LJ's new decision to allow users to tag others' journals re: "adult content" has me wanting to head for greener blogging pastures, if I can find any. You're the person I know on LJ with the most experience of other blogs, and I wondered if you had enough spare spoons to give me the benefit of your advice. (If not, I understand; I gather it hasn't been easy lately, spoon-wise.)
I had been looking at Greatest Journal, but what you say about spam gives me pause. I had thought that anonymous commenting would allow my LJ friends to comment there without a login, but perhaps if I created a second account as a "guest" login, for people who wanted to comment, that might work instead?
Any reflections on various blog sites would be very welcome. My current thought is to maintain my (free) LJ account, so as to have access to friends-locked entries of my LJ friends; I could then use the LJ account to post links to entries in the new blog, when appropriate. I'd like a blog site that allows comments, friends, basic filters for entries ("friends" and "private" are all I'd need) and interest listings - and that doesn't have any of this "other people can tag your entries re: adult content" nonsense.
Again, any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, and if you can't spare the spoons, then please accept my good wishes in any case.
"LJ's new decision to allow users to tag others' journals re: 'adult content' has me wanting to head for greener blogging pastures, if I can find any."
I actually see this as less of an issue than the things they did earlier in the year, but I can certainly see it being the straw that broke the camel's back for someone, or just more evidence that "they don't get it" and waiting around for 6A's clue shipment to arrive is pointless.
I've been meaning to write a long entry exploring the issues for a couple months; I've finally figured out how I want to write the first part...
"(I gather it hasn't been easy lately, spoon-wise.)"
(It hasn't. But it feels like things are finally starting to improve a little.)
"I had been looking at Greatest Journal, but what you say about spam gives me pause."
GreatestJournal is being attacked heavily right now, but the spammers could just as easily turn their attention to one of the other sites at any time. I don't know whether or how the different sites differ in their ability to handle (ideally, detect and filter) spam. But yeah, right now anonymous commenting on GJ is probably more trouble than it's worth.
"I had thought that anonymous commenting would allow my LJ friends to comment there without a login, but perhaps if I created a second account as a "guest" login, for people who wanted to comment, that might work instead?"
Is a guest login with the password spread around enough to make it functionally anonymous allowable within the TOS of any of these sites?
Anyhow, OpenID will allow your staying-on-LJ friends to comment -- under their own names, even -- on your blog elsewhere, if you pick a site that implements the OpenID stuff. It'll look a lot like this when they do.
InsaneJournal supports OpenID, as you can see. So does CommieJournal. GreatestJournal and Blurty, AFAICT, do not. I don't know about DeadJournal, JournalFen, or the other LJ-codebase blogging sites that I don't have accounts on yet (there are oodles of them). But I bet there's a table showing which sites include which features, somewhere.
With OpenID you'd also have the option of commenting to your LJ-friends entries as your InsaneJournal (or CommieJournal) self, they way I'm doing here, as long as they've either friended your IJ ID or allow non-friends to post comments. Being able to see locked entries is a little less clear to me (I think that if you've logged in to LJ via OpenID using your IJ username, and they've friended your IJ account, you'll see the friends-locked entry, but that you do still have to remember to log into LJ after you've logged into IJ). But you said you were planning to keep your LJ identity for access to locked entries, so even if I'm wrong (or it winds up feeling like a hassle), you're covered that way.
"Any reflections on various blog sites would be very welcome."
I haven't spent enough time exploring any of the other sites to give you a really fair comparison (because most of my friends are still her eon LJ), but I'll toss in a few impressions ... the others I've tried do "feel smaller" -- less "solid" somehow -- than LJ, which is probably just a reflection of how large, both in number of users and in equipment/facilities/staff LJ really is, but other than the spam on GJ (which isn't their fault) I haven't had any real problems on any of them yet. Occasionally GJ or IJ will not respond to my client when I try to post a new entry, but most of the time posting to four other sites combined takes less time than posting to LJ alone. IJ has lately been frequently posting my entry and failing to return the success code to my client, so the client just sits there waiting, thinking that it's not done yet (I can probably make this mostly not-a-problem by rearranging my posting script to post to IJ last).
Blurty feels like a ghost town. (It also varies the most from the familiar LJ user interface.) CommieJournal feels kind of like a new school building that isn't completely moved into yet. InsaneJournal maybe tries a smidgen to hard to "feel loose" and to be cute with its asylum theme (but once you've set up the style on your own journal you won't notice that quite as much). GreatestJournal feels repressed -- not repressive (none of these four feel like that), just like it's full of people unready to be as open and loose and friendly as I'm used to seeing on LiveJournal. Again, the caveat that these are impressions based on, really, too little experience to be fair.
There are feature differences and accounting differences (IIRC, InsaneJournal only has free accounts and permanent accounts but their permanent accounts don't cost much, for example). If you don't need womdigious numbers of icons, SMS posting built in, and image hosting, they'll all do the job -- if you do need any of those things, you'll want to check out who offers what.
