okay so

[solipsistnation]

So Livejournal is having issues, yes.

What are the alternatives? I'd like to be able to keep more or less my friends list here, since I'm rather fond of all of you and enjoy reading all y'all's missives.

Let's see...

1. We could go back to usenet, and secret hierarchies. This is cool for one subset of people, but not useful for others.

2. Email. Nopers.

3. Everyone gets their own blogs whereever and I have to set up an RSS aggregator and stuff. That's cool, but it loses the friend-group-cross-pollination thing that I really enjoy on LJ. (Culture list, meet GweepCo. Gweeps, meet the Culture list. Oh, and hello sysadmins, music nerds, and random people I thought were cool and turned out to be quite nice, plus occasional artists and so on.)

4. DeadJournal? Advantage: Same sort of interface! Disadvantage: Kind of silly.

5. Set up a private LJ-type server somewhere and somehow convince everyone to use it?

6. Something else? Facebook, MySpace? Ugh. :/

7. Just be sad and alone forever, without even the internet to amuse me? Hum.

Clearly none of these are ideal, or and not all of them are even particularly workable. I should probably back up my entries and userpics and junk anyway.

Any ideas? I like the sort of community that LJ encourages and I don't really want to stop using it. Ideally the Russians won't screw up it up too much.

Comments

[zarq.livejournal.com]

Just keeping up with the Culture list can be a full time job. :)

I agree. There's a nice social community aspect to LJ that I haven't found anywhere else.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

There are about a million LJ clones. The most stable one appears to be Journalfen, but that's a fandom site explicitly that requires you to pay for your journal. There's also InsaneJournal, which does not appear to have any major issues yet.

You could roll your own on sidey and do the friend of a friend thing again?

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sidey (or something I stick in my office at work because I AM SYSADMIN-MAN HEAR ME ROAR) are definitely options, but that has the potential to lose various bits of people I like to follow. At this point, I know people in LJ from all sorts of places. I could get gweeps and probably some other people to move to sidey, but not everyone... I really enjoy the people-meeting-people dynamic of having diverse groups in one place.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Clearly, this calls for you to write some kind of uber-aggregator service that lets you form a "friendslist" that pulls posts from all the LJ clones, and perhaps also RSS feeds!

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Eh, everything produces RSS these days anyway, so it'd mostly just be a glorified RSS thing. I did write an RSS aggregator to learn python once, but honestly, I'm not that into writing web apps these days.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Dude, what do I know about webapps? Last thing I programmed was in FORTRAN.

[blackcoat.livejournal.com]

Well, with OpenAuth, we're part way there...

A distributed lj would be interesting. So instead of being lj user="blackcoat" I'm user="blackcoat" journal="insanejournal" or something.

[matgb]

Dreamwidth (the LJ fork being developed by some former staff) appear to be working along similar lines to that, a distributed model allowing you to read locked content from other sites being a stated objective.

I'm really keen on a distributed model, a single point of failure is too annoying for me.

[matgb]

There's one called Gregarious that can handle friends locked posts and similar, I keep meaning to try it but never get around to it.

[mandy-moon.livejournal.com]

What are LJ's issues? I haven't noticed anything recently.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

They laid off a bunch of their US employees:

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5124184/the-russian-bear-slashes-a-social-network

Also, reliability has been down lately...

[krellis.livejournal.com]

Note that posts from people who actually do (or did) work at LJ have refuted some of the numbers and descriptions there - Valleywag isn't exactly known for accurate reporting.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. And valleywag is folding too, so there you go.

Still, it's been a little rougher on LJ in the past few months, I think.

[brynndragon.livejournal.com]

Can you give links for those posts you speak of?

[krellis.livejournal.com]

This entry in no_lj_ads has the most comprehensive information in one place I've seen (and appears to be being updated frequently):

http://community.livejournal.com/no_lj_ads/83519.html

It includes links to the entries I was referring to.

[brynndragon.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! That is a wonderful entry to share with people.

