As of today, my old paid account on LiveJournal is over. I upgraded to Plus so I could still have most of my old userpics, and will continue to cross-post to there for the foreseeable future. But Dreamwidth is my new home.

Having given the issue some serious thought, I've decided to go ahead and move my journal over to Dreamwidth. The main reasons for doing so:

• I could import my entire LiveJournal, comments and all, into Dreamwidth.
• I could continue to crosspost from here to LiveJournal so that the people who don't want to join can still read them.
• Dreamwidth is based on the LJ codebase, so it's familiar.
• Current LJ users can use their LJ logins to leave comments on my Dreamwidth blog.
• Not owned by the Russians.

Anyone who would like to follow me over would be most welcome to. I have a few spare invite codes, and you can always hit the Dreamwidth Codesharing community to pick up a code.

I'm again considering closing up shop and moving to another journaling solution.

This time, the issue is spam. Russian LJ comment spam.


I average about one a day. It's not terrible, but an annoyance when I'm on the fence with the service to begin with. It really annoys me for two reasons:

1. It really annoys me because I have to DO something about it. It means I have to go delete each one by hand rather than LJ binning up all the "suspect" comments in one place so that I can delete them whenever I get to it (much like Wordpress does).


2. I get an email for each one. With Wordpress, I only get emailed comments that pass through the spam filter. The rest are just put into the "Spam" category. I can look over them and mass delete them whenever I log in. Half the time, the comment was already deleted by the spammer, but the email goes out immediately when the comment is made.
   
   In essence, the spammers are using LJ as a vector to spam me via email.

But I'm still stuck with the same conundrum I was last year. There are still a good number of people I only follow on here. I don't want to lose connection with them. I'm again looking at Dreamwidth. It's LJ-like because it's branched from the LJ codebase, but with a lot of the stupidity of LJ fixed.

However, it seems that all the cool kids are on Tumblr now. I have an account there as well, and I'm giving thought to moving over there.

I'm also not fond of the idea of losing 10 years of posts. Maybe there's a way to import all my old posts into Tumblr...

So I've been thinking. About LiveJournal.

I have a paid account, and have since 2005 or so. I renewed it again this year ... but not be choice. It was only renewed because I had set it up to automatically renew a few years ago and forgot about it. But it brings up a valid point. And that point is, how much more do I want to invest in this place?

LiveJournal, and before that TigreJournals, has been my online home since 2001. I'm closing in on 2,000 entries, covering all of my twenties. It's a precious gold mine of my memories, thoughts and activities from college to my first steps into "real life" to where I find myself now.

But, and let's be frank, this place is not what it once was. I know it. You know it. We all know it.

There once was a time where a day on my LJ friends' list would be three pages long, and if I missed a day or three I could be sure I'd have to dedicate an hour or so to getting caught back up on whatever had happened. Hell, there was a time that you weren't a fur unless you had an LJ account. It was a primary method of communication for me, and one of the original "social networks" I was involved in.

But these days few people bother to even read LJ anymore, and even fewer post regularly. Almost everyone has moved on to newer things. These days. all my high school and college friends are on Facebook, and all my furry friends are on Twitter. Hell, even I post far less regularly than I would once have. This last week involved two flight lessons nearing solo, and a trip to Atlanta for a private concert with halioffirpine. But I haven't bothered to update LJ-land with all this yet.

It's like watching the end of the Universe, the end of time, when the last stars are flickering out of existence slowly, and heat death is setting in.

I guess I just wonder how much more of my energy I should continue to invest in this place? To be sure, I have some friends for whom LJ is my only connection to, and I don't want to neglect them. But I also can't help but notice that my Twitter client runs on my desktop and alerts me when someone I follow posts ("tweets") ... in just the same way Semagic once did with my LJ friends list.

Each morning, when I first wake up, I grab my iPad and check, in order: 1) Facebook, 2) Twitter, 3) FARK ... and eventually down the line, I get to LJ. When I'm out on and about, the things I check with my phone are, in order: 1) Twitter, 2) Facebook, and 3) USA Today. I almost never check LJ from my phone because it sucks so hard.

It's not so much that LJ has lost importance so much that it has lost relevance. It's like ... it's like the browser wars. At one time, Netscape controlled 80% of the browsers. Then Internet Explorer came along and, irregardless of the bundling with Windows, IE6 was a much better browser when it was released. Netscape didn't innovate and, in a ironic twist, Microsoft would let IE wither until where we find ourselves now in another browser war. LJ has simply failed to keep pace and failed to remain relevant in the face of the "social network" revolution that's taken place over the last 4 years.

Please note that this is not meant as a slight against the folks still here who DO read my LJ. This is just kind of what I'm feeling, and the thoughts going through my head right now as I type into Xjournal (a client, I might mention that has STILL not been updated to fully support Snow Leopard, but there are no other real options).

So here we are. I'm posting to LJ, probably feeling a lot like some AOL users felt at the end of the 90s when the wider Internet made their service irrelevant.

One thing I'm seriously considering doing is resurrecting my old kiranlightpaw.com domain, which has been dormant for 2 years and underutilized nearly forever. I may throw a copy of Wordpress on there, transfer everything from here, and start doing my own thing. The only downside to that is that I lose what community there still is here.

I'm not leaving LJ just yet, but I think this will be the last time I pay for a paid account on LiveJournal. And while I will probably still post here (let's face it, there are some things - like this - that just can't be said in 140 characters), it will probably continue to be infrequent posts at best (or at least as frequent as it has been).

BTW, flying this afternoon. Pattern work. Hopefully I'll have gotten my landings a little bit better by the end of the day.

You know, I remember when Livejournal was, more or less, the center of my online social life. Almost all my friends were on LJ and posted regularly. Especially in "the fandom," it seemed like it was almost a requirement. It was easy, because it was the only thing I had to keep up with. Hell, even when I'd go to a lab at Auburn, LJ was the first thing I'd hit.

These days, my attention is [not so] equally divided between:

• LiveJournal


• Facebook


• Twitter


• A handful of other sites I visit every so often.

Each of these services seems to have their groups of users that don't overlap very much. That is, a lot of people I know on Facebook (which is mostly family and friends "outside the fandom"). Twitter has its own group of people I follow. And then there's LJ, which has always been here. It's just strange how most of these groups don't overlap except peripherally.

It's almost like social networking overload, and I wonder how much more I can subdivide my attention.

Note to self: figure out a way to backup my LJ in case they croak.