Getting off LiveJournal.

[reddragdiva]

In the latest SixApart fuckup, it turns out the complaint they scrambled to act upon was from a Christian Identity/Dominionist group — that is to say, backwoods rednecks where neo-Nazis inbreed with Klansmen. Fabulous choice of bedfellows! Be sure to bring this to prominent attention in discussions of this matter.

Shitty apology (comments already filled, sorry!). Questions on the CEO's CNet/CNN quote remain notably unanswered.

"Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues," countered Six Apart's Berkowitz. "It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not. We have an awful broad range of discussions and topics and other things going on in LiveJournal, and we encourage other broad-ranging conversations on all sorts of topics. This was a specific case where we felt there was not a reason (for these journals to stay online)." Berkowitz said the company would "obviously apologize" to anyone whose journal was deleted in error but added: "That's going to be a very small minority of the sites. I would be shocked if it's more than a dozen."

Translation: "fuck off, you're almost all a bunch of paedophiles."

The number of journals is already going down. (Note that's a comment on the previous news post, bragging about the new high in journal numbers.)

My earlier posts on what to do if SixApart sends LiveJournal to shit seem somewhat more urgent. I personally have no plans to give SixApart my money ever again. Probably keep the account for now (or from January) as a freebie.

So: how are we going on maintaining the community aspect without putting all our eggs into another basket susceptible to this sort of gross stupidity? Networking public blogs is easy; the trick is how to friends-lock a blog post to be readable by third-party sites, in a manner usable by technophobes and yet not susceptible to phishing attacks. I invite suggestions from the exceedingly smart people reading this, and ask them to ask other exceedingly smart people they know.

Update: Considerably more than a dozen. Gosh! etc. I await evidence these people are not too stupid to give any more of my money. I wonder if I can do a chargeback.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

Hmm... they've already apologized on the front page. Seems like merely a higher than average wind in a teacup.

[reddragdiva]

No, they notably did not address that quote. Also, remember that this is the second time LJ Abuse has gone batshit since the SixApart takeover. WHO WILL REMEMBER THE HEROES OF BOOBIEGATE?

[vatine]

Some method of marking "this is a friend" and requiring an active session, identified with (say) OpenID? It would, possibly, require a login for each new blogsite one went to, but in these days of cookies and password managers, that'd probaly be just fine, anyhow.

Another option would be looking at the distributed KOM-system research, but only Canadians and Sweds know about KOM and I suspect it's too retro for this Web42.0 world.

[aca.livejournal.com]

The answer was kindly provided by LiveJournal, or at least from the same stable.

OpenID.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I designed the crypto in OpenID, but unfortunately it's only one part of the solution.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Um. This is quite hard. Ask me about it in the pub sometime.

[reddragdiva]

Having something that would work at all is hard enough. How to make it as supremely usable as friends-locking in LJ?

[vatine]

It's probably hard to do sufficiently well. Doing it crappily is probably not that hard, though. But, in this case, doing it Right is, indeed, probably better than knocking up something that sortaworks.

[miss-glitch.livejournal.com]

I've always been happy to pay my LJ subscription as I thought they provided an excellent service. I don't think I will be renewing my subscription when it ends though, I'll just stick with a free account.

Ideally someone we know will start up a similar service, and everyone can move to that ;)

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I have the technology. I have installed LJ before. Do you want to run it?

[bob]

the lj code is opensource. take it and runaway.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Many of us indeed opened accounts on Greatestjournal and Deadjournal just in case when the whole breastfeeding thing happened.

Personally I don't think this is worth leaving over, but I think that was - just everybody didn't follow me, and the person I was following to Greatestjournal turned around and kicked me in the teeth, so I renewed my paid account here anyway.

[ladykathryn.livejournal.com]

Start your own social networking service? For serious. No commercial service is going to be immune to "this sort of gross stupidity", because any commercial service (or any sufficiently large volunteer service, or any small volunteer service run by someone prone to panic) has the potential for a fuckup like this. (Mind, I'm reserving judgment on that, too.)

[ladykathryn.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was incoherent.

Ahem. Let's try that one again. No commercial service yadda yadda is going to be immune to this problem because all commercial services are aggregates of individuals who may or may not make correct decisions or implement general policy decisions correctly. A decision to shut down a small number of pedo groups can easily be made worse by someone getting lazy and suspending by keyword rather than checking the accounts. This is not just a problem with LJ, it's a problem anywhere there are a sufficient number of people in a position where they can get lazy and damage things.

[vampwillow]

I registered a new domain last weekend for the purpose of having it vailable for blogging, and I already run an OpenID server for my own use so I should probably 'mashup' the two for this purpose.

Guess I ought to take an XML dump of my more recent posts so my archive is up to date ...

