Mr. Keys (Photo: Twitter)

Matthew Keys, the 26-year-old social media editor at Reuters who was indicted by the Department of Justice yesterday for collaborating with the hacktivist collective Anonymous, has been suspended from Reuters with pay. Now, reporters are working to cobble together details of his checkered online past.

BuzzFeed reports that along with building a dedicated Twitter following of over 20,000 people and creating popular Twitter parody accounts like PendingLarry, Mr. Keys established himself in the early aughts as an infamous LiveJournal troll, who went by several usernames, the most popular being "madrigalskylark." His presence on the online diary site was so well-known that it warranted its own entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica, a Wikipedia-type platform that chronicles the goings-on of 4chan and hacker culture.

Madrigalskylark's entry reads:

Obsessive LiveJournal user madrigalskylark is known for his attention whore antics, leaving phony suicide notes, passive-aggressive bitchiness, and use of the victim role to earn sympathy from naive, unsuspecting morons. Or gluttons for punishment, depending on how you look at it.

BuzzFeed also links to a fully fleshed out Wikipedia page that user edit history indicates Mr. Keys wrote about himself. The page chronicles everything from the details of his early childhood (he split time between Vacaville, CA, Germany and El Paso, TX) and his past relationships. ("In May 2006, Matthew began dating 'Jeffrey' from the Sacramento area. In early July, Matthew broke up with 'Jeffrey' after discovering 'Jeffrey' was cheating and moving to Los Angeles. Matthew is currently single.")

The entry also contains a detailed trivia section with gems such as, "In high school, Matthew was known as 'The Guy Who Likes John Mayer'" and the factoid that he previously maintained "eight LiveJournal accounts, five Xanga accounts and three Blogger accounts."

"Once again, loser gay boys with way too much time on their hands are discussing me on LiveJournal," reads one of the quotes on Mr. Keys' self-built Wikipedia page. The page also states that Mr. Keys "may have had the first ides of a social networking website on the Internet similar to MySpace."

On a post about Mr. Keys on Gizmodo, commenters chimed in to share their experiences with him. A handful claimed that when they turned Mr. Keys down for romantic relationships, he would create "defamatory (and 90% falsified) websites" or Craigslist postings about them. One commenter wrote on Gawker:

He would make life hell for people who refused to date him. He would stalk and use his tenuous grasp of early social networking to create shitty websites and Craigslist posts full of lies and material created to defame people he didn't like.

He did this to me, he kept trying to get me to go out with him. I refused. Instead of attacking me he went after one of my friends (who he thought was my Boyfriend). He posted fake profiles on dating sights, and posts on Craigslist with his image, with copy that stated that he had herpes, HIV and other diseases.

He would go online and impersonate him, furthering these lies. This got so bad that my friend left the state, his job, and all of his friends almost over night. Everywhere he went people would come up and ask him if he was "that guy form the Craigslist posts" or "the herpes dude". My friend was one of several people that Matthew did this to. Most of them were targeted because they refused to date him, still there were others that he attacked for reasons unknown to me.

Another Gawker commenter wrote that when he asked Mr. Keys to stop talking to him, "he tried to blackmail me with (what he thought were) nude pics of me. Threatened to send them to all of my coworkers, all of my Facebook friends, etc."

Despite his alleged involvement with Anonymous, Mr. Keys actively leaked information to websites like Gawker about the goings-on in hacker IRC rooms. He also used the information gleaned from his conversations with Anonymous members to inform reporting he did for Reuters.

Sabu, the LulzSec hacker turned FBI informant, tweeted about Mr. Keys back in March 2011, but the tweet flew under the press radar. The AP reports that one day after it was announced that Sabu was an FBI informant, Mr. Keys wrote a story for Reuters about how he had "infiltrated" the hacker group. It's unclear whether this is a coincidence, or if Mr. Keys believed Sabu would snitch on him and made an attempt to cover his tracks by publicly claim to have infiltrated Anonymous instead of copping to collaborating with them.

An anonymous source told Betabeat that Mr. Keys said the day before news of the indictment broke that he was worried he would be fired. Mr. Keys has since claimed on Twitter that statement was unrelated to the indictment.

