Hi everyone

[prog]

Yeah so I've totally let LJ slide. This is my first post in like five weeks, after over eight years of nigh-daily use (though my posting frequency started nosediving early this year). I may be done with it. If nothing else, I am almost certainly not going to re-up my paid account when it comes time, later this year.

Everything I've been writing lately has been either on the Gameshelf (which I refaced and relaunched last month) or Twitter. I am also on Facebook, but only nominally: all my status updates there are actually just cross-posted tweets. (I kind of hate Facebook now, and wish I'd never joined. But deleting my FB account at this point is not an option. That's how they getcha.)

I've also basically stopped reading LJ, which sucks, and deserves reversing. (EDIT: I have begun to eat through N pages of backlogged flist posts. RIGHT NOW.) I have a Perl script that lets me subscribe to all posts - even locked ones - but its formatting was off, and I am incredibly lazy, so rather than fix it I just shut it off. I would manually visit my friends page just often enough to keep up with y'all, but when LJ lowered the default friends-page size to 10, I stopped bothering, because: incredibly lazy.

So, I would like a place to write longer-form, non-Gameshelfy blog posts. Perhaps I shall join the exodus to DreamWidth, which seems to be well and truly underway among my long-standing LJ flist. Or perhaps I will set up a Tumblr. Or maybe I will try hosting a damn blog myself... or maybe I will just listen my to my incredible laziness and continue using this damn thing. I don't know yet.

How're you?

Comments

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

LJ lowered the default friends-page size to 10

A-ha! I thought something odd had happened. But then I thought maybe I just rarely scrolled all the way to the bottom and the friends pages had always been that short.

Jerks.

[magid.livejournal.com]

If you want a DW invite code, I have some.

[jazzfish]

I heartily endorse the Dreamwidth product or event, as I'm sort of in the process of migrating that way myself. Maybe a new platform will be enough of a Change to get / keep you writing the longer non-Shelf posts?

[cnoocy]

One of my friends has set up things to make a daily post of all his tweets to his LJ. It at least keeps him connected to things, and I've been considering doing so.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

many of my friends do this, and it's not particularly value-added. Tweets are really hard to parse standalone like that.

also, I do have a DW account, same name, and plan to make the migration before my paid time here expires.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

They're also redundant for people who read the tweets via Twitter directly (or via RSS like I do).

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

or on facebook, which is where I get prog's twitters. they work there.

[prog.livejournal.com]

It depends on the toots. Blocking out @-replies (as per Facebook's echoes of my tootles) suddenly makes things a lot more readable.

Convinced that part of why Twitter got an early bad rep among the LJerati is how LoudTwitter just echoes _everything_ a person tweets, so that a reader felt like they were listening to one half of... several phone conversations, actually.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I pondered doing something like that (and rolling my own solution, because I don't like loudtwitter's output). But I honestly don't know how many prog.livejournal readers there are who aren't also my twitter/facebook readers.

On the third hand, there's arguably value in cc:ing tweets over to the entirely separate medium that of LJ/DW, where followup conversation appropriate to that medium can happen. That's the result of their appearance on FB, anyway, and I appreciate it -- it's one of the reasons I can't scuttle my FB account.

Boy these TAs (twoletter acronyms) are kind of grating, en masse.

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

I'm great! Thanks for asking. Or something.

I still check LJ. I don't write much, but I would if I had more time. LJ posts have so much more *content value* that twitter or FB has. Most of those micro-updates are just silly stuff, or pointers to interesting URLs. No actual discussion.

I'm not ready to leave LJ yet. I have a lifetime account that I purchased some ... 6 years ago.

I really liked the permissions control on postings that LJ afforded, and wish such things were easier in Facebook land.

I don't really like the changes in LJ land that have happened since the original sale, but they really don't affect me at all, being a lifetime account holder (I don't see the ads, etc.). And with a few exceptions, the new successive owners have managed to the keep the site up and running (which probably got easier as more and more people stopped using it).

I suppose I could go over to DW, or setup an account there. I know folks who cross-post to LJ from there. That is OK, I guess.

I miss LJ from 2004, really. All of the cool kids were doing it, and it had value. Now, not as much.

But this seems to be the predictable cycle of nearly any online community space. I still mourn the loss of some of the dialup BBS and NovaNET/PLATO community I once had, and that was over 20 years ago. .

[xach.livejournal.com]

I let my paid account lapse, thinking I didn't care about any of the paid features, but then I realized that all my *visitors* suffer with the ads stuck into my pages. And I link to a lot of my posts from Lisp-land, and I didn't want that to be the impression people got from my blog.