Note that I'm only looking at sites using the LJ software. Some non-LJ-ish sites might work for you as well, though I expect that for the social-networking aspect alone -- the special way LJ handles 'friends' and works as an aggregator -- you'll probably wind up deciding to stick to LJ-codebase sites anyhow.
One thing that'll probably be a factor for you is, if there's another exodus, which site most of your friends move to. If most of your friends who move go to GJ, then you might want to go there as well despite the lack of OpenID support.
There's a project -- I've forgotten the name -- to build a LJ-software blogging site specifically for fen leaving LJ in protest after Strikethrough2007 and what followed. I haven't checked the status of that project lately.
"I could then use the LJ account to post links to entries in the new blog, when appropriate."
I've been thinking a lot about whether I should be posting content to LJ at all, or just posting links that look like cut-tags and lead to one of the other sites. (I'll explore the reasoning there in an entry one of these weeks, I promise.) Of course, I'd have to pick which one to link to ...
"I'd like a blog site that allows comments, friends, basic filters for entries [...] and that doesn't have any of this 'other people can tag your entries re: adult content' nonsense."
So far, the other sites I've looked at seem to be intent on not following LJ's mistakes, some having made explicit policy statements to that effect. (I haven't seen much of anything on Blurty.) None have 'upgraded' to the flagging code yet, AFAIK. CommieJournal does have a sister site, WackyJournal run by the same folks that's specifically for content that is PG-13 or lower. (In the other direction, ISTR hearing that JournalFen, where I don't have an account yet, is limited to users old enough to view adult content without controversy ...?)
One thing it's hard to predict is how the various sites will handle growth, whether it's the slow growth of the ordinary accrual of members, or abrupt growth due to migration. Will they get better as more resources for improvements become available? Worse as the resources the owner can afford get stretched too thin? Sell out to some more commercial entity? Knuckle to pressure applied indirectly via advertisers? (The last seems particularly unlikely for GJ and IJ, at least.)
One reason I chose to use multiple mirrors was because I didn't know where (or whether) most of my friends were going to move, and I wanted to be convenient to everyone and have them convenient to me. The other reason was that, as painful as the idea of moving from LJ is, I did not then want to wind up similarly bound to another site, in case wherever I moved to wound up doing something similarly stupid and/or evil. With mirrors, as long as I can make sure everyone reading me at any location knows the other locations and don't make any one site "primary", cutting off a site if it goes bad won't be like moving house, just a matter of cutting off one outlet.
The more transparent I can make access via OpenID, the more flexibility I have, and the lower the nuisance-cost and emotional-cost of telling any one site, "what you just did is unacceptable; goodbye." Like many other people, I felt months ago that the ethical choice would have been to leave LJ in protest, but the perceived cost of doing so was too high. I don't want to have to make that sort of decision again.
And thank you for the good wishes regarding my health.
(no subject)
I had been looking at Greatest Journal, but what you say about spam gives me pause. I had thought that anonymous commenting would allow my LJ friends to comment there without a login, but perhaps if I created a second account as a "guest" login, for people who wanted to comment, that might work instead?
Any reflections on various blog sites would be very welcome. My current thought is to maintain my (free) LJ account, so as to have access to friends-locked entries of my LJ friends; I could then use the LJ account to post links to entries in the new blog, when appropriate. I'd like a blog site that allows comments, friends, basic filters for entries ("friends" and "private" are all I'd need) and interest listings - and that doesn't have any of this "other people can tag your entries re: adult content" nonsense.
Again, any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, and if you can't spare the spoons, then please accept my good wishes in any case.
(no subject)
Longer Answer
I actually see this as less of an issue than the things they did earlier in the year, but I can certainly see it being the straw that broke the camel's back for someone, or just more evidence that "they don't get it" and waiting around for 6A's clue shipment to arrive is pointless.
I've been meaning to write a long entry exploring the issues for a couple months; I've finally figured out how I want to write the first part...
"(I gather it hasn't been easy lately, spoon-wise.)"
(It hasn't. But it feels like things are finally starting to improve a little.)
"I had been looking at Greatest Journal, but what you say about spam gives me pause."
GreatestJournal is being attacked heavily right now, but the spammers could just as easily turn their attention to one of the other sites at any time. I don't know whether or how the different sites differ in their ability to handle (ideally, detect and filter) spam. But yeah, right now anonymous commenting on GJ is probably more trouble than it's worth.
"I had thought that anonymous commenting would allow my LJ friends to comment there without a login, but perhaps if I created a second account as a "guest" login, for people who wanted to comment, that might work instead?"
Is a guest login with the password spread around enough to make it functionally anonymous allowable within the TOS of any of these sites?
Anyhow, OpenID will allow your staying-on-LJ friends to comment -- under their own names, even -- on your blog elsewhere, if you pick a site that implements the OpenID stuff. It'll look a lot like this when they do.