The AP reports that the former KTXL Fox 40 producer, who allegedly shared login credentials with members of Anonymous so that they could deface articles on the Los Angeles Times website, is scheduled for arraignment in Sacramento on April 12th. "Reuters spokesman David Girardin said the company was 'aware' of the indictment when Keys was hired last year, but he declined further comment," wrote the AP. The story has since been altered to reflect the official Reuters statement:

“We are aware of the charges brought by the Department of Justice against Matthew Keys, an employee of our news organization. Thomson Reuters is committed to obeying the rules and regulations in every jurisdiction in which it operates. Any legal violations, or failures to comply with the company’s own strict set of principles and standards, can result in disciplinary action. We would also observe the indictment alleges the conduct occurred in December 2010; Mr. Keys joined Reuters in 2012, and while investigations continue we will have no further comment.”

Mr. Keys claimed to have found out about the indictment on Twitter. Shortly after news broke of the indictment, Mr. Keys tweeted the following:

https://twitter.com/TheMatthewKeys/status/312348676448219137

A Reuters employee told Reuters (yup) that Mr. Keys' work station was being dismantled and his security key card had been deactivated.

The Ventura, California based law firm Jay Leiderman announced on Twitter that they plan to represent Mr. Keys. "We fight the man for you," reads the firm's Twitter bio.

Update: A tipster who spoke under condition of anonymity provided Betabeat with the following screenshots from Mr. Keys' Facebook profile. Since news broke of his indictment last night, he's addressed the issue twice on his page:

The first post, published shortly after news of the indictment broke on Twitter.

The second post, shows Mr. Keys taking issue with (or making a joke about) a sentence in an AP story about him.

Mia. (Photo: TheJCKlatch.us)

In a bustling Starbucks at the Stamford Town Center in picturesque Connecticut, a tall woman swaddled in a gray sweater and an ankle-length skirt appeared in the doorway. Her chestnut hair was pulled back, exposing moon-pale skin and saucer eyes. Nervously, she scanned the room before I waved her over. She introduced herself: “Hi, I’m Lillian.”

Lillian did not come to the Starbucks alone. Although to be fair, she's never really alone. Along with Mia, Rebecca, Julie, Pastel, Jennifer, Katelynn, Luna and "17," she is part of the JC Klatch, a system of individuals (don’t call them personalities) who have lived together inside the same physical body for as long as they can remember.

Lillian is missing some of her teeth, so she frequently smiles with a tight-lipped grin. When she switches to another individual—Rebecca, a lesbian obsessed with cars—her head leans right and she twitches slightly. Her eyes flutter like she's rousing from a dream. And then a voice emerges: sometimes it sounds a lot like the voices of the other individuals, but sometimes it sounds completely different, like when 17—the only male individual inside the JC Klatch—speaks with a boy's childlike speech impediment, rounding his R's.

"Do you want something to drink?" I asked Luna a little bit later. "Sure, if you're offering!" she replied. "How about one of those strawberry milkshake things, but with soy milk?"

I obliged, carrying back a medium strawberry frappucino and a bottle of water. "Oh my god, it's good!" Luna exclaimed, sipping the drink.

Later, after Luna had switched to Mia and Mia to 17, the Klatch's opinion of the milkshake had changed.

"This is weird," 17 declared, pronouncing it like wee-ord. "I've never had this before."

***

Called a “multiple,” Lillian and the others refer to themselves in the plural, but they do not identify as having Multiple Personality Disorder or Dissociative Identity Disorder. Instead, they see being multiple as  akin to a lifestyle—though not by choice. Each individual (or "headmate") within The JC Klatch has a different age, demeanor and personality. Their handwriting and medical conditions are unique: Pastel has a different eyeglasses prescription than the others, which Lillian said her optometrist still hasn’t been able to explain. Each one also has distinct interests, mannerisms and sexual orientations. They can have different significant others.

According to The JC Klatch, some multiples don’t lose time—the individuals inside them communicate internally so that they all possess the same memories and understanding of the world around them. The JC Klatch can switch between individuals voluntarily, and it’s not impolite to ask to speak to someone who isn’t “fronting,” or currently controlling the body. During our conversation at Starbucks, I spoke to five of the nine different individuals that comprise the JC Klatch, each of whom fronted when I asked to speak to them.

