Reasons to leave LJ-land
I have seen a variety of reasons, most of them related to dissatisfaction with the way user relations are being handled, new feature roll-outs that many people disagree with, and concern over privacy implications of the company having been bought by SUP, a Russia-based corporation.
My personal reasons involve consideration of whether the culture fostered by LiveJournal’s interfaces meets my needs and goals, and a measure of nationalist sentiment. The sale of the company coincided with a large change in my own life, so it seemed a good time to make an otherwise highly inconvenient leap.
Destinations Considered
LiveJournal-like
SixApart
Other
OpenID Integration
My original hope when embarking on this was that OpenID would help to ease the transition, by providing me with a ready-made identity on most major blogging sites so that I could leave non-anonymous comments and read locked posts. On one hand, this is somewhat working. I am using it on LiveJournal and InsaneJournal with moderate success. On the other hand, there have been hiccups. For one thing, OpenID does not mean an integrated reading interface. I’m still visiting as many sites as I was before. More, in fact, as other people disperse. [Edit: Thanks to RSS, I have it all in one place now.]
OpenID needs to be supported in two respects: As a producer (by your main blog site, or an independent service), and as a consumer (by the blog sites you read on). Consumer support is patchy, and often does not provide the ease of reading that a full account on the site would. Since I use persistent cookies, it provides no clear advantage to me in terms of content reading or commenting on blogs, and some significant disadvantages. It’s slowly becoming clear to me that even among the journal sites that support OpenID its users are often treated as second-class netizens.
So, why am I still using it? It gets my real blog URL onto people’s screens when I comment, rather than the URL to a blog I don’t use. It means my login info is transmitted to fewer sites. But most particularly, it does inconvenience me, which is of use in finding out where those inconveniences are, and it is visible to others, which just might get people thinking about how the blogosphere fits together.
Reading Lists
This is a source of consternation. For journals with no locked posts, I can simply feed them to an RSS reader. However, for those with locked posts, either they simply do not include those posts in RSS, or they only do so if you are logged in. Good on them! But inconvenient for me. I don’t currently know of any Linux-compatible free RSS reader that supports cookies or OpenID. Thus, I am reduced to visiting reading list pages on multiple journaling sites. The ability to bookmark sets of pages in Firefox improves this slightly, but it still is more effort than existing solely within a single site was.
[Edit: Both Akregator (a KDE app) and Sage (a Firefox extension) apparently can use cookies with RSS. I am now using Akregator quite satisfactorily to read unlocked feeds, locked LJ feeds, and locked WordPress feeds. Note: Friending an OpenID on LJ does not add their posts to your friends page. LJ is not a full-fledged RSS reader.]
Questions Remaining
- Is there a Linux-compatible RSS reader that supports cookies and/or OpenID? [Edit: Yes.]
- Will enough people disperse to drive OpenID improvement? [Edit: Highly unlikely.]
- Will the bemoaned potential issues with LiveJournal actually occur? [Edit: Moderately unlikely.]
- How many readers will I lose to doing this? [Edit: Far more than I'd anticipated. And not everyone friended the OpenID either.]
Akregator on Linux supports locked posts, or did last time I tried it. Log in to LJ once and all the friends-locked stuff then comes through.