Livejournal in trouble and fired half its staff

[matgb]

Short version. Livejournal has today fired about half of its US based staff, including several people that I'd say are key, if not crucial to the operation. This means that while SUP/LJ Inc have the right ideas about where to take the site, they're running out of money (and paid over the odds anyway) and can't afford to do it.

I suspect that LJ itself will continue, as it has ongoing revenue, but the improvements that it needs to turn itself into the successful site it could've been will now be significantly slowed, which puts the long term health of the site in danger. Not got time to do a full post, but here are some links:

LJ cutbacks

LiveJournal: The Russian Bear Slashes a Social Network
(ValleyWag and 'truth' are normally only vaguely associated, the numbers are completely wrong, but still)

Mat Bowles - Two scary tech stories

synecdochic: FYI

no_lj_ads: LJ in 2009 — The Grim Purge

Archbishop of the Land of Me - Rest In Peace

scrottie: LJ itself

azurelunatic: Support means just that.

ljbackup_dev: LJ Backup V1.1.0 Released!Hey all. Manag

nhw: Time to back up, folks

Made from Truth and Lies - Reasons to worry

ljArchive

Export Journal

I promised a 'how to' on backing up your journal and exporting it to other platforms, in order to write that I first need to do it myself fully and properly, so that'll happen later on (hopefully tonight, depends if I can get it all to work). In the meantime, some of the comments/posts linked abouve are from rahaeli/synecdochic, who used to be an LJ staffer but left to concentrate on her writing career (I got the impression she was asked to defend the indefensible once too often)—she's a good fiction writer FWIW. Last year, she announced that with a small number of others she'd be working on a fork of the Open Source Livejournal code (to be called Dreamwidth) to update it, make it compatible with modern servers and run a platform that'd be more community friendly in the way LJ "used to be". Many of the proposals she put forward were ones that echoed what I was looking for—crucially a separation between your 'reading' list and the people you trust to read your friends locked posts, as well as complete interoperability with other sites on the same codebase.

That latter is interesting—if she/they (we?) can get it going, then different people could run Dreamwidth installations and you could still add people, let them read your secure entries, etc from your friends page, without much if any extra effort on your part. That could mean that anyone could pay for a server and run their own site. Drawback is that you'd need your own webserver, renting one of them is a minimum of £50 per month, much more for something decent.

But if enough people were to chip in, it'd be more than possible. In fact, it'd be more than viable, it'd possibly be a very good plan. There are a bunch of you reading this that know a lot more about the backend side of this sort of thing than me—we'd need to work to set it up, and then install updates, etc. Almost certainly viable with enough people, so, well...
[Poll #1326311]

Comments

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

If people need instructions/more ideas on backing up, liz_marcs may have saved you the bother of writing it.

I've saved all my entres as XML, CSV and LJarchive, so I feel covered!

I would be interested in Dreamwidth. Was the second part of the poll for programmers/techie types only?

[akicif.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that one way to handle the access management side of things for multiple independent servers hosting groups of users who can access their own and other servers would be to set up a Shibboleth federation....

Actually, that may be overkill, but I suspect you'd need something more than OpenId.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Bah, I stupidly forked out a chunk of money for a permanent account and don't have the desire to spend yet more money on a blog.
I'll see how it goes.

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

My first thought? Bah, this is what happens when ld_bureaucrat gets an account, isn't it?

[mooism.livejournal.com]

How do you get your £50 a month figure?

I pay just under £180 a year for a virtual server (might not be beefy enough to run Dreamwidth, mind, but I don't know how much memory/disk/etc it would need).

[fearmeforiampink]

So what you're saying is that it'd allow me to both read the entries of friends on that, and read livejournal friends in the same way I do know, including such friends locked posts?

And to post in a way that's visible on Livejournal, not just as link to my post on the server, and post friendslocked posts that friends on Livejournal can read?

If so, then maybe.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I'd be sad to see people splitting up the potential Dreamwidth userbase until after federation features are implemented in their initial site. One of the reasons I've been following the Dreamwidth project since day one is that I think the names involved give it a good chance of gaining enough users to have a useful portion of the LJ 'network effect' - the reason that LJ is a useful site to be part of when all its clones are, let's be honest, not, is that it has lots of people on it. If this userbase disperses to several alternative sites, that effect is lost to all of them - unless one has some unique credibility-bestowing factor that gives it the edge, and everyone heads that way.

If/when federation features are implemented, I'd very much like to be part of running the UK part of a DW-based federation of sites.

[tyrell.livejournal.com]

Well, that was interesting. So far, not ONE of the backup/archive/transfer systems has worked straight out of the box. Out of 5. Shall be looking for those howto guides, then.

[caseytalk.livejournal.com]

I can help with the dosh, but I'm pants at tech.

[davidnm.livejournal.com]

Fired half their staff? Ooops. It sounds like they've mainly got rid of useful people, too, rather then non-job management types. Oh well, wouldn't be the first time an organisation has shot itself in the foot with mass sackings. (It reminds me a bit of what Devon County Council did a couple of years ago, actually.)

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Depending on where you read, it looks either like just a (stupid) cost-cutting measure, or a means to consolidate control at Russia's end. I expect it's the latter. See...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/06/AR2009010601216.html

If it was going down the tube with the possibility of another buyout, (this time at a more sensible price), maybe there's the possibility of a users-buyout? With the idea of returning it to the original no-advertising model. The trouble with the likes of Dreamwidth, is they're never ready when you suddenly need them!