LJ to Dreamwidth in a hurry (5 minutes)

[cellio]

Dear LJ friends who are pressed for time:

Yeah, having to do this in a hurry sucks. But if you can spare just 5 minutes, you can copy your LJ content over to Dreamwidth. You can defer actually doing anything with it until later, but at least you'll have it somewhere other than the Russian servers.

**Note** (pointed out in a comment): you can only import your journal here if you've accepted the LJ TOS.

Step 1: create an account on Dreamwidth:



You can skip everything other than choosing a name and password for now. Come back and browse account settings when you have some time. (You can even skip the email-validation step for now, though you should do it at some point.)

Step 2: go to the Import Content tool:



Choose LiveJournal from the list. Enter your LJ user name and password. Check all the boxes in the "what to import" list. Click submit. Wait a while (possibly a couple days because of current load).

That's it.

Don't worry; your journal entries will keep their security groups. You're not leaking private stuff to the world.

---

When you have another 2 minutes: claim the comments you posted over on LJ that have been migrated here. Get rid of that ugly "username.livejournal.com" and replace it with your DW account. You'll need to do this while your LJ account still exists.

Comments

[illariy]

Thanks for this handy guide! I have been a DW user since 2009 but I wanted to update the imported comments. Trying to import threw up this error in my DW inbox: "Your import has failed to import.
XMLRPC failure: Terms of Service agreement required"

I think this is on the LJ side of things...

[cellio]

Oh, whoops -- sorry. Yes, that's coming from LJ; they won't allow remote calls unless you've accepted their TOS. (The people I was most-immediately trying to reach are still on LJ and haven't migrated, so probably have accepted but aren't happy about it.)

[damont]

I'm glad I migrated my LJ postings before thie new TOS occurred. I may have to stop multiposting, and am not sure what I'm going to do with my LJ. Having the permanent account was nice but I think this is going to kill LJ, later if not sooner.

[cellio]

If you don't accept the new TOS you will stop multi-posting; LJ blocks the DW cross-poster.

The permanent account was nice, but it's time to move on. I got 15 years out of it for the price of four years' fees, so I can't feel cheated, only extremely disappointed in what LJ became.

[unique_name_123]

Thanks for sharing all of this. I have requested the import and see who moved here. Do you recommend nuking LJ or just not using it?

[cellio]

Welcome to DW! I have an alternate (specialized) journal that I hadn't imported here and I set it to importing on Friday. It had finished by this morning. So based on that, I'm guessing you might be waiting a couple days.

As for what to do about the LJ account, that depends. My LGBT friends seem to be mostly deleting; that's a community that Russia oppresses and suppresses. Some of my privacy-minded friends are deleting, though that ship sailed, at latest, when the servers moved to Moscow in December, so this seems to be a "final nail" situation rather than actual protection. Some of my other friends are deleting on general principle or in solidarity. Other friends, however, are leaving their journals there but not updating them any more. And a few are still posting or cross-posting there.

I have some external links to my journal (specific posts, mostly), so I'm going to try to fix those first. I still have a few friends who post locked material that I want to be able to see, and that won't work if I delete the account, but I might delete all its content and leave the login. I haven't quite figured it out yet. I'm done posting there, though; I haven't accepted the TOS.

[unique_name_123]

I thought I had to accept the TOS to import to here so I did, but no one seems to post over there any more. I really miss it.

[cellio]

I updated my DW import in December (when they moved the servers) and then began posting here and cross-posting there. So there are no LJ-only entries that I don't have here. I'll lose a few comments, but no posts.

I miss the LJ that used to be. A lot of the people I follow there haven't posted in years but didn't, as far as I know, come here. I guess they've scattered to Facebook and Tumblr and G+ and wherever else, or just stopped posting. Bummer.

TOS, etc.

[goljerp]

Ah, I should've done that. Now I'm in the annoying place where I haven't accepted the TOS, and I really don't want to... but I haven't imported my stuff over to here (or downloaded since last, um, May -- I still have XJournal on my old mac where I occasionally downloaded my history to my mac).

On the plus side, the annoying TOS box only comes up if I have javascript enabled, so I can at least browse what's left of LJ for a little while. I think after pesach is over, I'll accept the TOS, migrate / download, and then freeze.

Oh, well...

[damont]

I wasn't using the DW cross-poster, and had no intentions of doing so. I will likely stop posting things on both places, though. There is a small number of people whose intentions going forward I need to find out before abandoning LJ entirely. But I will not accept the new TOS for longer than I absolutely must to finish getting out cleanly.

[richardf8]

Hey Monica,

Thanks for the quick tutorial. Worked like a champ. The settings came right over, and I expect I will see my entries speedily and in our day.