LJ: Emboldened-time to really get started on moving out

[matgb]

K, I've mentioned several times, and I've had my 'replacement' site set up for ages anyway. But, y'know, other things to do, etc. Never had the impetus, or the reason. Well, guess what? LJ/6A are, as innerbrat puts it, at it again. More from liz_marcs here as well. Thing is, it's not like it's unexpected. Back in June bradhicks wrote two excellent articles on the illegality of fanfic involving minors, in the second he observes:

I predict with absolute confidence that many of the journals that were reinstated after Strikethrough '07 will be deleted again in the near future.

This is backed up by former LJ staffer and one-time head of Abuse team nw using her synecdochic account: the law sucks, but it's the law. There's a huge list of links, including some back-up instructions here.

But, y'see, I don't care. People doing illegal things have been banned from the site, having had public warnings that those things (ie breaking the US obscenity laws on child porn) would get them banned. Have 6A and the LJ abuse team handled it well? Of course not. But were they going to get hit at some point? See above. So how does this affect me? Simple, I don't trust any other company to host my content for me anymore, I want to control it myself.

But more importantly; I want to help others be able to do the same. So I have a plan for the weekend^[1]. What I never got around to mentioning was that when my hosting package for TaKtiX.oRg was up for renewal at the end of June, the hosting company gave me an offer I couldn't refuse; upgrade to their top level package, for less money than my existing package would cost for the first year. Hmm. So I now have unlimted subdomains, 100 databases (I had one before), more bandwidth than I can possibly use and therefore a lot of flexibility. So I'm going to install Wordpress MU and have a play around.  I may want some help with various testing things next few weeks.  Wordpress MU powers Wordpress.com, and is very flexible, it should allow me to set up a full blogging platform for whoever wants it, a full CMS, etc.  [ETA: Gah! My webhost doesn't support the software, it'll run WP but MU needs more resources.] Hopefully.

But the huge advantage is that you can import your full LJ into it, and hopefully be able to crosspost back here using some plugins, and if you want to go elsewhere at any point int he future, you can still export your content and import it into any Wordpress (or even Movable Type) powered blog.  Everyone love the rather crazy business decisiont that LJ makes it easy to leave with your content, but almost impossible to effectively come back with it?

So, beta testers useful when I've got it installed. Others thinking of jumping ship and self hosting+cross posting also welcome. Others using Wordpress for other things are invited to help out the codebase, suggest useful plugins, etc.

I've been putting this off for two damn long. eclexys and johnwordsworth both prove you can maintain an LJ as well as a WP powered blog, and there are many plugins that could make lives even easier for them.

---

[1] I'm exhausted anyway, didn't sleep at all well last night, so I'm not going to Inferno this evening, I've been ill on and off all week so I'll stay in and relax.

Oh yeah, they've made the Message Centre almost usable, although the removal of links to pages beyond the first is annoying.

Comments

[innerbrat]

Hey, forget backing up my LJ to it, can I have a subdomain for that "raging dyke who watches moving pictures and reads words" blog I've been meaning to set up for ages?

I can't think of a subdomain I want though. Maybe girly.taktix.org or media.taktix, or you know the kind of things I'm likely to blog about.

What I'd then be interested in was a way that those posts could automatically be posted to my LJ with a specific tag. and a preformatted cut tag.

Um.

By which I mean, ME!

[matgb]

Um, yeah, um, I was planning on offering that to you even when I only had 10 subdomains to play with.

and the only thing I'm not sure of for the rest is auto-tagging, cut tags should be easy, I'm hoping to have cuts instead of the WP [more] tag anyway.

[innerbrat]

:-D Thankee.

Of course, I need to think of a name.

[harlotqueen.livejournal.com]

I might try using the Mac Mini to host some stuffs after I move

(though this might be tricky)

[mapp.livejournal.com]

"Simple, I don't trust any other company to host my content for me anymore, I want to control it myself."

If I used LiveJournal for content that I would desperately want to keep control of, then I'd be worried by these latest moves on the part of 6A. If I wanted a site for posting serious things that I wanted complete control over, then I'd use something that's not LiveJournal. For the general crap that I write about, LiveJournal is more than adequate.

I think the problem is that, up until the great over-reaction Strikethrough, most people seemed to assume that LJ/6A had a generally hands-off approach to content. Strikethrough '07 didn't effect me in the slightest, and this annoucement about how they'll be enforcing US law doesn't really bother me that much either. It just looks like the drama-llama has reared her ugly head to me.