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

For me, the useful bit of Livejournal isn't the access control or the aggregation. It's the fact that having a fuckload of users makes it much easier to notice spam attacks. I'm averaging about one piece of spam a day right now, despite there being more than 10,000 people reading each of my posts[1]. I really doubt that I could achieve that via other means.

[1] Yes, I do find that number quite astonishing

[reddragdiva]

There's assorted distributed spam-spotter plugins for WordPress, but obviously they don't block people before they post.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

For a corporate apology, it's far from shitty (except for the bit where he starts to ramble). What were you expecting? Yes, it's not complete, but it's still a solid stab at, "We fucked up. We're sorry. We don't want this to happen again."

You know what needs to happen to make this work? We already have the system: Usenet and NNTP. All it needs is a good, shiny Webloggy top layer. I'm going to keep ranting about it until some pinhead with the knowhow and time does it.

[gothgeekgirl.livejournal.com]

For a corporate apology, it's far from shitty (except for the bit where he starts to ramble). What were you expecting? Yes, it's not complete, but it's still a solid stab at, "We fucked up. We're sorry. We don't want this to happen again."

Indeed. The real problem is the length of time it took for the apology to appear. I've been through similar situations where something drastic has to happen RIGHT NOW to fix a problem. There should have been a series of increasingly detailed posts in news, starting with something like:

"We have a problem with some journals violating TOS that we have to fix immediately because of X. Our first cut is likely to be drastic, but nothing will be deleted, just suspended. More information as we have it."

And so on. I've been in similar situations and been praised for my prompt action because I started with, "We have a serious problem here..." Not everyone's that clearheaded when the shit hits the fan though, even if it isn't the first time, just different shit. SixApart needs an emergency situations checklist to follow, or this *will* happen again.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

We could, uh, spend more time talking to real people down the pub.

Nah. It'll never work.

;)

[gothgeekgirl.livejournal.com]

Especially not when the pub's a continent and an ocean away ;)

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

You want community? It's easy, already built and rolled out, with hundreds of dedicated clients making it easy in thousands of ways.

It's called USENET.

If you want private to-the-community posting, encrypt the traffic to a key that gets passed to people if/when they evidence themselves as reasonable and prudent human beings, by whatever measure the group feels is reasonable. The thing is that you can never build community by having *everything* "friends-locked", so it's perfectly reasonable to layer security on top of an existing resource. So what you may be *really* looking for isn't a site or meida engine, but rather decent encryption with good group-key management.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Doesn't even have to be encrypted. Put it in a separate hierarchy and adjust readers.conf, or something along those lines.

[greap.livejournal.com]

Networking public blogs is easy; the trick is how to friends-lock a blog post to be readable by third-party sites, in a manner usable by technophobes and yet not susceptible to phishing attacks

Already figured out (well much less susceptible to phishing at any rate) and launching in October.

[reddragdiva]

So does it (a) avoid putting all the eggs in your basket (b) run on something other than Windows? (Check it against Mono for Windows if you want to actively care about cross-platform issues.)

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

The active user base of Livejournal, defined as apdated in the last 30 days, is about a million users. Myspace keep the figures to themselves - the '100 million accounts' is meaningless, as most them are no more than placeholders and their users have never even logged-in since they were created. Site traffic may be a better guide, and it's available in a published survey from HitWise (http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/2007/05/facebook_visits_up_106_since_o.html).

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I'm with the "use NNTP" crowd, but perhaps more radically: I want every user running an NNTP server. The propagation graph becomes the 'friends' graph, or at least a large subset of it. Obviously turning this into a practical thing that your granny can use is a fairly large step...

[reddragdiva]

Locked entries problem?

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

I'm worried about losing the community we have in LJ. Many people have blogs, but there seem to be more bloggers than readers. LJ is (hopefully) interactive.

[gths.livejournal.com]

Well... it hard for me to give them more money, since I bought a permanent account a year or so back.

Also I don't have much desire to actively maintain my own weblog at the moment, let alone implementing a whole heap of new doohickeys of limited effectiveness just so I can let certain people read stuff and not other certain people.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

The biggest problem to solve is identity management. LJ does this very well, offering unique IDs across the whole service, with a lot of customization and ways to slice the userbase, and built-in social networking and trust metrics. Having just had a quick poke around OpenID, it's sorely lacking in that respect. It'll let you easily prove who you are when you want to, but as a tool for maintaining a presence & position it's almost useless.

Once you've got a decent ID management system, though, the filtering & locking will be pretty much trivial.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Could you explain in a little more detail what it is that OpenID doesn't provide that you need? Thanks!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The plot doesn't so much thicken as take an entirely predictable turn: http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/stewardess_/683.html

[reddragdiva]

I still mostly think they're too incompetent to give further money to.