Which is why I want to build something that can give you friends list style elements all on one place (an RSS aggregator built into a site, using something like Gregarious) and also promote and allow OpenID or similar support.

The feed aggregator can pick up on friends only content, and display like your friends page (or you can change the view from what I've seen), and hopefully userpics and similar can become cross platform as well.

The problem is that LJs syndication system is sucky, so people leaving are in many ways lost, and that's what we hope to build a prevention of.