“Part of me was like, ‘Is she shitting me?’” the Klatch's roommate Alan Verrier said of the first time he found out there were others. “I used to call them my one-body sorority.”

The concept of several individuals inhabiting a single body has historically been deemed Multiple Personality Disorder or Dissociative Identity Disorder, but The JC Klatch and other multiples are quick to dispel any labels or diagnoses that insinuate they are disordered. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV defines someone with DID as a “person who suffers alternation of two or more distinct personality states with impaired recall among personality states of important information.” However, the multiples I spoke to argue that what differentiates them from those suffering from an identity disorder is that they simply aren’t sick. The individuals within them operate harmoniously. They are able to live relatively normal lives, with good jobs, close friends and adult responsibilities (though Mr. Verrier joked that every individual within the Klatch detests doing the dishes).

The experiences of the multiples I spoke to also diverge from the traditional psychiatric definition of DID. For one thing, they are aware of the other individuals that exist inside them, and they can voluntarily switch between them, unlike most DID sufferers.

For many multiples, the world seems curiously black and white: they are multiple, but do not have multiple personality disorder. They are different, but not sick. It’s incredibly complicated for a reporter to pick through, to discern who is telling the truth, who is lying and who sincerely believes they are telling the truth but may not be. Without speaking to their psychiatrists—a profession they largely shun—or people in their lives who disagree that they are multiple, it was nearly impossible to determine who to believe. But if they were living happy, healthy, fulfilling lives, did it really matter whether they were truly multiple or not?

***

Many multiples have made their home on Tumblr, nestled among the otherkin under the wide umbrella of identity politics and the social justice movement (much of which has been the target of mockery across the web). There you might find systems made up of actual historical characters—Abraham Lincoln, for instance—or even other species. Though Tumblr didn’t invent multiplicity, it has helped to popularize it, providing a largely judgment-free platform for sufferers (and those who have convinced themselves they’re sufferers) to congregate and discuss their lifestyle.

The Tumblr subculture is a somewhat warped extension of the long-standing presence of multiples on the Internet, dating back to bulletin board systems like WWIVnet from the late ’80s and ’90s. Nearly all of these groups were initially dedicated to sharing abuse experiences and ways of coping with DID, with few resources for people looking to live a healthy multiple lifestyle.

The Astraea system, which lives in a body in its mid-50s on the West Coast, has been an active member of plural groups on the web since 1992. They began posting stories about healthy multiplicity online in 1995, and their website morphed into a repository for links and articles about being a multiple. “Many people seem to think this is some kind of relatively new phenomenon—self-recognized plurality, plural groups talking about themselves online,” said Iris, a 57-year-old African-American individual in the Astraea group. “This actually goes back before the Internet to the earliest computer bulletin boards.” Like many fringe groups, the Internet has allowed those who believe they are multiple to find people like them and share their experiences.

Of course, there are always the wannabes.

“Oh yes, we have certainly met fake multiples,” Rebecca, the car-obsessed lesbian, confirmed.

***

Rebecca. (Photo: TheJCKlatch.us)

“All of us have known we were multiple for as long as we can remember,” Lillian said once we’d settled down across from each other in Starbucks, her eyes growing wide. “As we grew up, we found out pretty quickly that people weren’t multiple. And our mother would always correct us if we used the terms ‘we’ or mention any of the others.”

When referring to the person they were born as—the name on their birth certificate, which they declined to tell me—The JC Klatch uses the term “the body.” “The body is 29.” These differentiations are crucial for The JC Klatch: the body is simply a vehicle driven by the nine individuals that live inside of it. The name the body was given at birth is almost irrelevant now.

Despite maintaining a nontraditional lifestyle, The JC Klatch have a relatively normal life: they live with Mr. Verrier, a pharmacy technician and “singlet,” the slang term for someone who is not multiple. The Klatch work as a field technician at a computer company. “It does come in handy, because if one [individual] wakes up sick, we can send another to work,” Luna told me.

Mr. Verrier believes that The JC Klatch is multiple—or at least that they truly believe they are—but he doubts they were born that way. “They’re all slobs. They share the same insecurities and the same idiosyncrasies,” he said. “That’s where I kind of question whether they were born or split later.”

