LiveJournal is still here, but how do we go forward?
There were rumours of a total disconnect of the Russian part of the internet. LiveJournal, which is owned by a Russian company and is hosted in Russia, would therefore also be unreachable. There was some panic and many people moved their journals to Dreamwidth. I was not that worried, as I blog on my own WordPress instance and only cross-post to LJ - though almost all of the interaction I have with others is through LJ.
I have a permanent account, so I do not directly contribute to LJ’s bottom line - and while I don’t believe for a moment that my entries cause people to flock to LJ, adding content does strengthen the network effect of people engaging with LJ and possibly buying paid time etc. So the question I have to ask myself is: do I want to contribute to a Russian platform?
And the answer is that I do not want to do that. I fully support the widest possible range of economic sanctions. In the case of LJ, I don’t want to/can’t leave completely, but I do want to minimize my engagement on LJ. Concretely, this means the following:
- /c
- If you have a journal on Dreamwidth, I will read and comment over there. My username on DW is the same as on LJ, so please feel free to add me if you haven’t already done so.
- If you do not have a journal on DW, I will continue to read and comment on LJ.
- I will stop crossposting the entries from my blog to LJ, and instead crosspost them to DW.
It will take some time for me to switch the cross-posting over to DW, as there is some code involved and I need to get that done and tested.
Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.