On May 1, 2008, I will no longer post original content to LiveJournal. I will, instead, be stuffing my LJ account with updates of content from my personal homepage (http://www.feedle.net).

My reasons for this are complex, and it's not exclusively because of the latest wank-a-thon. I freely admit that the latest wank-a-thon is a "last straw", but it is not for the reasons a lot of you are complaining about.

LiveJournal killing new "Basic" accounts, in and of itself, wasn't a bad thing. That's not why I'd be complaining about.

What I am complaining about is that this is the same crap that LiveJournal did when they deleted fan-fic accounts, started the "Plus" account tier in the first place, or any one of the hundreds of changes that have had mixed results since the beginnings of LiveJournal. LJ's management made a major change without notification, and without seeking input.

Of course LiveJournal has a "right" to make those kinds of decisions. That's not the point: the point is, LiveJournal was supposed to be a community of users, not a profit center for a Russian multimedia conglomerate. At least, that's what we were all told in the beginnings.

But, the writing is on the wall. LiveJournal is going to be another MySpace: devoid of intelligent commentary, full of bad web design, and all of it with ads and popups all over the place.

You can keep it.

This belies a greater trend, however, in the future of blogging. At one point, it made sense to aggregate all the small blogs in one place. Centralized authentication is one, and the ability to host content is another. Seven years ago, when I first joined LJ, there was no centralized authentication system for small-time bloggers, and webhosting was expensive and required a computer science degree to maintain.

Today, a $10 webhosting account with Dreamhost gets you more bandwidth and disk space than a small blogging site could ever use, one-click installs of either Wordpress or Joomla, and a whole host of other features that don't hold a candle to the second-rate offerings of LiveJournal (picture databases like Gallery, real domain-based webmail, etc.) Today, both Wordpress and Joomla allow for OpenID, and Joomla can authenticate against Google and LDAP sources as well.

Point is, the things that were once hard to do without LiveJournal are easy. I can read everybody else's blog in my favorite RSS reader (Google Reader), which works on my Blackberry, my iPod, and whatever computer I need. Commenting back never seems to be a problem on sites like brianenigma's, who went to a solution similar to what I plan on doing about a year ago.

In short, LiveJournal no longer fills the need it once did.

I will probably keep pushing updates to LiveJournal for a while, at least. I've also made lj-books of most of my LiveJournal content, and will probably keep the PDFs around for a long time. I may even offer them for sale.

But, it is obvious to this geek that LiveJournal's new owners are not interested in the community aspects of LJ. That is why I'm leaving.

The boycott? Get real. The sad fact of the matter is, and I truly believe this (and comments by SUP management that are floating around the blogosphere support this as well): SUP would be happy if most of us over the age of 25 left LiveJournal. It's what they want. They seem to think that will be profitable.

Let's give them what they want, people. Let's leave.

On May 1, 2008, I'll be gone. See you out there.

Last update: 20-03-2008 03:24