The Internet

For those of you who may not have seen this yet, this story started going around last night. I saw the LJ Twitter account link to it, so one presumes this is indeed legit. The article’s talking about future plans for LJ, and it’s looking like the ongoing trend of not giving a damn about the old-school LJ user base isn’t stopping for the foreseeable future. The money quote is this one:

LiveJournal’s leadership has made it clear that their future American business strategy lies in generating new traffic rather than catering to the service’s current small-but-loyal membership. The challenge for Petrochenko and other executives at LiveJournal will be redefining the brand’s identity in a crowded media marketplace.

The ONTD_political community is not amused. Neither is JF’s fandom_lounge.

I am not abandoning LJ quite yet. But I HAVE shifted a lot of my primary reading over to Dreamwidth–so if you’re on both sites, and if you are actively posting to DW, I’ll be reading and replying to you on DW. So if you plan to make the jump and you’re on my LJ friends list, let me know so I can add you on DW.

I’ve seen a lot of news going around about this, but for those of you who haven’t, LJ has just turned on new functionality to crosspost to Facebook and Twitter.

On the face of it this seems fine. I crosspost regularly, as y’all probably know; all my posts these days originate from my WordPress blogs, but from there they head out to LJ, Dreamwidth, Facebook, and Twitter all at the same time. I’m fine with LJ allowing that to happen for stuff that originates on LJ.

What I’m not fine with is that you can apparently now also crosspost comments. Including comments on locked posts, or posts which are set to screen all comments. The crossposted comments will include a link back to the original post–and if that post is locked, sure, only the people who are authorized to see it will still see it. But there’s no way of knowing if those crossposted comments might quote bits of the original post.

So there’s big privacy fail here. There’s also just general fail of manners, because seriously, it’s just rude to link back to locked posts that people on other sites can’t read.

I wouldn’t have been turning on this functionality anyway since my crossposting originates off of LJ and I therefore do not need it. But I’m leaving it off also on general principle just because of this big gaping security hole. I encourage you all to do the same. Also, while I don’t often post locked posts or posts with screened comments, I do ask that if I do, please don’t crosspost any comments off of them.

The FAQ post about the new functionality is here. The new news post that mentions it is here.

If you feel passionately about this, I encourage you to submit feedback to LJ about it.

If you feel really passionately about this, enough to bail on LJ, I have Dreamwidth invite codes. Let me know if you want one.

For several days now, LJ’s feed of custom styles has been broken–which has meant that the custom style I set up to let it download a feed of my Friends list into my mail client hasn’t worked, so I’m totally behind on keeping up with all of you!

If anybody posted anything addressed specifically at me, can you link me up in a comment? Thanks! *^_^*;;