Please share this with anyone you know who still uses LiveJournal. It could collapse next week; it could last another two years. I think "next week" is probably too fast and "two years" is probably pushing it, a lot; that's my only prediction.

I do not, to my very great sorrow, think LJ will survive in anything resembling even its "hollowed-out shell of what it used to be" current form for much longer. And I hate what it's become, but I'll cry when it dies, because it shaped SO MUCH of my life.

If there is anything you still care about hosted on LJ -- posts, links, icons, photos, anything -- and you don't have a backup, get that backup ASAP. I have not stayed current on ways to back up. The ones I used to know of:

Because of sanctions, it will be very difficult for them to find a buyer, and most of the potential options would be deeply not great. Given the lack of advance notice for the changes in that RU news post, I suspect the sale or shutdown will come equally without notice if and when it happens.

I am very, very conscious of how it looks for me to be saying this, because I own and operate a direct competitor to LJ, but: I strongly suspect, from all these signals, that Sberbank is preparing to either sell the outside-Russia part of LJ if they can find a buyer, or shut it down if they can't.

--because of changes in Russian law since 2022 and the beginning of the "three day military operation" (soon to enter year five!), they haven't been able to accept payment from anyone outside Russia since then, and the only ads they can run pay almost nothing for outside-Russia views.

It is my considered opinion, from what I know of geopolitics, Russian politics, and the technical capabilities of LiveJournal, that the current owners are working to isolate any LJ user outside Russia from any LJ user inside Russia to the greatest extent possible --

People who don't have Cyrillic services enabled and aren't in Russia will be further isolated from Russian LJ: posts will not be visible and no one can comment across the divide. There's been no English language announcement of any of this.

they have to identify with one of the systems (payment or Sber ID), but those are all mostly not an option for anyone outside Russia (payment because of sanctions, Sber ID because you need a Russian phone number, which is now almost impossible to get outside Russia).

Users inside Russia who don't have Cyrillic services enabled have to turn them on. They will not be able to see any post that was made by someone not in the Cyrillic services after December 29. Users outside Russia with Cyrillic services enabled are in a bind:

I have gone through all the comments: LJ current management (remember, LJ is currently owned by Rambler, which is owned by Sberbank) is not giving out much information, but users have pieced together the following from how they see the changes behaving:

(There is an exception for accounts that have over 500 "social capital", which is a thing that mostly applies to the Cyrillic services, I think. I haven't kept up with their feature development. I also suspect it's a temporary exception.)

If you don't want to, the summary: to comply with Russian law (they didn't admit that part but I know that's why they had to do it), users with the "Cyrillic Services" turned on can no longer post or comment unless they are inside Russia and identified with their government identity.

On December 29, the current owners of LJ posted an announcement to the Russian language news community: ru-news.livejournal.com/80899.html You can drop that into Google Translate, it does pretty okay with Russian these days.