Decisions, Decisions

[ravan]

OK. I'm fairly certain that Six Apart (6A) is preparing for either an IPO or an acquisition. This means potentially continuing crackdowns on various types of unpopular expression to look good for investors (either stockholders or publicly held corporation).

I often write about unpopular stuff: anti-neo-con politics, paganism, glbt issues, dominionism exposure, childfreedom, workplace idiocy, sf&f conventions, and a lot of other crap. I also write about stuff like my health, job, household, finances, issues, kittens and random rants. Most of this stuff is not public, but FO (friends only) or a subset of FO.

So, I have two choices:
1) Go ahead and resume normal blogging, without doing any self-censorship, accepting the very real risk that 6A or whoever owns them will suddenly decide that I am PNG on their servers for some dumbass reason.
2) Abandon my permanent account and friends list here to stake my claim elsewhere (with the attendant service issues), maybe trying to turn this journal into some sort of feed showing the new one?

Either way I could lose something, IMO.

I'm inclined toward number one - because leaving seems like giving in to the Mrs Grundy's of the world. If anything, I may make *more* of my edgy rants and pontification public. I also plan to do more frequent backups.

Also, if 6A gets acquired or goes IPO, I can try to get stock, as long as the company is publicly traded. While I'm not rich, I do have a small portfolio that needs diversification. I tend to be a long term oriented investor.

What do *you* think?

Comments

[mdlbear]

I'm proceeding down the first path for the moment, but with the eventual goal of making LJ a mirror for a main blog, probably on steve.savitzky.net. The network effects of LJ's commenting system, communities, and friends lists are too large to ignore, but it's a single point of failure that I can't control.

Also, there are things I just can't do with LJ that I can do at home in a directory-tree-based system.

[ladyqkat.livejournal.com]

For now I intend to adopt a 'wait and see' attitude laced with skepticism. LJ is, to me, a somewhat comfortable place to be and who is to say that the recent witch-hunt and firestorm will not hit other blogger sites with more devastating effects?

Back-up stuff? Hell, yes! At this point the main thing I am concerned about is the story I am writing, but I write that elsewhere and copy and paste the text to the story site. I may go back through posts I have made and pull off things that mean something to me, but some stuff, fun and silly as it may have been at the time, will be lost to the ether.

I don't have enough computer savvy or monetary resources to be able to forge a mirror site or maintain a domain. And I really like the networking aspects of LJ that don't seem to exist on other blog spaces. Or that you need a minor tech degree to understand.

I am just somewhat disappointed that, from what little checking I have done (and it has been very minimal), there seem to be no news coverage of this entire debacle. That, to me, is more ominous than all of the hue and cry being slung around various journals and communities.

No, it's made it into mainstream and non maintstream media

[alyxreese.livejournal.com]

# NEWS LINKS

# The story's broken into the mainstream media. CNET reports a conversation with Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart CEO & chairman, and also links to this post, here.
# BoingBoing: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/30/lj_purges_incest_sla.html
# AnimeNewsNetwork: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2007-05-30/shota-community-other-livejournal-accounts-suspended
# Firefox News: http://firefox.org/news/articles/408/1/Six-Apart-Deletes-500-LiveJournals-Many-Fannish/
# Metafilter: http://www.metafilter.com/61636/livejournal-suspends-hundreds-of-accounts#1712054 [NOTE: anildash says "Listen, we know and love that one of our core communities is the plethora of fen that flourish on LJ. Hell, half of our volunteers and team members actively participate in fandom. We're not going to every deliberately do anything to endanger that. But we do make human mistakes from time to time, especially when we're under the gun to Do Something To Protect The Children." Significantly different from that we saw in the CNET story.]
# Fark: http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2835992
# Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/0329200
# Digg:http://www.digg.com/tech_news/LiveJournal_deletes_hundreds_of_illegal_rape_survivor_LGBTQ_communities

Re: No, it's made it into mainstream and non maintstream media

[ladyqkat.livejournal.com]

Thank you sincerely for the links. Part of my problem is that I go into an information overload blip and can't recognize anything coherent or even figure out how to find the information.

[talvinamarich.livejournal.com]

Stock.

I would love to see a mutual-fund-like thing where LJ Users can combine their spare change and effectively buy LJ over time.

[alyxreese.livejournal.com]

Option 1, continue blogging as usual.

Sensitive posts you can lock to your f-list which means it is not open to public consumption. IF they have issue with that, then that becomes a whole 'nother ballgame...

:)

[mdlbear]

It would be unwise to assume that they won't read your locked posts if they find a suspicious keyword in your interests lists. Your content is on their servers.

See http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/blog-anonymously.php for info on how to blog anonymously. Yeah, it sucks.

[elf]

They claimed that content had little-or-nothing to do with the recent deletions... it was about interest lists indicating intended criminal activity. >:(

And locking posts kinda kills the purpose of having a political or current-events focused blog.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Exactly. My of my political stuff is public, because I think it's stuff that needs to be said and spread.

[judith.livejournal.com]

Certainly option one. What's the point otherwise? I am thinking of moving my posts to a site maintained by me, but I've been too lazy to work it all out. Ideally I'd post to both sites simultaneously. I really don't want to give up LJ.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

I would say to go ahead, but keep a running backup.

-- Lorrie

[weofodthignen]

I use LJ overwhelmingly for the networking.

But it still matters. Nobody's come up with a good alternative, and the legal situation in this country makes it hard to defend one against concerted attack. Somebody also said something very disturbing about 6A's actions having made it much harder for them to retain legal status as a common carrier rather than a publisher. The implications of that for any possible new company also concern me.

M