[matgb]

Oh, I'm doing this because I've been procrastinating for ages, and because if the idea of a distributed journalling system is to take off we'll need 'fandom' to join it, and a lot more will leave than are directly effected.

Leaving to the clone sites is pointless, got to move to something better.

LJ is fine for crap, and great for keeping in touch with people (hence me definitely not LEAVING), but I want other options. I also want backups I can import/export easily, and not to be reliant on a dodgy datacentre built on a fault line.

Plus, um, the software comes with forums. You harassed me to set up forums ages ago, no reason not to now...

[mapp.livejournal.com]

I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't do it, just why I wouldn't be following you with moving my own content elsewhere. I don't think, even when I started using LJ, that I thought I could trust it for handling content reliably. As it turns out, they've not done me too badly so far, seeing as I don't use my LJ for writing Harry Potter fanfic.

[foxfirefey]

The drama over Strikethrough '07 was mostly made by the people who it did affect. And now in Strikethrough the Revenge: Now It's Bold, their fears have been brought to further fruition.

LJ/6A used to have a generally hands off approach to content, one that is now decidedly less so, and nobody knows quite where the lines have been drawn, so of course the fen are freaking.

[mapp.livejournal.com]

"(...)and nobody knows quite where the lines have been drawn"

"All it says is that things that are illegal under United States law aren't allowed here, either." (taken from the more clarifications post).

I see that as fairly clear and, generally speaking, this is why I'm not that concerned about Strikethrough '07 or Son Of Strikethrough. Although I don't know the ins-and-outs of the US legal system, I'm fairly confident that at least 99% of the content of my journal doesn't break any laws over there.

[foxfirefey]

It would be a lot easier...except that obscenity in the US is a real tricky bitch to navigate, because there actually are no hard and fast rules and it's all very subjective. While your journal probably doesn't break any laws, a lot of fandom worries because their past times are, shall we say, a bit on the wild side.

It doesn't help that reassurances LJ/6A made in a backpedally sort of were interpreted to allow the kind of content the two users just got suspended for--ie, erotic art not involving minors.

[mapp.livejournal.com]

They have said that they'll consider things in context, and I agree that it's tricky to define exactly what is or isn't obscene, which is going to give some people on LJ a cause for concern. But common sense dictates that if you're using a site that you don't control, you should be prepared for the fact that the terms and conditions of the site are liable to change. LiveJournal, simply put, isn't the best place to post stuff that could be construed as obscene.

If you think you're going to want control of whether your content is available or not, then you're going to have to host your own servers, and also hope that whoever you've registered your domain name isn't going to strike you from the records if they get lots of complaints.

I think my issue is that people seem to have odd expectations of how LiveJournal should operate. The problem is that they've not really enforced a policy for the last few years (or, if they have, they've kept it pretty quiet) - and now that they're trying to clean things up a little, for better or for worse, you've got a lot of folks getting worried.

[foxfirefey]

Many are certainly mobilizing and making plans to do so.

And a lot of folks should be worried--not you, no, but the fen are definitely in an awkward position, and it makes sense for them to worry.

They tried hard to get the policies clarified, because a lot of them just wanted to know, okay, what do I avoid? Where are the lines? And according to a lot of the answers I saw given, they relaxed a little, because based on the answers they thought the main kinky things they did on LJ would be okay. The original Strikethrough was portrayed as a mess up, an accident, something that happened because the journals were just suspended without review.

The latest bannings show that's not the case. Furthermore, it shows that the suspensions will be immediate, without warning or petition, no chance to delete the offending content instead of losing all your journals.

pornish_pixies, the community where the suspended artists were posting, is trying to figure out how to cope. Current strategy is aggressive lock down, with whether or not a move should take place being discussed.

My guess is LJ is in the position where they didn't want to say exactly what their policies would be, because it would spur fen to leave, but they had to adopt these policies out of fear from legal action and advertiser threats. But the fen are finding out anyway, and trying to figure out where they will take the things LJ no longer will host.

[mapp.livejournal.com]

My own understanding, from the "more clarifications" post, is that LJ/6A are trying to remove child pornography, and that's about it. This might just be me reading into it a bit much, based on my own opinions that if two consenting adults want to do things to one another, they're free to do so.