[krellis.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't buy too much into the doom and gloom yet. Yes, they laid off a bunch of people, but I personally am still optimistic. That said, it doesn't mean I'm not backing up my entries and photos from Scrapbook, as it's a prudent thing to do, it just means that I don't think it's quite time to be hunting too hard for alternatives yet. Yet. :)

[lil-laurel.livejournal.com]

i backed up my journal entries, but how did you back-up your scrapbook files?

I'm of the same line right now. I'm going to make sure i have my content saved, but i'm not looking for a new home yet.

[krellis.livejournal.com]

I haven't done it yet, but the discussion at this thread is about the only decent source I've found so far:

http://community.livejournal.com/lj_dev/800317.html

It's not quite as well-documented (yet?) as the LJ backup. Perhaps given a bit more time someone will come up with better information on it as well.

[lil-laurel.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you!

Working command-line Scrapbook backup client

[krellis.livejournal.com]

FYI, I've hacked up the fotoup.pl command-line client to make it work with the current LJ authentication scheme so you can back up Scrapbook photos. I posted an entry with details and a link to the updated version of fotoup.pl here:

http://krellis.livejournal.com/231473.html

(It's Perl, so feel free to diff against the real deal if you don't know me enough to trust me. :)) The instructions aren't very non-geek-friendly, but feel free to pass the entry around as you feel appropriate.

[dariusk.livejournal.com]

The one big, huge thing with LJ for me is the ability to have locked posts and tiers of filters. Because I love having a blog that only people I trust can read.

[kiya]

In response to the actual post, I'm not intending to leave LJ, so I, well, dunno.

On a complete tangent, are you playing ATITD4? I'm giving it another go, as the interface appears to be sucking marginally less....

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

I am. I'm Solipsistos, hanging out in Adn, at the very tip of the Red Sea straight east from the chariot.

I'm not particularly active-- I burned out real good in T3 and I'm trying to avoid that this time around, so I'm not really going nuts with too much stuff yet, but there's a guild hall there if you want to join up for chatting and stuff.

[kiya]

I'm Hely, working on sorting things out in the Cat's Claw region at the moment (because I could find the damn schools there). I haven't got the hang of long-distance travel yet, but I'll make a note of where you are.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Okay, cool.

The easiest way to get between regions is the chariot. It should be marked on your map (F3). You can head over to it and jump to Adn or other regions. If you can wait a few minutes, travel is free. Otherwise, it costs Travel Time-- check your Navigation menu for how much TT you have accumulated, and check Options->Offline Chores to see what you're set up to do when logged out. Mostly, setting Offline Chores to build up TT is the best way to go since you can do stuff quicker by hand than by offlining it (and you may not have grown enough of whatever it is to offline it yet).

Do you have a guild hall out there? I can run out and join up so I'm easy to get in touch with. Otherwise, send me a /chat and say hi. 8)

[kiya]

Yeah, I'm not big enough to offline things yet. I am small Egyptian.

But! I just finished making my house bigger! Six more expansion blocks and I'll level up. :}

I don't have a guild yet. I'm sort of puttering about seeing what I can accomplish on my own right now.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Whoo hoo, making your house bigger!

Uh, you aren't doing it one block at a time, right? It's more expensive, since you have to build the walls each time, and existing walls are basically torn down and discarded-- no recycling walls. :(

[kiya]

I'm doing three or four at a time, which I've figured out is less efficient than doing everything all at once, but I want to actually see progress.

Four rotted flax to go to 13 blocks.

AND I have access to clay now. Woohoo. Next step: animal husbandry!

[ex-susumu64.livejournal.com]

Flickr.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

YouTube.

[mazianni.livejournal.com]

Twitter.

[usagijer.livejournal.com]

GoogleDocs.

[kittenexploring.livejournal.com]

Ionospheric nuke detonations - nuke exploding is a 1, no nuke that second is a 0.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Pfeh, nukes? Kids these days, sheesh. Back in MY day, we tapped wires together at 300 baud! The really good hackers could tap 14.4k WITH error correction!