Friends and family are frequently skeptical of the Klatch and often ask Mr. Verrier if they’re faking it. “I never thought they were faking it,” he said. “Nobody can act that well for that long.”

***

(Photo: Plural Activism)

Further convoluting the distinction between a healthy multiple and a disordered one is the complex history behind identity disorders. Diagnoses of MPD rose to prominence in the wake of the 1957 film The Three Faces of Eve. MPD (which later became DID) is a fraught term, having later been exposed as being widely overdiagnosed. Studies found that psychiatrists may have projected the disorder by using hypnosis to draw memories and personalities from those with fragile mental states, causing many patients to come to believe they were multiple when they weren’t. Published in 1973, Sybil was also seen as a nexus of the multiple personality movement, although its truthfulness was later widely contested.

“The whole issue of multiple personality is overdiagnosed,” explained Dr. Richard K. Baer, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association who wrote a book called Switching Time, about his treatment of a patient with multiple personality disorder. “There are a lot of people—both therapists and patients—who seek out the diagnosis of multiple personality.” The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation estimates that DID occurs in 1 to 3 percent of the population.

There are several factors that differentiate the experiences of the multiples I spoke to from someone officially diagnosed with DID. For one, The JC Klatch and other systems can switch voluntarily, which Dr. Baer told me is not possible for sufferers of DID. “If she can call upon these parts voluntarily, there’s no dissociation,” Dr. Baer explained. “Multiple personalities is a dissociative disorder, and if you're not dissociating, you don’t have it.”

“Multiplicity is not typically an alternative lifestyle,” he added. “It’s a pathology that has a protective function.”

Furthermore, all three systems I spoke with are well aware that there are other individuals living inside of them, which is typically not the case for someone with a DID diagnosis. “If she’s aware of all the personalities and all of their thoughts, she’s not dissociating,” Dr. Baer repeated. “She doesn’t have a dissociative disorder and she’s not a multiple, but she thinks of herself this way.”

Mr. Verrier claims that The JC Klatch visited a psychiatrist in New Haven who confirmed that they were multiple, but that, because they are aware of each other, they “don't fit the model for DID.”

***

Jan and Jazz.

Debbie was in her late 20s when she was in a car accident that left her unable to use her legs. She’d broken her back, leaving her partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair for much of her life. Then, one day, Debbie mysteriously stood up and began to walk.

“I found out she was multiple when she was in a wheelchair for 20 years and then she started walking at the hospital,” said Jan, Debbie’s longtime partner. The doctors couldn’t explain it.

“I thought she had conversion disorder—that’s where you can have paralysis caused just by your mind,” Jan told me by phone. “A therapist I’d been going to suggested Dissociative Identity Disorder, so I decided the next time she would act different from normal I’d try talking to her like she was a different person. And when I did, it was a little girl named Ana.” The reason Debbie could walk now, Jan explained, is because Debbie didn’t exist anymore, but had instead given way to the countless other individuals of all different ages that inhabited her body and could control it in ways that Debbie wasn’t capable of. The system is called Oure Gaiya.

Jazz, who is one of the primary fronters of the Oure Gaiya system, calls Jan her sister, though they’re not actually related. Jazz and Jan have co-adopted three mentally and physically disabled children, just in case the state ever deems Jazz unfit to be a parent. They both consider themselves full-time mothers, but Jan cares for Oure Gaiya, which has several children that comprise it, like they’re her own brood.

“I’m a mom of over 50 kids,” Jan said. “When they come forward, I parent them. It’s great—I always wanted a huge family.”

Jazz is one of the most vocal supporters of “healthy multiplicity,” which she defines as “people who share the same body who interact with their family, friends and the public in general on the same level as most people.” Her website is a trove of helpful information for multiples and those who care for them. She maintains the Plural Activism Yahoo Group, which boasts 540 members, though there are countless other multiples on platforms like Livejournal and Ivory Garden, a members-only DID support group. She helped to create a logo for plural activism (a series of circles that intersect, with the words "Many minds, one body"), established a Wikipedia for multiplicity, and maintains a Plural Pride CafePress store where users can purchase T-shirts with slogans like “Living multiple and loving it.”

