Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/08/six-to-end.html
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Yeah, fuck those guys. Dreamwidth seems alright though? Seeing as it’s been set up by ex-livejournal staffers. Not that i’ve used it. I wonder if george is gonna jump ship.
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I hadn’t posted there in internet aeons, but I just killed what little presence I had there now.
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“Ownership” is rife with bogosity - especially when it comes to websites trying to profit by mass-adoption of user-created content. Trying really hard to create that illusion of openness and public-participation, but with careful behind-the-scenes manicuring of discourse in order to avoid the embarrassment of anybody saying anything awkward. Culture is inseparably “owned” by those who create it - NOT by rent-seeking parasites.
Just as bad is how reactionary Russia has been to sexuality. Religion is merely an older excuse for their oppressive stodginess which had no excuse even in soviet era.
(ETA - I know that this isn’t Russian, but it is a criticism of Soviet oppression)
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A couple of my favorite authors recently mentioned leaving LJ and migrating to Dreamwidth; now I know why they are probably jumping ship.
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I failed to notice that LJ turned into a Russian social network - not that I ever spent any time on it - my impression of it was that it was still very literature-focused. For those old users, I can’t see how the new TOS would be anything but totally intolerable, given that a good chunk are going to be in violation of it. The new business focus being what it is, I wonder if there will be any sort of impact from this exodus of English speakers. How important are the core users when services like this transform into something completely different? How well do communities stay coherent when they have to move to a different platform?
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I got one of those permanent accounts back in 2002 or so. Can’t recall the last time I logged in to my account, though. Guess I might just have to do that, so’s I can delete the shit out of it.
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Didn’t Livejournal also lose its DMCA safe harbour status? Seems like things are already going south and this would just be another nail in the coffin.
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I don’t really ever want to go back to LJ, and for a moment considered letting my account eventually be banned because of my history of entries grappling with my sexuality, bu eh… I guess I’ll make a backup.
Feels like going back into a long abandoned building to fish out your diary long after you stopped keeping diaries.
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as a longtime lj user (since 08’) this news totally stinks
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Done in and financed by a country that was never a Soviet satellite?
I don’t understand what you are asking. Was that intended as a question or a statement?
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Anyone have a good way of migrating posts out of there? For a while, I was manually copying old LJ into Evernote, but it was slow and boring. And then Evernote changed its terms and I gave up on it and I now have a bunch of stuff stranded in two different places. 
I thought that businesses main purpose was enhancing shareholder value.
I wonder if GRRM will be migrating off of LJ because of this.
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I can’t vouch for this as I found it less than a minute ago, but ljmigrate is available on GitHub. Ljmigrate is a tool for archiving posts from any LiveJournal clone site and optionally migrating them to any other LJ-clone site. Useful for moving from LiveJournal to InsaneJournal, for instance.
Also an option I very recently found: migrating LJ posts to WordPress
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For an alternate take there’s the opinion of a Chicago-based Russian ex-pat writer who’s work I tend to enjoy. His mother, who grew up in Sovier Russia and is a vocal advocate for LGBT rights, is staying put because she feels it’s important to fight where she already is.
Eh. When they forked the code back in '09 they also forked the underlying design principles. Before that LiveJournal had been this interesting mix of private journals shared with a few friends and public blogs meant to be seen by thousands. Dreamwidth design ran more toward the privacy aspect while LiveJournal embraced the public nature. A Wordpress installation is probably a better idea for anything that you want public.
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If you want to just move everything over to a different (non-sucky, non-sellout) service rather than deal with an offline backup, Dreamwidth has a very good data migration tool that will bring over all your posts and all comments on your posts to your dreamwidth account.
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What? It’s perfectly possible to set up a public journal on dreamwidth. The fact that DW has more fine grained privacy tools than LJ does not mandate that you use them.
Also, and @politeruin: Dreamwidth is owned by people who have been quite vocal about not tolerating any dilution of their freemium business model. They don’t carry any advertising of any kind on their site, and insist that they never will. That puts them on the side of the angels in my book.
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Organizations can charter their purposes to be practically anything. It amazes me how few kinds of business are tried.
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