LJ Strike

[xela]

I was unaware of the whole controversy about LJ's new owners quietly putting an end to the classic free account until a couple of days ago, and as a permanent account holder I am blithely unaffected by pretty much any stupid-ass thing they decide to do. But this decision so totally misses the point.

I doubt a 24-hour posting strike will do much good. But it can't hurt. Here's a good brief discussion, and here's a timetable by timezones

Personally, I don't expect them to get it, and think we'll see an outmigration from LJ eventually. I tend to think the best solution would be for someone to take the LJ code, devise a migration tool for LJ account holders, and form`a consumer's co-op to own and operate their user-owned alternative site. (I don't have the time or energy to do this, but I do own the domains altjournal.com, .net, and .org, and would be willing to contribute those, a couple terabytes of RAID arrays, and, say, ten U of datacenter space to help bootstrap someone who wanted to run with the idea, and could convince me they could make it work.)

Comments

[jered]

The LJ code has been running for some time at DeadJournal, InsaneJournal, etc. The problem is critical mass, as there's no cross-site community management. That's the main thing that blocks migration to other blogging tools in general -- LJ is your only choice for ACLs in a traditional (e.g. non-MySpace, Facebook, etc) format.

[aerynne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think it's the ACLs that really make a difference.

[siderea]

*smaksforhead!* That was what I was fogetting to do! Ask you to buy altjournal.[*], seeing as it is still available

Good telepathy!

Please join elsejournal.

[tla]

What I really want is something that will run in a distributed fashion, so that I can use any client I like to point at whatever set of RSS feeds I choose, and the owner of each RSS feed will have ACLs set on each post using some sort of distributed ID system, e.g. OpenID. In fact, I think LiveJournal IDs are OpenIDs, so something could probably be written that would allow LJ into the distributed system I want. Then I could take my posts elsewhere, and the people to whom I give access would be easily able to continue reading them.

Maybe that's what I'll do when I'm supposed to be writing Chapter 3.