“Society has all these bad images of a person who is multiple: they’re mass murderers or they’re child abusers,” Jazz told me. “That’s partly why plural activism exists. We want to change that.”

Jazz also says she has successfully convinced the American Psychiatric Association to amend its definition of multiple personality disorder in the upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V, to be published in May 2013. “We got them to actually change their diagnosis of what it means to be multiple,” Jazz told me. In order to be diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, Jazz said, the DSM V “now says [being multiple] has to interfere with your daily life. So if you’re unhealthy, of course it’s going to interfere, but that’s because you’re unhealthy, not because you’re multiple.”

***

Pastel. (Photo: TheJCKlatch.us)

For healthy multiples that embrace the numerous people living inside them, “integration” is a dirty word. Many do not seek psychiatric help for fear of being integrated—that is, having a therapist work to try to convince them to combine all of their individuals into one primary individual, the way most people live.

“We’re never lonely,” Jazz told me. “Why would someone want to be something that they are not? To us, integration is a form of murder.”

Dr. Baer said that perhaps healthy multiples simply encourage themselves to develop different sides of their personality into fully fledged people. Each of us has numerous sides: who we are at work is different from who we are with friends is different from who we are with partners. But we traditionally don’t view these as separate people within our body; they’re simply personality traits. “Clearly something’s going on with [The JC Klatch] where she’s having these different parts of herself that don’t seem very integrated,” he said. “She’s encouraging them to be separate. I have all these parts inside of me and they talk to me in different ways. How is that different from what she’s doing?”

“If someone characterizes themselves as a multiple, but they don’t dissociate, it’s kind of like saying you’re Buddhist,” Dr. Baer went on. “People really strive to find a way to understand themselves, so it’s an easy thing to glom onto.”

***

Throughout the course of reporting this story, it became impossible to ignore the fact that someone who had officially been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder might take issue with people who didn’t undergo the type of systemic abuse that causes alters to blossom, and yet still claim to be multiple. (Each of the systems experienced abuse as children, but The JC Klatch and Astraea don't believe it's the source of their multiplicity. "We had severe abuse and it took work to get where we are, but we did evolve from an unhealthy system to one that is healthy," Jazz said.) Did it make them angry? Did they feel like their experiences were being somehow trivialized or unfairly appropriated?

“When I first read your email, that was my first thought, yes,” Olga Trujillo, a survivor of DID, told me by phone. Ms. Trujillo has written extensively about grappling with her DID diagnosis following persistent sexual and physical abuse as a child, and now travels around the country giving presentations about child abuse and domestic violence issues. She said that the descriptions of multiplicity laid out by Oure Gaiya, The JC Klatch and Astraea greatly differed from her experience. But because of the controversial history surrounding DID, and the fact that some have questioned the authenticity of the condition, Ms. Trujillo is not quick to jump to conclusions.

“I don’t want people to tell me that what I have doesn’t exist, so I don’t want to be doing that for anybody else,” Ms. Trujillo said, adding that she questions whether there isn’t a spectrum of DID. “It’s impossible to determine what’s behind it. But this is their lived experience, so what does it matter?"

A piece from H&M's "Inclusive" line, modelled by someone who's not exactly a size 22.

The rag trade has never been terribly kind to larger ladies. Plus-size women quickly learn where they can and cannot shop, as most clothing companies simply decline to do business above a size 14. And the bigger you get, the more doors slam shut. Entire malls must be written off.

And that’s just assembling enough clothing to cover yourself on a daily basis. Staying on trend can seem downright Sisyphean. Did you want one of those chambray shirts that were so popular this year? Well, don’t expect Vogue to help you find it. Either it’ll turn up at one of the handful of outlets that deal in fashionable plus-size clothing, or you’re just going to have to do without.

In short, it’s a wasteland. And traversing it is a series of humiliations.

But in recent years, a fashion-forward vanguard has emerged from the blogosphere to help shoppers of size navigate their limited options: women like Gabrielle Gregg, who pops up everywhere from MTV to InStyle, Marie Denee of The Curvy Fatshionista, an exhaustive guide to plus-size options, and Nicolette Mason, who pens Marie Claire’s “Big Girl in a Skinny World,” to name just three.