[kittenexploring.livejournal.com]

Wires? Wires! Luxury!

In my day we had to bang rocks together and use pressure waves to transmit data! You kids don't know how good you have it. I wore my fingers down to my armpit running my p2p client!

[dosboof.livejournal.com]

"Ideally the Russians won't screw up it up too much."

Those have been famous last words throughout most of recorded history.

I'm hoping it's overhyped and have no plans of deleting my LJ, but considering you can trust Russian business ethics as far as you can throw them, I backed up onto my local machine today in case I need to take the past 7 1/2 years of my life elsewhere with little or no notice.

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

In my dream world, "we" would be able to cobble something together from the extant LJ code (which is publicly available) and anyone could set up their own server that would be quasi-independent. BUT, using a model similar to how IRC works, one could establish relationships to other servers and build up a network that way, so not only could friendships be build across the same server the way they are now, but then communities could build up relationships with each other while maintaining more local autonomy. People who aren't technical could get accounts from friends or the inevitable for-profit entities which would step in (e.g. LiveJournal, assuming this round of unpleasantness is merely temporary), and people like you or I could host our own servers if that's what we wanted to do.

This isn't a fully formed idea, and I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement, but I think it'd be a more interesting and robust model than the current set-up.

[matgb]

Dreamwidth are working towards that sort of thing. It's what stopped me from working towards a Wordpress setup to do similar.

There are a number of different distributed trust models being worked on, Appleseed looked interesting but it's a one man band.

I'm definitely going to look into getting people to club together to pay for a dedicated server for a Dreamwidth install if they can get the codebase right. The problem with the LJ codebase as is is that it requires really old versions of Apache and is a bugger to install, so you'd actually need your own box with a high speed dedicated line.

Dreamwidth are hoping to have it set so you can just rent from a bog standard server farm, which'll make it actually viable.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

It turns out I know one of the Dreamwidth people from WPI, so I bet it'll turn out well.

[leviathan0999.livejournal.com]

I currently have "Sunctuary Journals" -- mirrors of my LJ, some not as up-to-date as I'd prefer -- on iunsanejournal.com, greatestjournal.com, commiejournal.com (Good for us old RCNers, Wot?) and Journalfen.net. Never heard of DeadJournal till a moment ago, but I'll hit that too.

[bouncingleaf.livejournal.com]

I don't have any good ideas for this. I mostly just have the same objections you have. Of the solutions you propose, #3 seems the most workable, but yes, I'd miss the cross-pollination of groups and the ability to readily see who knows who.

And in response to #6, although I do like Facebook for other reasons (the cross-pollination of groups... the ability to see who knows who), I don't like it at all for journal keeping - not for maintaining mine, not for reading others'.

[kittenexploring.livejournal.com]

Insanejournal seems to be the most functional livejournal clone at the moment that doesn't have as bad a silly problem as deadjournal. I don't think lj is going anywhere soon, though. First will come a few more waves of 'features' designed to extract money. As they drive people away the service improves until the next feature.

Just keep backups and you'll be fine. Maybe inscribe your posts on glass tablets in case my nuclear TCP idea above takes off.

[desertlover.livejournal.com]

There's a whole lot of fun going on over on Facebook. (Seriously)

There's a ton of crap-ware applications that do nothing but consume cycles and better tailor the advertising you are subjected to - BUT, it is easy to avoid/ignore said crap, and the advertising is easy to develop a blind spot to.

Privacy for private stuff is tricky to make sure you get right, but it is possible to have things secretive and uhm private. Also possible to have groups, filter Posts to groups of friends, and also aggregate blogs that aren't on Facebook.

And it's not just for kiddies. There's a huge adult user space.

Oh, but nudity in photos is a no-no. (not sure if that's an issue, only know because of some friends and breast feeding photos and an article about that topic)