This is part of what’s confusing me, that you seem to be exempting Russia from ‘internationally’. In any case, here’s a partial breakdown on LJ users by country:

* United States – 3679297
* Russian Federation – 707280
* Canada – 324075
* United Kingdom – 312623
* Australia – 146175
* Singapore – 110958
* Ukraine – 98271
* Philippines – 67661
* Germany – 60168
* Finland – 45092
* Japan – 43097
* Netherlands – 29289
* Belarus – 29146
* Brazil – 26406
* France – 25267

As for LiveJournal flourishing under the SixApart brand, that’s correlation, not cause. Until late 2003, LiveJournal’s growth was purposefully checked by an invite-code system, to avoid overwhelming the number of servers the service was able to afford. By the time they were acquired by SixApart, they had already grown roughly 200%. During their time under SixApart, they simply continued their growth trend.

I realized that LiveJournal existed before Six Apart purchased them, but from what I understand the service became popular underneath the Six Apart brand (although if I am wrong, feel free to correct me in the comment section below).

While I do understand that LiveJournal is more of a “community platform,” it seems to have thrived mostly in Russia while WordPress, Blogger, TypePad have established strong markets internationally (which has always puzzled me for some strange reason given the features present on LJ).

LiveJournal’s founder took over as SixApart’s Chief Architect when LJ was purchased, and it’s probably taken a year to move LJ off SA’s servers because TypePad moved to servers LJ had architected. If they weren’t included in the purchase agreement, LJ would have to move; and planning a move that big takes a damn long time.

As for “whether this move improves LiveJournal outside of Russia” “in the face of international competiton [sic]“, I really don’t even understand what you could mean.

a) LiveJournal has always been based in the U.S. They’re moving from one U.S. facility to another U.S. facility. It will make no difference in load speeds or other technical metrics, which are already fantastic. Presumably their overseas CDN is remaining the same, so there will be no difference there, either.

b) From a features perspective, LiveJournal has been continually improving its service since its founding. It has over 17 million users. It offers a different kind of experience from TypePad and WordPress.com, which are not community platforms. It gets more than 10x monthly unique visitors than Vox, SixApart’s community platform, which would have been an infinitely better comparison. LJ’s server move will in no way affect any of this.

In short, what are you talking about?