Yes, this.
The most common complaints I've heard about Facebook over the years were about the lack of straightforward privacy settings and poor audience selection options. LiveJournal has had good solutions for years.
Meanwhile, Ello is barely usable right now. It has zero privacy settings and doesn't actually seem to be conceived to be a Facebook replacement. For now, Ello is more like Tumblr with no features.
Originally posted by
fengi at
Serious Suggestion: instead of chasing Ello, why not push LJ?I'm going to go all pitchman/cheerleader for a moment:
Instead of joining the stampede to half-baked ello, let's encourage people to join the Livejournal. It's far from perfect, but it's more viable than most other options.
It has the features ello testers and disgruntled Facebook users want now. After 15 years of experience, it has slowly learned from drama and errors. It survived the original dot bust and seems ready for the next one.
The free-to-paid membership model has provided ad-free, adult-friendly options for a decade plus, something earnest manifestos usually don't (see tumblr's broken promise).
So why deal with more inflated startup promises and fumbling? Say goodbye to Facebook and hello to Livejournal -- a customizable global social network that doesn't require real names and provides an easy, logical way to avoid ads. [Forgive me for the infomercial language.]
As a longtime user and occasionally harsh critic, I think LJ is flawed but less adversarial and predatory towards users than Facebook, Google and others. Yes, it has an "old meme" image and notorious past service dramas, but in the long term it's become a solid product.
It's a viable alternative to Facebook which is ready to serve users immediately.
Click here for their new promotional video, which you can post to Facebook.
Click to view
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*Recently when an error appeared to override my preferred friends display, a complaint ticket received a polite response and a fix in less than 24 hours - from what appeared to be an actual human. Even in the worst days of LJ, my tickets were handled in a relatively coherent and timely fashioned compared with the inscrutable silence of bigger networks.