LJ drops Basic accounts, bother!
Mar. 13th, 2008 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bnewmanApparently, 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.
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.
