LJ muckety muck

[prog]

rserocki wins the prize for the first person on my flist to (without me having to ask) summarize the recent rambling and overlong post to news about what just hoppa. (Basically: a Russian media company, SUP, just agreed to acquire Livejournal from SixApart.)

By itself I probably wouldn't care much, but the whole post-flagging thing left me feeling a little raw. News so soon after of a fundamental structural shakeup at LJ makes me more nervous about leaving six-n-growing years of personal writing exclusively on someone else's servers, running a presentation layer that is getting baroque in strange ways.

Now that I've started to use and enjoy MovableType, and that I have been planning to launch a blog of some variety at jasonmcintosh.com, the chances are looking nonzero that I'll jump ship sometime in the coming year.

Comments

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

I was going to say they couldn't possibly run it more incompetently than the current administration but that's just tempting fate.

re the post flagging thing, the only plausible explanation I've heard (aside from LJ/SixApart being morons) is that they did at the behest of advertisers.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Or its implementation coulda been a pre-purchase stipulation insisted upon by SUP's lawyers. Shrug.

The principle of the thing upsets me less than how it's implemented. It apparently (and, worse, inconsistently) sets up a new barrier between my content and my audience. I didn't ask for this.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Either way it's not something any of their customers asked for. I've put plenty of money into LJ in the past precisely *because* they left the content well alone. These days they're too quick to make sweeping changes nobody wants and can't opt out of. Very bad.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

Someone else on my f-list had suggested that this whole post flagging thing was probably a way to make LJ more 'appealing' to a buyer -- "we're providing tools to protect the kiddies" sort of thing. -- apparently they were correct.

[aarondf.livejournal.com]

What I do and like is have my 'real' blog on my work server using MT but have a plugin which autoposts everyting to my LJ also. Only real problem with this is the comments are split but for me not a big deal.

Obviously

[taskboy3000.livejournal.com]

I believe in controlling my own meager content, which is why I (almost) never blogged on LJ. I understand the community aspect of LJ, but I didn't like the lack of control. I suppose I could have staged my content elsewhere and merely published my journals through LJ, but that seemed like a lot of work for little bang.

Perhaps there's a business in making P2P blogging, in which the content sits on your home machine, but gets published on a server?

Go with MT, jmac. Take the power you so richly deserve!