It quite snuck up on me, this idea of leaving LiveJournal. Once I started on it, it seemed quite fun, but only because I’m willing to lose a little to gain a bit right now. And I have lost some – filtering functionality, ease of integration, etc. But I’ve also gained, because LiveJournal was culturally not entirely my sort of place anyway, even before the recent transitions. So, how is the first round of this going?
OpenID – Doesn’t do all I would wish it to, not by half. But it does provide a base on which other technologies could build, and it does get my non-LJ URL onto people’s screens. Its implementation is far too much like having a LiveJournal account that just happens to send its login info to a different site, rather than true cross-site integration, but that’s passable, at least for me.
Filtering – If I’d wanted to make it easy on myself, I would have gone to another site that used LiveJournal’s software, so as to have the equivalent “friends” concept and associated filtering. Here, I don’t have that, but it was a conscious choice to not want it right now, and to want something culturally different. This has more to do with my current life shifts than with leaving LiveJournal, but also means that I get to be a test case of integration across different software suites.
RSS – I already use in a lot of cases and will likely use in more. It’s a lovely technology. I ought to look for better clients for it though, as there’s a chance of some of them supporting OpenID or login cookies, either of which would be sufficient to get me at the locked LiveJournal posts I read. Aside from locked stuff, it looks like RSS is going to be my way of handling “friends page” equivalence.
This is more pinning together disparate pieces than the previous solution, but at the same time it’s a little like stepping out of AOL into the real internet. There’s a world out here, and it’s a tiny bit complicated, but I suspect it’s worth while. Of course, I’m not the only person I’m inconveniencing, and social networking is never trivial or linear, so only time will really tell.
