It's a long and rather sad story, but since systemd started to do its own logging (using a binary format), it can optionally now link to a micro HTTP server so that you can connect to the journal on localhost in order to read these logs (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/configure.a...).

I won't offer any opinions on whether this is good or bad, simply state that's what happened.