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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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...)

[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.

[redcountess]

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

[reddragdiva]

My lunch is paid for, as is yours; this statement of yours makes no sense other than for the sheer sake of provocation.

The problem is how to do friends list cross site. Even if some mathematically watertight procedure was found, this will involve people with no technical ability at all, who can use LJ just fine, having to use something cryptographic. This will lead to exploded heads.

[reddragdiva]

The Other Place is of course utterly watertight.

[reddragdiva]

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

[adrasteah.livejournal.com]

It wasn't meant as provocation. Yes, you & I have paid accounts, but the vast majority of LJ accounts are free and the vast majority of the people who work for LJ are unpaid volunteers.

Lots of people have blogs that are independent of each other and if they're good and people are interested in them, then people will read them. Alternatively there is DeadJournal or people can move to a new LJ clone.

Anyway, this is all making the assumption that things will change, and for the worst. They might, but they also might not.

[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?

[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...

[reddragdiva]

The worst thing is what it will do to usability. LJ is one of those wonderful things which is usable by technophobes and geeks, pissing off neither (c.f. Mac OS X, Firefox). Anything with cryptography and thought concerning cryptography is no longer an appliance. Bad.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

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

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

No, the crypto is invisible to the users, who use only a normal browser to interact with the site and never have to give a thought to keys or suchlike.

[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.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

See my comment about addressing this.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

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

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The key distribution part isn't just for laughs, the transport can be as leaky in either direction as you like and it won't matter. Outbound leaks which leak back in again are equivalent to borrowing real-usenet transport, indeed.

[yady.livejournal.com]

Could that not be solved by having people sign their entries and comments with PGP keys or something similar?

[bluekieran.livejournal.com]

I could see it being made simple enough for use from a single computer, but portability would be the really tricky bit. I wonder if we could convince people to carry their private keys around on USB smartcards (smart so the private key never has to leave the device) which take a thumbprint as the passphrase?