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

[greap.livejournal.com]

a) Initially no but from rel 2 (Late Q2 2008) an installable version of the product will be out which will link up with the central servers for some of the cooler community based stuffs. Besides which I have no intention of listening to batshit Christian cults "concerns" and the product has been engineered so that the lovely data trawl requests the US government seems to enjoy making can't be completed.

b) Already testing on mono on redhat :) Runs much better on Windows though because the DB side of things is optimised for the XML interfaces Sql05 gives us.

[alien8.livejournal.com]

and Mac?

[greap.livejournal.com]

As a web application hosting platform?

[reddragdiva]

"It's Unix! I know this!"

Quite a lot of stuff that Just Works on *BSD will Just Work on MacOS X. Certainly anything that uses ./configure .

Think of it as a server OS with a really fat GUI just happening to be running on the server at the same time ...

[greap.livejournal.com]

I was aware OSX uses a BSD core but it seems a very expensive route to take and would incur significant overheads compared to an off the shelf *nix or windows based system.

[reddragdiva]

They really are of comparable price to comparable quality hardware. Macs are just well-built PCs now, remember.

Though, of course, I suspect alien8's original question was talking about the client side.

[alien8.livejournal.com]

both really.

Client absolutely.

Mac servers aren't expensive really.. (compared to other decent kit and they are in colo places now oh yes.. you not heard of the mac mini colo project?)
http://www.macminicolo.net/

:)