Before Tumblr, there was LiveJournal. Started in 1999, LiveJournal served as a popular blogging platform with over 10 million accounts at its peak. Even if you weren't an avid LiveJournal user, it was more likely you were familiar with the site's largest community, a celebrity gossip page called "Oh No They Didn't." ONTD was so popular that news of celebrity deaths, like Heath Ledger in 2008, would flood the site with so many users it would crash LiveJournal's servers.
LiveJournal's interest in the US started to slow by 2007, and the site's owner sold the platform to a Russian media company, called SUP, for $30 million. By 2009, all of LiveJournal's US operations were ceased and moved to Russia, making the platform — once a place for freedom from censorship — subject to Russian law and jurisdiction.
Although LiveJournal is still alive and accessible today in the US, the majority of the blogging platform's core audience is in Russia.