I've recently heard from many sources that Livejournal is dying.
This is a mixed bag for me, in the sense that:
- I am very unhappy about LJ's breaking of their community promise never to have advertisements, and the fact that that promise silently disappeared from their statement of principles. Classy.
- LJ has been utterly overrun by spambots, to the extent that jwz's Xscreensaver hack that pulls random new entries from the latest-posts feed only rarely pulls something other than spam. This is partly a result of the DMCA getting the "safe habour" provisions only half-right; LJ, like every other forum, either must commit to taking full responsibility for policing their content or basically not do anything. Proactive-enough measures to kill spam accounts would incur liability, so ... yeah. Fail.
- I use LJ right now as the main mirror of my blog (which is naturally hosted on my own software/server and just auto-pushed to LJ). I disabled comments in my own software ages ago when I noticed that spammers cared enough about peddling their viagra that they bothered figuring out how to mass-post spam on my software (despite, as far as I know, my being the only one who's running it anywhere).
- It's still clumsy to seamlessly friend/comment/talkback across different sites. People also often expect, if you establish an account on some of these accounts, that you're using it in the fullest sense. If I wrote the glue to mirror all my posts to Facebook (ugh), I bet people would be unhappy if they use facebook's other features to try to interact with me.
I am now reasonably likely to make an aggregator component to my blog/wiki software if I leave LJ, but I'm wondering if I should add the ability to push my posts out to any particular other sites.
If anyone would like to contribute their impressions of how the places and kinds of blogging are changing recently, I'd love to hear about it.
