Staying with Livejournal
Apr. 11th, 2011 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessSo, as my Twitter followers know, I came very close to abandoning Livejournal just a couple of weeks ago. This was not because of a sudden love of Facebook. I still hate Facebook. Or because of a sudden love for Twitter, although I do love Twitter, and not in a sudden way. Rather, it was because I was getting tired of constantly getting logged out -- and because I had just discovered, to my annoyance, that people attempting to comment anonymously - i.e., those without an LJ account -- would have to watch an ad. I had specifically chosen a paid account not so much to keep me from watching ads as to keep my own blog ad free, and I felt that I was not getting what I was paying for. My interactions with Livejournal's service department were not going very well either. And this was after several years of declining customer service. And let's not even get into Livejournal's business decision to ignore what its customer base wants -- a blogging service where users can be anonymous, pseudo-anonymous or not-anonymous at all, and share or not share their thoughts with the world, with select friends, or privately, changing with every post, to, well, a blogging service that also offers games. Livejournal, we love you because you aren't Facebook. You attempt to turn yourself into Facebook, and we don't love you at all.
Then Livejournal started going wonky -- very wonky -- and I couldn't access it at all.
Time to abandon Lj, right?
Not quite.
Not just because I've been on Lj since, wow, 2002, which is longer than I've stuck with apartments, jobs, and relationships; there's been such a huge shift in the people who were reading this blog in 2003 and even 2005 and now, and a huge shift in the comments as a result, that it hardly feels like the same place. In 2002 to about, hmm, 2006, and maybe a bit later - say, 2008? -- Lj was a place where I mostly chatted with my personal, mostly real life friends, and posted the occasional poem (scroll down for poems that I posted on LJ) even though I had originally planned to use it as a writing/promotional blog, not realizing that starting in 2002 my job/grad school would keep me too busy to do much writing/promotional sort of things. Then Facebook arrived, and real life friends drifted off to Facebook; meanwhile, I started doing more speculative fiction writing, and found more fellow writers, and LJ turned into a way of interacting more with them.
I digress. I meant to talk about why I'm staying on Lj.
Because as it turns out, these glitches and LJ going down are not random events, or results of LJ's competence or lack thereof. Rather, according to multiple sources, reporting over the last several days, they are specific attacks on Russian bloggers and attempts to silence Russian freedom of speech, coincidentally helping to silence the voices of non-Russians as well.
And that I won't tolerate.
A paid account on Livejournal costs me $19.95 per year, money that presumably goes towards paying for servers and staff to fight against this sort of thing. It's not much. But it's something. I renewed my account, and I'll be trying to blog a bit harder.
(Which is not to say that I won't be creating a Wordpress account shortly, or closing the backup Dreamwidth account.)
Then Livejournal started going wonky -- very wonky -- and I couldn't access it at all.
Time to abandon Lj, right?
Not quite.
Not just because I've been on Lj since, wow, 2002, which is longer than I've stuck with apartments, jobs, and relationships; there's been such a huge shift in the people who were reading this blog in 2003 and even 2005 and now, and a huge shift in the comments as a result, that it hardly feels like the same place. In 2002 to about, hmm, 2006, and maybe a bit later - say, 2008? -- Lj was a place where I mostly chatted with my personal, mostly real life friends, and posted the occasional poem (scroll down for poems that I posted on LJ) even though I had originally planned to use it as a writing/promotional blog, not realizing that starting in 2002 my job/grad school would keep me too busy to do much writing/promotional sort of things. Then Facebook arrived, and real life friends drifted off to Facebook; meanwhile, I started doing more speculative fiction writing, and found more fellow writers, and LJ turned into a way of interacting more with them.
I digress. I meant to talk about why I'm staying on Lj.
Because as it turns out, these glitches and LJ going down are not random events, or results of LJ's competence or lack thereof. Rather, according to multiple sources, reporting over the last several days, they are specific attacks on Russian bloggers and attempts to silence Russian freedom of speech, coincidentally helping to silence the voices of non-Russians as well.
And that I won't tolerate.
A paid account on Livejournal costs me $19.95 per year, money that presumably goes towards paying for servers and staff to fight against this sort of thing. It's not much. But it's something. I renewed my account, and I'll be trying to blog a bit harder.
(Which is not to say that I won't be creating a Wordpress account shortly, or closing the backup Dreamwidth account.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-11 06:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-11 08:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-12 04:59 pm (UTC)Wordpress installation (and updating) goes like this: I open the control panel. I click "add wordpress blog." Magic blog fairies make magic happen. I'm free to hunt up whatever cool ass theme I want. Updating to the latest version of WP is also easy, I just click on "update automatically" and it does its thing.
LP hosting costs under $100 for an entire year and includes all sorts of addons like you can have a forum (again, basically one click installation), shopping carts, photo galleries, etc. LP also has super fantastic customer service. I've always been able to reach an actual person by both email and phone, and gotten whatever (minor, usually having to do with updating billing info) problem sorted out right away. Also, when they roll out an incentive for new customers, like upping storage or offering a service or upping the number of subdomains you can have? They include existing customers in the offer.
I syndicate my WP posts to LJ and DW, and that's super incredibly easy as well.