Moving -- Some Practical Questions

[angiepen]

I have to admit that I'm still hoping things will get better right here on LJ. :/ I know, that hope is becoming more and more forlorn and less and less realistic. Not only does LJ not seem to be capable of verbalizing (or textualizing) its actual policies in a clear and unambiguous manner, it also seems to be doing a bit of thrashing when it

Comments

[lilithilien]

I don't have an invite to journalfen so that wasn't an option for me. Instead, I got a GJ and IJ account. After trying both of them, I'm extremely happy at IJ and wholly underwhelmed by GJ. (GJ's also been banning artists so I don't think it's the answer.)

I've found the community at IJ to be active, lively, and bright. Yes, it's small, which means that we're able to take what we've learned here at LJ and rebuild in better ways over there. I don't think this is possible at GJ, where a certain mode of interaction has already been established. The owner is very pro-fandom, and has assured us that we're more important than advertisers.

I concur about the "insanity" theme. In a recent poll over there, other people commented saying the same thing. I'm going to put a suggestion in their "Ideas" page to see if it might be changed. I can't say that it will do any good. However, the site owner is incredibly responsive to requests. For instance, just a few days after people complained about a 100-friends limit on free accounts, he upped it to 250.

The site is small, it's true. That has its benefits and drawbacks, but I see it as a remarkable opportunity to take what we've learned and to rebuild something better. At least I'm hopeful!

[angiepen]

I'm hearing some good things about IJ's owner, but my point is that he might not be able to upgrade enough to support several thousand active users moving over there. Does he have the money for upgrades? (And if he keeps selling permanent accounts for thirty or forty dollars he's going to dig himself into a huge hole with an eventually-massive horde of users demanding perpetual service but no income to support them.) Is he willing to make this his full-time day job, assuming it's not already?

Do you know how big IJ is right now? I'll feel a lot better about it if it has ten thousand active (as in, posting at least once or twice a month) users than if there are only one or two thousand. He might well love us to pieces and have the best intentions in the world, but if the scaling-up is beyond his resources then that's a serious and perhaps insurmountable problem. :/

I'd love to hear that there's some place willing AND able to take us in, but so far I haven't heard anything concrete along those lines, with numbers and plans. Have you? [hopeful look]

Angie

[lilithilien]

I don't have the numbers, but I think I know where I can get them. I will check and get back to you.

I do know this is the owner's full-time job and stewardess said that he has eight tech staff working for him. And if he's taking the money and reinvesting it into the business, I think he'll be able to make this work.

Truthfully, I think the biggest problem is going to be moving entire communities to another location. So far the trusted migration programs only work for personal accounts. However, there's a new program in beta that claims to be able to deal with that. If that works, I think we'll see several comms (especially the HP ones) leaving en masse.

[angiepen]

I do know this is the owner's full-time job and stewardess said that he has eight tech staff working for him.

I hadn't heard that before but it's excellent news.

And yes, the thought of moving entire communities full of fic -- years worth of fic, or art or whatever -- is rather daunting. :/ It makes me very happy I don't mod any communities.

Angie

[lilithilien]

That's what I mean about a responsive site (yeah, it does help that it's small). Here are the numbers:

* Total accounts: 45301
* ... active in some way: 10604
* ... that have ever updated: 14097
* ... updating in last 30 days: 3003
* ... updating in last 7 days: 2154
* ... updating in past 24 hours: 709

[angiepen]

[squint] That's... decent. I still don't think they can take all of us, but they're used to a fair amount of traffic and if it is this guy's living then he's more likely to be able to scale up, and if he's been running this business for several years (?) then he's more likely to be able to do it successfully.

Thanks for the data. :)

Angie