Folks can ask what the policies are, but as has been said, obscenity is a pretty subjective thing. They have said they'll look at things in context, but I'm still fairly sure that LiveJournal reserve the right to cancel your account at any time. I doubt they're even required to give people an explanation.

Unfair? Yep. But LiveJournal has expanded a lot, and it makes sense to me that they're now casting a slightly more critical eye over the content they're hosting. If somebody decided to take somebody to court over what they've posted on their LiveJournal, heavens forbid, then chances are they'd have some difficulty proving who posted it, which would mean it's more likely that Six Apart would be on the receiving end of the long arm of the law.

While I accept that folks have a right to feel annoyed over this treatment, the general amount of "omg end of world" stuff that seems to have come from it seems a bit over-the-top.

[foxfirefey]

Of course LJ's TOS lets them do whatever the heck they want. It's all about what they end up doing within that latitude that counts. For a lot of fen, this is the end of LJ as they use it. A lot of them are paying customers, some heavily so with multiple accounts with extra icons. And I also thing people can be understandable upset when they feel they're being jerked around and told one thing, only to have another thing done. It's not that LJ doesn't have a right to do it, it's more that LJ has been claiming that such and such is not something to worry about, when the latest suspensions clearly show it is.

I saw the supposed picture in question from one of the suspenders wasn't child porn, and claiming it involved a minor is a dubious assertion--the character in question could just as well be of age.

What LJ needs to do is buck up and actually admit that it doesn't want to be hosting this stuff, instead of waffling around the issue unsuccessfully trying to defuse it.

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

Count me in, sexy

[caseytalk.livejournal.com]

If you need a beta tester who knows nothing about html and can fill the role of clueless-enduser-who-can-muck-up-the-easiest-of-instructions, count me in.

[davidnm.livejournal.com]

I have to say, I do have very mixed feelings on the whole journal-deletion issue. On the one hand, I do find it amusing on one level that it does seem that some people in some areas of the fanfic world don't quite seem to be able to grasp that other people might well 'not like' what they do, and I do find the outpourings of some fanfic-types downright bizarre.

On the other hand, I don't like the fact that the whole thing stinks of the 'suspicion is proof' society that seems to be increasingly prevalent; plus I can entirely understand non-Americans being annoyed at being affected by badly-drafted American laws. (And indeed Americans being annoyed by dodgy US laws, too.) And plus there's always the 'it's dodgy fanfic today, what will it be tomorrow?' issue.

So ... meh, no easy answers, I geuss.

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

Heh. I have a Greatestjournal into which I cross-post stuff, but it's more because I'm worried that LJ will fall into the San Andreas fault and I'll lose the last eighteen months of my life than because I have any desire to publish dubious fanfiction or, indeed, to transgress US law in any other way (not that I know of, anyway...) Come to think of it, what I should really do would be to print the whole lot off and stick it in my dad's fireproof safe. That's not going anywhere near the San Andreas Fault.

I like the way LJ lets you keep up with other people and I'd miss all you lot, but apart from that they could throw me off tomorrow and, bar the loss of my outpourings of literary genius/wibblings/crap/deep thoughts, I wouldn't give two hoots.

[matgb]

Ultimately, any blog anywhere can function as a partial LJ, if you're happy to only have public posts you don't even need privacy functions.

But yeayh, San-An has always been a concern. Are you aware of LJbook BTW? Can convert all your LJ, or just selective bits of it, into a PDF, rather nifty in many ways. There's a link on the back up instuctions page; I used to do it every few months, haven'#t recently, decided to leave it a little bit as the servers would doubtless be a bit busy with the current mess.

It's not what they banned that bothers me, it's the crappy disingenous way they've gone about it and the complete lack of claruity; they set up a review panel, involved a fair number of different staff, but didn't tell anyone. People asked and asked and asked what the lines were, what they couldn't do, and got no answer. So the one at the centre of this one got banned (all accounts, no warning, no take down request) for a bit of art depicting an adult Harry in bed with Snape; graphic, yes, but not child porn.

Plus despite having policies, no notice. What if they decide something else is the cause du jour? I don't trust them anymore, not because of this instance, but because they didn't answer the questions being put to them, nor follow established warning procedures.

But like I've said, I'll not be leaving, just self hosting and cross-posting, which is very different.