LJ secretly moved its servers to Moscow late in 2016 -- I think it was in the week between Christmas and New Year's, when fewer people would probably be around to notice, though correlation != causation so who knows if that's why -- but the big debacle there with "here are new terms of service, in Russian, which you must accept to proceed" was a few months later, in the spring of 2017. A few of my friends moved to DW when it opened up in 2009, a few more moved after the server thing, and a lot more moved when those new TOS hit. Anecdotes are not data, but I suspect this was a broader pattern.
What I saw in my small circle is that the people who came here in 2009 "staked territory", so to speak -- grabbed the user name to establish presence and start finding each other on DW -- but people were mirroring LJ to here for a while, still treating LJ as primary because that's where most of the people still were. Migrations are hard; people want to be where their friends are, but groups don't move all at once.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2025-01-23 03:31 pm (UTC)LJ secretly moved its servers to Moscow late in 2016 -- I think it was in the week between Christmas and New Year's, when fewer people would probably be around to notice, though correlation != causation so who knows if that's why -- but the big debacle there with "here are new terms of service, in Russian, which you must accept to proceed" was a few months later, in the spring of 2017. A few of my friends moved to DW when it opened up in 2009, a few more moved after the server thing, and a lot more moved when those new TOS hit. Anecdotes are not data, but I suspect this was a broader pattern.
What I saw in my small circle is that the people who came here in 2009 "staked territory", so to speak -- grabbed the user name to establish presence and start finding each other on DW -- but people were mirroring LJ to here for a while, still treating LJ as primary because that's where most of the people still were. Migrations are hard; people want to be where their friends are, but groups don't move all at once.