LJ drops Basic accounts, bother!

[bnewman]

Apparently, LJ will no longer allow the creation of Basic (free, ad-free) accounts. Existing accounts can (for now) still be switched to and from Basic status. The latest news posting (which might, theoretically, have prominently mentioned this) says nothing about this change.

As has been ranted about at greater length elsewhere, this is a violation of (legally non-binding, but quite explicit) promises LJ has made in the past regarding the character of its service and its relationship with users. Brad, original founder of LJ and now Not In Charge, but on an advisory board which is apparently going to be ignored by the new Powers That Be, agrees that this was a breach of trust and a bad move.

I'm not sure what I'm planning to do about this. My account will remain Basic unless and until there's another change in policy (I wouldn't trust an assertion that this won't happen if I were given one), but I can certainly no longer recommend in good conscience that anyone join LJ in order to keep up with me. On the other hand, I don't post here all that often. People can follow my journal, such as it is, using RSS, and comment anonymously or using an OpenID, and I have few locked posts.

At the same time, I will say this: Why have so many of us put ourselves in this position where the data that make up our personal and social lives is held by a company that we don't control and with whom we don't even have a real contract? For each other. I could drop LJ in a moment — log out and never log back in — if everyone on LJ whom I care about would follow me. They only have a hold on me because they have a hold on you, and so on, circularly. We are hostages. We came because it was a good deal, but we will stay even if it becomes a bad deal, at least for a while.

Where could we go? Another social networking site? There are others that have better reputations (InsaneJournal seems to be an especially popular destination for LJ refugees)... or, we could hope for some software and protocols that would allow us to achieve the same functions we get from LJ while hosting our content on whatever machines we choose.

Comments

[ultranurd.livejournal.com]

The comments threads on that news post remind me why I'm not involved with the larger LJ community.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

The problem is, the software and protocols you refer to aren't either one of those...they're the people and the community. And LJ is just too big for functional migration. GreatestJournal has already collapsed, and InsaneJournal's at capacity or higher. JournalFen is limited by design.

It's really that everybody's on LiveJournal, and even at the rate people are leaving due to bad decisions, that doesn't look likely to change any time soon.

[glassonion]

Right, and, in particular, you might (with a lot of effort) be able to talk your existing community into doing something you'd personally setup, but no one who isn't already part of your community is going to be on it, and, down the road, they won't want to join it, because the Next Great Thing will have more widgets. So people just kind of go with the flow and migrate from thing to thing, until they become old and get sick of that, and stop obtaining new widgets. I don't think there is a replacement for LJ in the queue --- i think new people you meet are going to be on Facebook, and there will be endless debate about whether it fills the same niche, and some people will refuse to join it and some won't, and we'll go on from there.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

I think this has, to some extent, already happened with Facebook, and Facebook is way more evil than LJ has ever thought about being. I'm really hoping for a future where "social networking" doesn't mean being part of a network that's owned, it just refers to a certain what in which unaffiliated bodies of web content can interoperate.

[crystalpyramid]

If they're doing that, shouldn't they at least restore the invite code mechanism?

[madfilkentist]

Do you have an InsaneJournal account? One action is worth a thousand rants.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

No, because I don't have any use for one, since my whole "social network" (in the blogs-with-access-control-lists sense) is on LJ right now. I'd much rather have something set up on a machine I control (or on a machine that is run on my behalf by someone with whom I have a contract) where my ability to add someone to an access control list doesn't depend on their having a prior relationship with any particular other entity. This should be pretty easy to do with OpenID, and everyone I know on LJ already has an OpenID.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Um. I don't know that much about OpenID. I can see from the Wikipedia entry that LiveJournal is an OpenID provider, and LiveJournal's FAQs mention that one can read and comment but not post with an OpenID but I don't see anything about how one *gets* an OpenID from LJ.

Is it automatic?

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's automatic. An OpenID "username" is just a URL, and LJ being an OpenID provider means you can use the URL of your journal for this. Logging into a third-party site with your OpenID initiates a 3-way transaction in which you prove to LJ that you're you (by logging in), and LJ in turn asserts to the other website that you're you, without the other site ever seeing your LJ password.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thank you for explaining; I understand now.