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?

[steer.livejournal.com]

Yes... this seems even more trivial than the "nipple/no nipple" issue.

[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]

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

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

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

[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 ;)

[aca.livejournal.com]

Well, it solves being tied to one site to provide access control without having to maintain multiple authentication credentials on each blog you read. That, to my mind, is the real sticking point.

What else would be lacking assuming a number of LJlike sites supporting OpenID were the network we're looking at connecting?

[reddragdiva]

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

[wendolen.livejournal.com]

Wow, I think I totally missed that one. When/what was it?

[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.

[reddragdiva]

Um, they were suspending accounts for having icons of breastfeeding. Apparently breasts are inherently offensive to the cat piss men of LJ Abuse. They then changed the TOS to ban all nudity in default icons, to cover their arses.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I think the sticky issue is aggregation. Assuming your "home blog site" fetches and aggregates the various blogs you read, it needs to be able to log in as you. It can do the OpenID dance, but when it fetches the RSS/Atom/whatever feed it at least needs a way of saying "I am trying to fetch this as user X" so that if the authentication cookies have timed out it can be told so (again, in some standard way) so it knows it needs to reauthenticate. Assuming we're all identified as URLs as OpenID assumes, we need a standard that defines how you get from there to an aggregated web of blogs.

EG It would be nice if the links my aggregator provides to your posts automatically identified me to your site so I don't have to keep going around telling people I'm me, so that the OpenID dance happens without me really having to think about it.

[wendolen.livejournal.com]

Wow! I'm really surprised that I missed that one, actually.

[vatine]

A way for a site owner to not be able to fake a comment from someone (as-is, we rely on LiveJournal for that; they're a trusted platform for LJ identity provisioning). A smallish extension to OpenID (to provide for entry check-summing and signing; plus a verification possibility) might do the rick, though I fear it'd be terribly open for abuse.

But, ideally, someone taht deals with crypto design is probably better off answering these sorts of questions.

[bob]

the lj code is opensource. take it and runaway.

[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.)

[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.

[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 ...

[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.

[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

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

Indeed. LJ didn't have these problems until it got huge (although it had other problems, like servers crashing).

Having just re-read the TOS, which pretty much permits them to do what the hell they like, I think the primary issue is how we the users want LJ to behave a)when it thinks a bunch of accounts are breaking the TOS, and b)when someone else tells it users are breaking the TOS or applicable law.

b) should be easy - I'd like LJ to clarify that they will not delete or suspend accounts in response to others (except by law enforcement, I guess), without investigating individual accounts first.
Which means a).

I guess I'd like assurance that users are innocent until individually confirmed guilty by a human of breaking the TOS. No mass deletes without a warning first (except if required as part of a police-led operation).

Now, where's the address for me to tell LJ that?

Thinking more laterally, SixApart is a public company, isn't it? Can we buy enough shares to make them listen to us?

[ladykathryn.livejournal.com]

SixApart is a public company, isn't it? Can we buy enough shares to make them listen to us?

No, it just passed its second round of VC. Even if it were a public company, however, shareholders mostly have a say in corporate decisions which lose or gain money (in some cases, a very small say - some corporations are divided into several million shares,it takes a considerable investment to have any real say in the operation of the company.)

[mirukux.livejournal.com]

not to mention the whole SUP thing plus the broken promise on adverts. bastards.