Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I have deleted my LiveJournal, finally. No actual information should be lost: I told it not to delete my comments on other people's journals, or my community entries. (I should probably go back and delete the "redbird's test" account as well.)

I've been meaning to do this for months; finally doing it was prompted, oddly, by the news that Myspace has "lost" all data from before 2016. And that led me to thinking, briefly, about the solidity or otherwise of websites, and reminded me that I didn't want my entries over there, (Also, I don't trust the current owners of LJ enough to trust them as backup for this online version of my life.)

ETA: Now I am feeling accomplished, because I checked that off my to-do list, and saw two other things I have done that were still on there. That file is labeled "call this a to-do list" but it's not really serving as one, apparently,

As denise suggested at the beginning of this Dreamwidth news post, I have donated to the Russian LGBT Network, to help gay men who are being detained and tortured in Chechnya. That link is for donations from inside Russia; those of us in the rest of the world can donate via All Out.

Specifically, this is what I have done with the $20 that I won't be spending for another year of paid LiveJournal time; I had already decided it should go to some LGBT cause, and this one seemed particularly appropriate.

Yes, I am cross-posting this entry to LJ. Right now, posts on LGBT and other political topics are most likely to be cross-posted, along with DW and LJ meta. If that gets this account removed, so be it.

The owners of LJ have changed their terms of service again, and from what I can see I am not happy (the things I can see include that there is no official/binding version of the TOS in a language I can read, only in Russian), and that users aren't supposed to post anything that would count as either political or pornographic by Russian law.

I suspect that my user bio on LJ, let alone some of my entries, qualifies as one or the other, since I'm openly bisexual.

They're also changing where they put advertising, and I think claiming greater rights to republish material. (I've been sort-of reading about this along with dealing with other things, including calling the governor's office about a bill that I think Putin would dislike.)

I'm not deleting anything immediately, in part because I assume SUP already have it all backed up on a server in Russia, but this may be the last cross-posted entry; in any case, anything friends-only/filtered is likely to be Dreamwidth-only from now on.

If you're on my friendslist on LJ, please tell me your DW username so I can add you here.

ETA: The cross-post failed, and my current attempt to make a similar post directly over there, and update my profile, failed; the status page says LJ is undergoing "planned" maintenance right now.

Under a new law, any large Russian blogging platform must keep records in Russia of everything published for the last six months. I would assume that this includes deleted posts or comments.

LiveJournal is definitely large enough to be covered by this, and I suspect it was written specifically with LJ in mind.

The law also bans bloggers from being anonymous; I don't know where that leaves people who haven't given LJ wallet names, traceable email addresses, etc.

If you aren't in or planning to visit Russia, this probably won't make much difference to you; I assume that the NSA, the British government, and so on can already get their hands on most of this if they want it.