Leaving LiveJournal — not yet

Posted by: o'wolf 9 years, 9 months ago

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But I've decided to let my paid account expire next year and move to a self hosted solution. There are several reasons, one is that I'm generally unhappy with how LJ develops:

• Poorly tested design changes, often making custom themes an eyesore
• Customization choices are getting fewer and fewer.
• SUP (LJ's owner) seems to care less and less for non-Russian customers. Understandably, looking at the demographics, but still...
• Injection of third-party scripts (adfox.ru, for example) and several SUP-owned trackers into pages, even for paying users.
• Why am I as paying customer being tracked by an advertising company, anyway?
• Adblocking of the adfox.ru tracker results in a never terminating AJAX request, burning CPU and degrading browser performance.
• It's 2014 but the official mobile clients (both for Android and iOS) are unusable.
• The community is gone. The postings on my friends page are almost exclusively chatter of a furry gossip community, RSS feeds and reposts from Twitter / Tumblr / personal blogs, some other communities... On the postive side, some friends I really care about are still posting interesting stuff.

I won't go so far to say that LiveJournal is dead, but it sure starts to smell funny. Quite frankly, it's not worth the money anymore. Because of the friends and a hand full of other people still posting interesting stuff, I'll stick around for a while. But it's time to start moving.

For the next 11 months, I'll post (most) of my articles here and on my new blog at wölfisch.de. I have imported all of my LiveJournal posts, comments, and the friends list at the new site. "Friends Only" posts are accessible by anyone on my friends list by logging in via LiveJournal to my new blog. Adding comments requires a valid local or LiveJournal account.

After the paid account expires next year, I'm going to set this journal to "Friends Only" mode. I'll probably post notifications about new blog posts at wölfisch.de afterwards, and as long as there's anyone I care about posting here I'll keep lurking. I'll be honored if you'd keep reading my blabber at the new blog!

• Tags:
• livejournal
• not a goodbye

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