(Not a) Weekend Update Is Wondering Where Everybody Went

[jon_chaisson]

So the noise around LJ Land is that everyone's migrating over to Dreamwidth. Not entirely sure of the reasons why, not that I've really paid much attention to the ownership goings-on here on this platform.

As you may remember, Bob, I used to have a Dreamwidth account maybe 3-4 years ago. I even used it for a personal project of writing weekly poetry. But once I stopped that project, that journal gathered dust until a year ago when I decided to save the work I'd done in Word format and close it down.

[Edit: Looking at past posts, it's more like 6-7 years ago! I was posting the poetry around 2010-11.]

I'm undecided if I want to take the same route right now. I've been using LJ since 2004 and have a permanent account. Obviously I still use it, mainly for personal, non-music, non-writing related blog entries. I so rarely get a response, not that it bothers me. [OK, in a way it's kind of sad that I don't, considering that back in the day this platform got a lot of traffic. But that's another entry entirely.] I still read my Friends Feed, which at this point is probably the same eight or nine people I know who still post here. A. closed hers down a few weeks ago, having realized she hadn't posted anything for years. I wouldn't necessarily feel too bad about doing the same, considering I've more than gotten my money's worth for it.

At this point, I already have two WordPress blogs going, which have been getting more attention than the LJ over the last few years. If I did rejoin Dreamwidth, it would be to post the same thing -- more personal entries. I'd backup these entries and close this one down.

But at this point, like I said -- still up in the air.

We shall see.

Comments

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I am still here. Not posting and commenting as much as I used to because of life changes and stress and all that good stuff.

Hope life settles down soon. I will still be here, though I do have a Dreamwidth by the same name, too.

[nimisha.livejournal.com]

This is all I have been able to figure out...It seems that the Russian owners of LJ finally decided to move the servers to Russian soil. A lot of people are worried about the security of their entries, including the private ones. It is naturally more of a problem for LJ's Cyrillic users, as some have been arrested in Russia for anti-government blogs. That is where it *may* become a problem for people with permanent accounts, like you and me. Because of the government threat, many, many Russian, Belarussian, and Ukranian users are reportedly packing up and heading out. LJ has not been profitable outside of those areas for years (and permanent accounts mean no more $ from you or me, right?), so if it begins to be a financial burden within those areas as well, there is some speculation that they might decide to shut the whole thing down, without warning.

I had obtained a DW account back in 2011, after the DDoS attacks, but had never done anything with it. I have now backed up all (almost 3000) of my LJ entries to that DW account. At the moment, it is set to private, as I may not ever be much of a blogger again (I posted all of 9 entries in 2016), but I do feel better knowing that if worse comes to worst, all I will have lost is the money spent on a permanent account and not my years' worth of posts.