Spit out the shells.

[reddragdiva]

• LiveJournal has six months to live (courtesy weatherpixie). Then we really will have to get up and leave en masse. Who else remembers when eGroups and OneGroup weren't a massive pain in the arse to use?

I appear to be over the coldy flu thing. The first beer on Sunday evening was that nice. I didn't even get hit by lightning for drinking Black Sheep from a Theakston's glass.

Comments

[adrasteah.livejournal.com]

No, someone who has completely bought into Yahoo! and Google say they think that. It's pure doomsday speculation and the use of 'will' when they think it might be a good idea for them to.

[kekhmet.livejournal.com]

agreed - there are two sides to any buyout anyway...
the buyer, and the seller
not every company *chooses* to sell when an offer is made
hell, even if they're purely motivated by money Six Apart might feel there more profitable things to do than sell their company to someone else

[reddragdiva]

Dot-com accounting goes something like: two years of a blogger = $100 in ads, so six million blogs makes SixApart worth SIX HUNDRED MILLION!!1!!!1! Or something like that.

[reddragdiva]

It's the depressing plausibility. Whether it would work or not doesn't actually matter to Yahoo - they happily pay dot-com prices for things and fuck them up.

Mostly it serves as a gentle reminder of the dangers of a single point of failure.

[adrasteah.livejournal.com]

It's the depressing fact that there is no free lunch.

If people want a blog that they control they should buy a domain and pay for hosting, or club together with friends and set something up. There are enough blog scripts to use, hell they can replicate LJ.

Six Apart bought LJ for the clustering and design that's not open source that it's developed, not to ruin all our LJ lives, which have up until this point been pretty cushy.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

LJ works precisely because it is a single point of failure.

[karen2205]

Who else remembers when eGroups and OneGroup weren't a massive pain in the arse to use?

Me me me:-)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I have been giving this matter Some Thought.

Getting up and leaving en masse won't work. The strength of LJ is its network effect; if we all had blogs provided by different blog providers we wouldn't be able to put each other on each other's friends lists, etc. So we'd have to substitute some other Giant Provider in place of LJ, and then they too would sell out and start to suck.

So a proper fix means breaking the network effect. We have to design a protocol which will allow us all to host blogging providers on our own servers, and they can all network together to create one big blog provider. And we have to do it robustly and securely.

This is quite a hard problem.

[reddragdiva]

I recall you were working on the problem for cross-site authentication just within the LiveJournal engine. So you didn't come up with anything that was mathematically watertight?

Of course, it's one thing to speculate on something that would be a cool feature to add. It's quite another when it may suddenly be necessary.

The main problem is that Yahoo is quite happy to pay dot-com rates for things then cluelessly fuck them up.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The cross-site authentication is fine; I'm pretty confident of the protocol I came up with. The problems are things like this: if I see a comment from ewx in your journal which you host, how can I know that you didn't falsify that comment? Are comments signed, in which case, are they non-repudiable?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Transport over NNTP, everyone running their own toy NNTP server (claim it's a P2P blog, if you like...), construct peering arrangements automatically using the 'friends' relation, similarly use the 'friends' relation to help with key distribution (but call 'friends' something less misleading). (Yes, I know there's a lot of details left to fill in...)

[reddragdiva]

The Other Place is of course utterly watertight.

[redcountess]

Darling, it's not like you to go yelling "the sky is falling" on pure speculation!

[reddragdiva]

WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!1!11!!

[vatine]

Yes.

To speed this up, I have reported you as a "su$p3Kt sikkr!t terrorheist" to your local pub. They will keep you in beer as a gherio, as long as you pay them.

[lpetersson.livejournal.com]

Yahoo! does have a bad habit of destroying whatever they buy and dammit, I renewed my paid account the week before Six Apart bought LJ :(

Oh well, there's always my DL account...

[vampwillow]

I need to renew my usericons today and account now - thanks to the extra two weeks - in three weeks. Given that the $-£ rate is so good it isn't a great loss if something goes poof in six months, but I'd rather it didn't. As reddragdiva said, lj gets me "laid and stuff"

[lpetersson.livejournal.com]

It does?

Damn, lucky you, it doesn't have that effect for me...

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Ah, the guy says nowhere "I talked to Yahoo and they said they were going to buy LiveJournal". I have to admit it's a distinct possibility though. If they have a women's interest section that consists mostly of articles about vaginas and makeup, then I can't really see them noticing that LJ customers will all leave if they Yahoo-ise the site until they do it and we leave.

I ought to get down to The Life Shop and find out how many pennies I need to save to buy mine back.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

'they' here being Yahoo, of course. Oops :)

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

*shrug*

I already read USENET. The vast majority of people I read here came from other venues, and I generally still participate in those venues. Hell, I even got one of them BACK, to run in a more-enlightened version of the Golden Age methods.

We'll get to watch blogging pretty much die as a phenomenon for the common man. It'll tighten its age range down, and people over 30 will go from being 1% to being 0.1%. And most of those will be cruising for 16-year-olds. The advertisers will love it because the demographics will be cleaner. Oh the embarrassment!

[vampwillow]

More than likely (and I do wish people would remember that 6A has already 'sold out' as it has had external cash injections already who put the CEO in there!) and whether it is likely to be Yahoo or someone else is mostly irrelevant (I wrote more about this on lj-dev a while back).

So far as distributing the journals is concerned, using <LJ .. <DJ .. <GJ .. etc tags could reasily be caught by the backend code and create the appropriate links, with RSS used to provide the text across the networks int he first place, oui? User posts from whichever one they are signed in on and links are created accordingly. Seems fairly trivial to have a token-check routine on each alternate hosting org to provide the security ...

[reddragdiva]

The trick is (1) doing the friends-list and friends-only thing (2) making all this fantastically easy, with no dancing pigs problem.

Remember: to succeed like LJ, this technology must take over the user's social life and get them laid and stuff.

[vampwillow]

" LJ ... must take over the user's social life and get them laid and stuff."


/me notes the inherent truth of this statement ;-P

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Heh. You seem to be anticipating at most a dozen sites, which all trust each other. I'm anticipating thousands, which do not all trust each other. I do not believe that the security problems are "trivial".