I've had this conversation with friends, too, about missing LiveJournal. The interactions were much more organic and fully fleshed-out. It was about sharing our internal life in a more intentional way that wasn't corporatized (unless you wanted to pay a few bucks to be able to have custom emojis), wasn't related to ad content or data or profiling.

In these conversations it seems fairly unanimous that people miss it, but changing patterns is easier said than done, plus LJ itself has that whole "now hosted in Russia" thing that concerns people.