They’ve received write-ups in outlets like The New York Times, Teen Vogue and Refinery29. The phenomenon is often presented as a consumer uprising by stylish young women hungry for better options, armed with the self-confidence to demand more. What is often ignored is the radical origins of these “fatshionistas,” many of whom got their start in a LiveJournal community founded by an outspoken activist. And as this circle of bloggers coalesces into the nearest thing the plus-size girl has to Vogue, it’s worth stopping to note just how far they’ve come—and stopping to wonder how true they’ve stayed to their roots along the way.

***

Let’s rewind to 2004, when the options were even more dismal. Besides the uninspired, almost grandmotherly options at Roaman’s and Avenue, there was Torrid, the brand-new juniors’ store started by Hot Topic. But mostly, you were stuck with whatever Lane Bryant deigned to offer. And as this reporter can attest, there’s a reason they called it “Lame Giant.” In the mid-2000s, it was a sea of billowing button-downs and depressingly sensible workwear.

Onto this denuded landscape strode Amanda Piasecki, a graduate student in electronic music and media. As a fat activist nurtured in the “queer fat radical” subculture of San Francisco, she was looking for ways to organize her comrades in the fight against body-shaming and outright hatred of larger people. She was also sick of spending too much money on clothes that looked like crap.

And so Fatshionista was born, a place to commiserate and to demand better, but most of all to cope collectively. As Ms. Piasecki’s inaugural post explained, “We are silly, and serious, and want shit to fit.” Her goal, she told The Observer, was to “make people feel less alone in the daily work of being an embodied fat person.” No small thing, that. (In one early post, a community member talked about how she’d once shoplifted at Lane Bryant out of sheer rage: “I was mad at them for having a monopoly on the big girl clothes, mad at their crappy fabrics and construction.”)

The community grew quickly, at the runaway rate so common to tucked-away Internet phenomena. The definition of “fatshion” was a generous one, embracing goth and punk as well as traditional trendiness. The daily post count escalated; the flame wars commenced. New readers were showing up, wanting to get their fashion fill. Deluged with contributors and commenters, the tenor of the site began to tip.

Ms. Piasecki now sounds rueful about what fatshion became in the years that followed: “My perception of what’s happening or what’s happened is this deeply queer, alternative type of culture was co-opted by the mainstream, in the same way that all kinds of subcultures are co-opted by the mainstream.”

Today, like so much of LiveJournal, the Fatshionista community is a veritable Internet ghost town. But many of the early community members have gone on to build major followings, which means that in the last couple of years, the marketers have come knocking. These bloggers now carry advertising and run sponsored posts on their sites, and they’re courted by brands eager for their imprimatur, which send them “review” clothes and invite them to events. No one’s getting wealthy, but it’s enough to support a shopping habit, and it makes for an excellent jumping-off point to bigger things.

Ms. Gregg. (Photo: MAX RAPP/PatrickMcMullan.com)

Take Ms. Gregg, a Detroit-born, curvy 20-something with a big smile and an omnipresent pair of sunglasses. Her website, GabiFresh.com, which she considers a kind of “personal style diary,” is a river of beautifully composed snapshots of her outfits. It’s also a veritable encyclopedia of ways and reasons for plus-size women to break all the long-held rules about what they ought to wear. Horizontal stripes? Go nuts. Patterned pants? Why not. Bright colors? Fabsolutely.

Last year, she kicked up an Internet tempest by arranging a “fatkini” slideshow of herself and others for the website xoJane. By the end of the week, she was on the Today show, patiently explaining the concept of body acceptance to a slightly bemused anchor.
Ms. Gregg picked up some of the politics, of course—even today, she tussles with Twitter trolls who feel the need to educate her on the dangers of obesity, and in media appearances she’s quick to shut down any diet talk—but her preoccupation was always style.

“I was just there for the fashion, basically,” she said of her time in the LiveJournal community, adding that she was often frustrated, wanting “to see more trend-driven things.” And over the years, her blog has motored steadily in the direction of the mainstream.

In 2010, she chucked the site’s original name, Young, Fat and Fabulous. “It was kind of awkward and kind of weird to always have the word ‘fat’ associated with me,” she explained. It was impossible to mention her site at a networking event without detouring into the political backstory.

