Changing Things

[wyld_dandelyon]

It's time to officially close my Live Journal. Everything is backed up to DreamWidth (though I don't think that backup made actual copies of the photos hosted on LJ).

LJ hasn't been what it used to be since a Russian company bought it, and their most recent terms of service are horrible (I'm liable to lose the account if they notice me talking about politics or queer issues, for instance, even if I were to keep a paid account).

It's not the same place any more by any metric I know of, even if it does still have the same address.

And I do definitely like it here.

But still, even thinking about it makes me feel sad.

Feelings are not always logical.

Comments

[kelkyag]

I hear that. It was home for a long time, and a few things are still there, but it's not so comfortable anymore.

I've been stalling on my cleanup, because I do have a lot of photos to wrangle first, and I haven't done much with the LJ photo interface since they switched over to the tagless one. DW has photo hosting now, but I don't think it pulls photos over with an import. Before it had photo hosting it would just link to the photos on LJ, and I don't know if that has changed. I'd like to go through and fix all my old photolinks; I've been using Flickr, but am not sure what to expect with the purchase by Verizon.

If you "claimed" your LJ OpenID (so that comment attributions are updated as people import things & the like), you may want to delete that OpenID account before you delete the LJ account that can authenticate to it. (See this support issue.)

[acelightning]

If you were keeping all your photos in your LJ "album", you can download them back onto your own computer, then delete the album (and/or delete the entire account). You can then upload the photos to your DW picture storage, although you'd then have to go through ALL the archived material and re-create the links to the pictures, by hand, one at a time.

[siliconshaman]

*hug*

I know how you feel... LJ was my first online journal. I met so many friends through it, and I had one of the last permanent accounts they sold.

But it wasn't the same any more. Some of those friends had their accounts suspended or locked for what they posted.

[earthspirits]

I felt sad too when I closed my LJ - but it's been great here, and I'm glad to be rid of LJ (what with all of the changes due to reverting to Russia, etc.).

[mdlbear]

Still there, but only for cross-posting and reading the few people who still haven't moved. I've dropped you, which I've been doing for everyone who isn't still getting comments over there that I want to read.

Be sure to claim your openID name so that the comments you made there will get your DW username attached -- you have to do that before closing your LJ account.

[mount_oregano]

I read the new terms of service for LiveJournal, and the no politics and no gay stuff only applies to Russian accounts. Someone with a US account can say whatever they want. I'm keeping my LiveJournal account -- but I also opened a Dreamdwidth account.

It's a creepy policy, though, and it doesn't make me feel better that Russians are trying to influence our politics and government. Or that United States ISPs may soon be able to block or slow down whatever they want. I'm not sure there's a safe harbor.

I, too, feel sad.

[tigertoy]

LJ has been effectively dead for years due to facebook. Lots of people I'd like to be in touch with never look at the site anymore. Few of those people have moved here to DW. The only reason I've kept paying for my LJ account is that I don't have any other place to keep my four digit number of photos and I don't want to rewrite a 3 digit number of old posts that include those pictures.

I refuse to use facebook because they are so evil and I hate them personally because they have stolen all my friends from me.