InsaneJournal supports OpenID, as you can see. So does CommieJournal. GreatestJournal and Blurty, AFAICT, do not. I don't know about DeadJournal, JournalFen, or the other LJ-codebase blogging sites that I don't have accounts on yet (there are oodles of them). But I bet there's a table showing which sites include which features, somewhere.
With OpenID you'd also have the option of commenting to your LJ-friends entries as your InsaneJournal (or CommieJournal) self, they way I'm doing here, as long as they've either friended your IJ ID or allow non-friends to post comments. Being able to see locked entries is a little less clear to me (I think that if you've logged in to LJ via OpenID using your IJ username, and they've friended your IJ account, you'll see the friends-locked entry, but that you do still have to remember to log into LJ after you've logged into IJ). But you said you were planning to keep your LJ identity for access to locked entries, so even if I'm wrong (or it winds up feeling like a hassle), you're covered that way.
(cont'd.)
... continued
I haven't spent enough time exploring any of the other sites to give you a really fair comparison (because most of my friends are still her eon LJ), but I'll toss in a few impressions ... the others I've tried do "feel smaller" -- less "solid" somehow -- than LJ, which is probably just a reflection of how large, both in number of users and in equipment/facilities/staff LJ really is, but other than the spam on GJ (which isn't their fault) I haven't had any real problems on any of them yet. Occasionally GJ or IJ will not respond to my client when I try to post a new entry, but most of the time posting to four other sites combined takes less time than posting to LJ alone. IJ has lately been frequently posting my entry and failing to return the success code to my client, so the client just sits there waiting, thinking that it's not done yet (I can probably make this mostly not-a-problem by rearranging my posting script to post to IJ last).
Blurty feels like a ghost town. (It also varies the most from the familiar LJ user interface.) CommieJournal feels kind of like a new school building that isn't completely moved into yet. InsaneJournal maybe tries a smidgen to hard to "feel loose" and to be cute with its asylum theme (but once you've set up the style on your own journal you won't notice that quite as much). GreatestJournal feels repressed -- not repressive (none of these four feel like that), just like it's full of people unready to be as open and loose and friendly as I'm used to seeing on LiveJournal. Again, the caveat that these are impressions based on, really, too little experience to be fair.
There are feature differences and accounting differences (IIRC, InsaneJournal only has free accounts and permanent accounts but their permanent accounts don't cost much, for example). If you don't need womdigious numbers of icons, SMS posting built in, and image hosting, they'll all do the job -- if you do need any of those things, you'll want to check out who offers what.
Note that I'm only looking at sites using the LJ software. Some non-LJ-ish sites might work for you as well, though I expect that for the social-networking aspect alone -- the special way LJ handles 'friends' and works as an aggregator -- you'll probably wind up deciding to stick to LJ-codebase sites anyhow.
One thing that'll probably be a factor for you is, if there's another exodus, which site most of your friends move to. If most of your friends who move go to GJ, then you might want to go there as well despite the lack of OpenID support.
There's a project -- I've forgotten the name -- to build a LJ-software blogging site specifically for fen leaving LJ in protest after Strikethrough2007 and what followed. I haven't checked the status of that project lately.
"I could then use the LJ account to post links to entries in the new blog, when appropriate."
I've been thinking a lot about whether I should be posting content to LJ at all, or just posting links that look like cut-tags and lead to one of the other sites. (I'll explore the reasoning there in an entry one of these weeks, I promise.) Of course, I'd have to pick which one to link to ...
"I'd like a blog site that allows comments, friends, basic filters for entries [...] and that doesn't have any of this 'other people can tag your entries re: adult content' nonsense."
So far, the other sites I've looked at seem to be intent on not following LJ's mistakes, some having made explicit policy statements to that effect. (I haven't seen much of anything on Blurty.) None have 'upgraded' to the flagging code yet, AFAIK. CommieJournal does have a sister site, WackyJournal run by the same folks that's specifically for content that is PG-13 or lower. (In the other direction, ISTR hearing that JournalFen, where I don't have an account yet, is limited to users old enough to view adult content without controversy ...?)
closing thoughts
One reason I chose to use multiple mirrors was because I didn't know where (or whether) most of my friends were going to move, and I wanted to be convenient to everyone and have them convenient to me. The other reason was that, as painful as the idea of moving from LJ is, I did not then want to wind up similarly bound to another site, in case wherever I moved to wound up doing something similarly stupid and/or evil. With mirrors, as long as I can make sure everyone reading me at any location knows the other locations and don't make any one site "primary", cutting off a site if it goes bad won't be like moving house, just a matter of cutting off one outlet.
The more transparent I can make access via OpenID, the more flexibility I have, and the lower the nuisance-cost and emotional-cost of telling any one site, "what you just did is unacceptable; goodbye." Like many other people, I felt months ago that the ethical choice would have been to leave LJ in protest, but the perceived cost of doing so was too high. I don't want to have to make that sort of decision again.
And thank you for the good wishes regarding my health.