрос не предоставлен через суд в Соединенных Штатах. (И это не случалось уже 16 лет!)

Импорт вашего журнала с ЖЖ может быть медленным. Вас много, с большим количеством постов и комментарий, и мы обязаны ограничивать как быстро мы скачиваем вашу информацию с ЖЖ, чтобы нас не заблокировали. Пожалуйста, будте терпеливы! Мы следим за этим процессом и исправляем ошибки, и опять займемся этим после окончания праздника.

Я очень сожалею, что мы не можем перевести сайт на русский язык и не можем оказывать помощь с сайтом на русском языке. Наша компания на много, много меньше, чем LiveJournal, и мои уроки русского языка в старшей школе были очень давно. :) Но хотя бы мы не принадлежим Сбербанку!

С Новым Годом, и добро пожаловать домой!

[abuela]

спасибо! гугл помогает читать написанное на разных языках, но забота всегда приятна, особенно в праздник))

[cz_unit]

Oh dear, sorry to hear about this, but really glad and appreciative that you make a home for everyone here. LJ was good, but then it got bought by some pretty bad people....

Thanks for being here Denise and all the DW staff!

[haertstitch]

thank you to dream width!
I'm sad it necessary but I'm glad you do it we all need a safe place even in the us.

[havocthecat]

Welcome and best wishes to the new folks!

[matsushima]

Thank you, denise and the rest of the dw_maintenance team, for keeping this site going. It's my online home and I appreciate all the work you do for it.

[zenpolymer2]

I second that notion.
:-)

Happy New Year!

[mahmfic]

What happened??

[soc_puppet]

LJ made it a lot harder for some people to post and/or comment. More info here.

[magid]

Thank you; this post was just the nudge I needed to finally delete my LJ account (I hadn’t posted there since 2017, and had been cross-posting for a bit).

[dr_romualdych]

Thanks a lot and Happy New Year.

[scintilla72]

whoa, it's our Mega-Host Lance Boyle in the year 2026!

[mimafi2]

Thank you. I didn't know you could import from LJ. I'd be happy to hear more.

[denise]

Here you go!

[abuela]

спасибо вам, внезапно очень трогательно видеть такое приветствие.

[prokhozhyj]

Happy New Year!

[cheburek]

A user from Russia is writing. Hello and happy new year!
Thank you so much for your work and help! We appreciate it and there is no more place for us. LiveJournal was the last platform where we could talk about someshing important. A lot of russian users already migrated to DW last year or erlier and now the second(probably not last) wave is coming. LJ is financed by the Russian budget. If that budget runs out, so will LJ.

[cheburek]

Sorry for the repetition, but I also advise Russian users to change their usernames when migrating, as many of them have already been identified on LiveJournal by their mobile phone numbers or bank cards, and posting here won't be safe if they find out who are you. It's the same situation as with Facebook. They can't block you, but they can jail you simply by comparing your username. I'd like to point out that some Russian LiveJournal users have been jailed after posting in the livejournal.

[denise]

This is a very good warning! It makes me so sad you have to think about these things to keep yourselves safe. I have been hoping for a better government for you for a very long time.

[mithrilian]

Thank you and Happy New Year!

[posadnik]

о, и тебе привет.

[cairo_tigra]

It's a big advantage that you're not owned by Sber though) However not all of us are russian.

[ourania_m]

Молодцы ребята! Быстро сориентировались, откуда пришел поток новых пользователей.

[pilottttt]

Сам обрадовался при виде этого поста. Фактически - новогодний подарок