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[aprilstarchild]

Updated Map of Online Communities, as illustrated by the guy who does XKCD.

Warning: HUGE.

It's.....kinda depressing. Livejournal does get it its own island, but not far from a bunch of a bunch of abandoned social networking sites like Friendster.

Facebook, predictably enough, is ginormous. And Farmville is larger than most other non-facebook countries.

If LJ ever dies, I think I'll cry. And that reminds me, I gotta do that ljbook thing where you can download all your entries. I've been on LJ since 2003, and if I lost all my entries, the record (as imperfect as it is) of seven years of my life would disappear.

Comments

[taiba.livejournal.com]

A lot of people are moving to Dreamwidth. I cross-post everything from there now, in case LJ really truly does something abominably stupid and I get fed up.

I'm actually tempted to do what a friend of mine did and restrict all my comments to my Dreamwidth account by blocking them on LiveJournal but not there.

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

Bah. I don't need two journal sites. What is so great about dreamwidth, anyway?

[taiba.livejournal.com]

A lot of little things, from what I hear, but I haven't explored it in depth.

One thing I like is that it's entirely open-source, and is big on "freedom of expression" so they're not going to do things like what LJ did when they banned a whole lot of accounts for using icons of babies breast-feeding, or delete entire fandom communities or other stuff like that.

They're also big on transparency, so for instance if they can't release a bit of code they'll tell you what it was and why they couldn't publish it etc etc.

They just generally seem to be more decent about the whole thing :-p

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

Wow. Their stuff looks a lot like LJ, damn.

*shrug* I don't want to double-post my entries...and all my stuff is *here*. It's kinda like Facebook, in that the people who run it do stupid shit, but everyone I know is there, so I'm sorta stuck.

[taiba.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. The other advantage is that, if other people move to DreamWidth, they allow OpenID login, so you can still view and comment on their entries by logging in with your LJ account, so you really don't need to sign up at all :-p

[smartasskicker.livejournal.com]

that map is INCREDIBLE!

i keep trying to start posting on lj, but usually give up. i keep hearing crickets.

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't post here nearly as often as I used to.

But facebook =/= LJ. I dunno how much of it is due to format--you can just make longer posts on LJ without having to do something separate than a normal post, the comment format encourages longer comments, you can use html, etc etc.....and how much of it is due to having different friends in each place. There's a little crossover here and there, but 90% of the people I know are on facebook, not LJ. And a lot of my real-life friends who used to use LJ, have pretty much abandoned it.

I post a lot of stuff here that I wouldn't necessarily want people on facebook to see. Some of it is just more personal. I wouldn't post to facebook about how the state of my depression, for instance. Or my money problems, except in the most vague sense.

Maybe it's just because I've historically been more open and "real" on LJ, whereas when I joined facebook it already had a bunch of acquaintances friending me, people with whom I'd feel weird saying some things, y'know?

Plus, last but not least, my dad is on facebook. Hah!

[smartasskicker.livejournal.com]

i have to say "DEFINITELY" to all of that! i don't need my aunt or people i went to high school with or just barely know, knowing exactly how much in the hole i am, how much i panic about it, etc. but in a locked entry on lj, i'm fine with it. but now i'm having an issue where i just started a new public blog (http://31-days-of-new.blogspot.com/) and so what do i have to post on lj except the depressing, not-shiny stuff? maybe i should just post those entries in both spots, and disable commenting? the internets have gotten too confusing!

i installed a 30-min-per-day limit on Facebook in my browser and that has helped my internet problem SO MUCH! the thing that drives me crazy is how communication has become so facebook-based. people who have my phone number AND email address will still send facebook messages! the limit has helped me from getting sucked in when i go to respond to them.

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

Hah, I've done that with people. I hate making phone calls as a rule, and it's sometimes easier to find their facebook profile than to look up their email.

April = LAZY

Shawn would probably be thrilled if I put a time limit on my facebook.

[smartasskicker.livejournal.com]

i do it too, sometimes... but i don't like that i do it! ha!

[browse.livejournal.com]

When I finally gave up on LJ, I started my own WordPress blog. The double-extra nice thing about that is that WordPress has excellent tools for importing all of your old LJ blog posts into your new WordPress blog. Which gave me a safe, tidy backup for all those years of posts.

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

I have a lot of older friends-locked, and in some cases private posts. Hell, I just started using fancier filters a couple of years ago. In any case, there are posts on here that I would NOT want on a wordpress, but I'd hate to lose them.

I plan to save (and even possibly print) all my old entries at some point.

[jenhowell.livejournal.com]

How do you get an LJ Book? My life since 2002 is on this stie and that's basically my whole life worth talking about at this point!

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

http://www.ljbook.com/

[legman666.livejournal.com]

That is amusing AND clever!

and it reminds me of rock band family trees! I LOVE THOSE!