“I figured as long as I had the same body-positive image, it may actually reach more people,” she added. Besides, she never wanted to be the voice of the fat acceptance movement.

Like Ms. Gregg, many of the most prominent personalities got their start within the LiveJournal community, though you may or may not know that from their current politics. The up-and-comers, on the other hand—the gals posting casually composed selfies of their daily outfits, tagged #fatshion and #fatspo—are hardly old enough to have spent any time on the platform at all.

And while fat fashion blogging has cracked into the rarified world of the trend piece, fat activism is struggling. Sure, fat acceptance has caught on in feminist corners of the Internet like Jezebel and xoJane, and plus-size bloggers are a big part of that, but some members of the old guard remain skeptical: “It’s become this exercise in showing how much fat people can be like the mainstream so their worth is questioned less,” said Ms. Piasecki, “which I think is a ridiculous exercise. For me, the right pursuit is creating a new culture.”

***

This tension recently bubbled up in the form of a cri de coeur by Natalie Perkins, an Australian illustrator and blogger best known for creating a line of colorful necklaces that read “Fat” in proud, plump bubble letters. Once a fashion blogger, she excoriated the fatshionista-turned-commercial-icon trend last November with a piece on xoJane with the confrontational title “When Activism Gives Way to Advertising: How Fat Girl Blogging Ate Itself.”

“We’re stuck in a bubble and fooling ourselves by thinking that the anti-fat world is learning anything from fatshion,” she wrote.

Ms. Kirby. (Photo: The Rotund)

There’s a lot less reason for plus-size bloggers to be mad at the mainstream nowadays, especially when all the incentives are on the side of playing nice. High-profile gigs are suddenly within reach. Brands court them with free clothing for review, offering an opportunity to serve the same function as traditional magazine stylists. Between the overtures and the increased availability of stylish clothing, “I feel like it’s effectively pulled the teeth that fatshion had,” said Marianne Kirby, a former LiveJournal moderator who stepped in as a leader once Ms. Piasecki left and one of the community's more overtly political alumnae.

You begin to understand why younger bloggers would seek to distance themselves from their activist predecessors. Tiffany Tucker, a 22-year-old English major from Chicago, explained why she shifted her more fat-focused posts off her site Fat Shopoholic and onto a second blog: “I wanted for my blog to be taken seriously as a fashion blog. I’m a fashionable person, not just a fashionable fat person.”

Still, the frustrations that first inspired Ms. Piasecki to start Fatshionista are far from gone. Many designers still turn up their noses at the demographic; many manufacturers are cutting their clothes smaller than ever, leaving anyone looking for a size 4X or 5X stymied. It’s commonly the smaller bloggers who are the most feted in the fashion world. Looming over it all: there are still just a handful of outlets providing these newer options, and we could be one global downturn away from it all hitting the skids.

There’s one place and one place only this reporter is willing to buy tights, and if We Love Colors were to go belly up, it’s back to inferior, scratchy, stomach-creasing options—or going bare-legged.

Ms. Gregg admitted that she shares this frustration. She often struggles to find suitable items for her InStyle column on a magazine’s production timeline, because the most on-trend options are typically fast-fashion. “Big Girl in a Skinny World” seems to suffer from a similar problem. February’s column on lingerie relies heavily on bra-and-panty sets that top out at 2XL, which is about a size 20. That leaves a lot of big-assed lasses hanging. And really, what’s the point of a fancy bra if you’re stuck wearing mismatched panties?

Then again, the sheer existence of Ms. Gregg and her compatriots is not to be underestimated as a call to arms. “I had never, ever seen anything like that before,” Ms. Tucker says of her first encounter with plus-size bloggers dressed proudly in cute clothing. And it’s true: for every Melissa McCarthy or Beth Ditto, there’s a yo-yo dieting Jessica Simpson and a sneering Karl Lagerfeld, ready to remind you there’s no reason to bother. Every 20-something posting outfit-of-the-day shots is another foot soldier.

