Signal-boost: the Great Migration

[alexxkay]

Originally posted by jducoeur at Signal-boost: the Great Migration

I suspect that many of my friends have heard about this by now, but for those who haven't:

The tl;dr is that the Sword of Damocles that has been hanging over LJ for several years is starting to cut. LiveJournal has been owned by a Russian company for some time now; evidence says that they recently moved the servers to Russia. That almost certainly means that the Russian government is going to begin actively listening to everything posted here (if they weren't already); knowing them, it is *extremely* likely that this monitoring will not in any way respect your privacy settings. On top of that, there are indications (not yet confirmed that I've heard) that they've begun actively censoring accounts critical of the Russian government.

siderea has made several recent posts about this; for more details, see this entry, and this one.

The upshot is that a *lot* of people are finally bailing from LiveJournal to DreamWidth, with various degrees of prejudice ranging from "doing primary posting on DW from here on out" to "deleting all traces of my LJ history". This is *not* paranoid: odds are good that the Russian spooks are going to read not just your new stuff but your history of private posts, so if that matters, you may want to take steps.

(For those who haven't come across it: DreamWidth is essentially an alternate LiveJournal -- one of many, but the best of the lot. It was originally based on the same code, although LJ and DW have begun to go their separate ways over the years. As far as I can tell, it's a deeply wholesome project: open-source, non-profit, non-commercial, supported entirely by memberships. While I don't use it much yet, I've been a paid member there for a long time -- they're good folks.)

Anyway: personally, I'm a bit less het-up about the change -- I've always been cynical about online security, and have been assuming for some years now that LJ was at best marginally more secure than Facebook (that is, not), so I generally don't post sensitive material. And I've been expecting this particular twist for some time now. I haven't decided whether to make the leap to DW-primary yet, although I might do so depending on how things progress.  Don't be surprised if this account becomes secondary, copied from the DW one.

So, putting that together: if you're an LJ user, and don't have one already, I recommend getting a DreamWidth account. If you care about your LJ history, seriously consider backing it up to DW. And if you haven't already friended me over there, I encourage you to do so. (Same account name, as usual.)

Comments

[keshwyn]

Are you over there?

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Yes, alexxkay.

[pseudohistorian.livejournal.com]

My reaction is admittedly somewhat like jducoeur's take on things--I never assume any social media platform is secure enough to protect things that are truly private, so I wouldn't post anything I'd be too worried about ending up seen by the corporation which runs it (Russian or otherwise). I've never even posted a locked entry on LiveJournal, though I can see the value in that for other people.

Similarly, I can understand the appeal of backing up and/or moving over to Dreamwidth for certain people (especially if they're part of a community that is doing so en masse), but the last thing I personally want is to migrate over to a version of LiveJournal with even fewer active users.

[jducoeur]

That last bit is the key. I'm finally making the jump in large part because a majority of my active network has done so -- as always, it's all about the network effects, and *this* seems to be turning into the version with fewer active users for me.

I'll probably keep reading a limited list here, for the people who are only posting on LJ, and those for whom I care about the comments here, but it's looking like DW now makes more sense as my primary site...