“I am glad that we are now living in this world where you can just be a fat person who likes pretty clothes,” said Ms. Kirby, reflecting on the progress made—and the distance left to go. “I guess the danger for the rest of us is letting it end there.”

kfaircloth@observer.com

(Photo: Tinypic)

Remember the heady days of Livejournal, when your emo post about how much your parents don't "get" you was only complete with an accompanying song and mood, the latter of which could be entered by choosing from a surprisingly robust menu of descriptive emoticons? Facebook, it turns out, certainly remembers those rosy days of yore, and is intent to bring back the emoticon feature to your very own status box.

TechCrunch reports that Facebook is testing "visual sharing," which would allow users to share what they're feeling (emotions!), reading, watching and eating, all with accompanying emoticons. Users can input a traditional status update ("Facebook attention fulfills me in a way nothing IRL does") and then append their mood or activity, which is accompanied by an emoticon ("Feeling unbearably alone").

TechCrunch points out that should the feature roll out to every user, it could be an easy way for Facebook to determine what users like to help serve more relevant ads. So if you add that you're "Listening to Bright Eyes," it can show you an ad for your old Livejournal account.

For now, Facebook says this is just a small test and the results aren't incorporated into graph search, so feel free to get as emo as you want.

Oh No They Didn't and its disconcerting new interface.

Break out the "Bright Eyes," over-sharers! LiveJournal, the no. 1 blogging platform of choice for navel-gazers in the early aughts is sending out notices this week that, "LiveJournal is planning to start deleting inactive empty accounts." A reader who received the email yesterday sent us a copy, but from the  chatter on the site, it seems they're not the only one.

Don't dig a digital grave next to your Friendster testimonials and MySpace spam just yet, however. The purge, which LiveJournal has instituted at various times before, looks to be part of a recent attempt to win back American hearts and minds.

As Fast Company recently reported, LiveJournal, which since 2007 has been the de facto Russian Wordpress and province of Singapore's Etsy-esque "blogshop" owners, wants to make a triumphant return stateside. Internet history buffs will recall that LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick sold his service to Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, back in 2005. Two years after that, Six Apart turned around and sold LiveJournal to SUP, a Russian online media company run by Alexander Mamut, one of the lesser-known Russian Internet oligarchs who first caught the public's eye during a money-laundering scandal with the Russian presidency when he earned the nickname "the Yeltsin family banker."

Under its new owners, the company, which is still popular with a loyal, niche group of "fan fiction writers, gamers, and various other Internet denizens," for its social networking functionality, is emphasizing community with makeovers for popular sites like Oh No They Didn't and AnythingDisney that include, "custom widgets to highlight frequent commenters," "new metric tracking and analysis systems," and "new, community-driven interface seemingly designed to deemphasize blog content."

They're even offering the carrot that most thriving Internet subcultures crave: pseudonymity.

"According to LiveJournal general manager Anjelika Petrochenko, LiveJournal's planning a major 2012 push based around attracting new users to community sites. Petrochenko told Fast Company that the blogging service was planning between 10-50 new community sites by the end of 2012. These new community sites will offer organizers and admins highly detailed metrics and statistics on user activity that appear to be more detailed than Facebook. Petrochenko also stressed that LiveJournal accounts do not have to be tied to a real name/identity and offered greater anonymity than other social networks. However, LiveJournal has been involved in numerous censorship controversies in the past."

The one community that's not biting is the 10 million monthly uniques who currently visit LiveJournal in the U.S., like "Game of Thrones" creator and active online diarist George R.R. Martin.

As commenter Ardath Rekha wrote in response to the Fast Company piece:

"I don't know why a company thinks that the way to repair more than four years of neglect and discourtesy is by giving the site a face-lift.  Especially when said face-lift is aesthetically unappealing, W3C-noncompliant, ADA-noncompliant, known to give users migraines, and ugly as sin to boot.  But it's nice to get confirmation about who they've actually been trying to please while they've been busy shafting us.

Rest assured, LJ's comeback in America is already as dead in the water as the Costa Concordia."

Timely digs! See, those LiveJournalers still got it!

As for the rest of you "inactive empty" bloggers who never managed to fill your LiveJournal with all your angst and dreams, you've still got a couple weeks, according to the email notice: "Pursuant to our housekeeping policy, your LiveJournal account [REDACTED] l is scheduled to be deleted in 15 days. If you wish to reactivate your account to avoid deleting, please visit http://www.livejournal.com and log in within 15 days of this notification."