sholio | That Livejournal thing

As many of you may have heard by now, Livejournal is now keeping its servers in Russia (websites' privacy controls, legal redresses in case something happens, and so forth are bound by the laws of whatever country the servers are physically located in), which is leading to a lot of account deletions from worried users in, mostly, the U.S.

I'm not planning on doing so; as far as I can tall, all the likely worst-case scenarios that I've seen discussed (an increased likelihood of credit card theft, having your personal information sold, theft/duplication of copyrighted material, etc) are already risks anywhere you have an online presence. I don't think people pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere are wrong to do so, especially if they're not using the site anyway; I just don't feel like I need to. The only thing I'm thinking about is maybe not renewing my paid account when it lapses so a) I don't have my credit card info on there, and b) am not financially supporting a business that is known to actively delete/suppress accounts on political grounds. Even so, though ... at least as far as the credit-card risk is concerned ... I've known people who had their credit card info stolen and used by thieves because of info leaks from Bank of America and Walmart, and I just tonight gave my billing info to an online site I've never heard of to buy an art book from Malaysia. idk. It's impossible to do business online without some level of risk.

However, I'm glad I have a journal mirror at DW. I'll still crosspost everything, and in all likelihood any new communities/journals I create from here on out will be DW-only, if only because of the added exodus from LJ and increased probability that LJ as a company, at least the English-language side of it, is tottering along on its last legs.

More information: here, here, here, and here.

(Though obviously if anyone wants to present an alternate POV in the comments that I'm not taking into account, feel free. Like I said, I don't mind other people doing it; I'm just not really feeling the need to, myself. Plausibly, as far as "bad things that are now more likely to happen," I think the most likely one is that LJ is now one step closer to the end of its internet-site life cycle and is just going to stop existing someday. So backing up is a good idea.)

btw, if I've friended you on LJ but haven't given you access on DW, just say something; it's not intentional, it's just that I never bothered strictly duplicating my circle/flist in the two places, and I don't have notifications of new friendings/circle-addings turned on, so I'll never notice if someone added me in the other place.

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b) am not financially supporting a business that is known to actively delete/suppress accounts on political grounds

Did they really delete any journals for political reasons? The last I've seen was the bunch of Cyrillic service journals that had disappeared were now reachable again, and in support board request they are saying there were just technical problems.

Like, when you click on all the journals from the long list in the entry by Anton Nossik that were missing at that point, most are back, though two out of 83 came up as deleted for me. But considering how many people are upset by the server move I would not bet that they were involuntarily deleted. I mean, I don't know for sure, but without hearing something more definite, I'm not ready to accuse LJ?

I mean, it's not that I'm super thrilled with LJ myself, and I have given up my paid account there quite some time ago, but they did have to deal with a lot of crap like all these DDoS botnet attacks for hosting opposition content in the past and didn't fold then. Of course that's different from breaking laws they are operating under, but still, SUP's track record as content hoster has not been totally horrible.

After all the most notorious mass deletions for spurious reasons happened under US ownership when SixApart thought all kinds of stuff was obscene or child porn or whatever, because some group of fundamentalist Christians complained, iirc the events from 2007.

but they did have to deal with a lot of crap like all these DDoS botnet attacks for hosting opposition content in the past and didn't fold then. Of course that's different from breaking laws they are operating under, but still, SUP's track record as content hoster has not been totally horrible.

Yes, that's what I was just thinking!

Also as I understand it SUP has no choice about where to host the personal data of their Russian users. The Russian data protection law that was revised in 2015 demands that the personal data of Russian users is hosted on servers located in Russia. I remember news articles that LinkedIn went to court over this and lost this November after all. AFAIK Google, Apple and Facebook now host the data of their Russian users on servers in Russia to not be blocked like LinkedIn.

I suspect it may be cost cutting by SUP to no longer maintain servers in two places to host international users in one place and Russians in another. Which probably doesn't indicate a bright future for LJ either. And I've seen rumors that they fired a lot of staff recently too.

Basically my issue is not so much totally pragmatic as...I just do not want to be there. So.

(Basically, as a Canadian citizen I'm not concerned about MY shit, but I do not want stuff important to me to be hosted on servers the company is being forced to move to Russia for basically the sole purpose of bringing its Russian users under surveillance and removing the last major safe platform they had. It just makes me unhappy.)

Edited 2016-12-31 20:17 (UTC)

And I totally respect that (hopefully the above post doesn't come across otherwise). I think people should do whatever they feel like doing with their own journals to make themselves safer/happier.

I do think the safety concerns are being somewhat blown out of proportion (for non-Russian citizens, anyway; for people in Russia, it's a bit of a different story) but that doesn't mean there aren't valid reasons to delete. I just think it's equally valid to stay if someone has enough invested in the site to be worth it.

After all the most notorious mass deletions for spurious reasons happened under US ownership when SixApart thought all kinds of stuff was obscene or child porn or whatever, because some group of fundamentalist Christians complained, iirc the events from 2007.

Yeah; I kinda feel like ... I don't want to set up false equivalencies between the U.S. and Russia (there are vast differences between the kind of safety/security/censorship problems we have and the ones they have) but it's not like we don't have our own problems along those lines. A site based in the U.S. isn't safe from interference either. Especially the way things are going at the current time.

More than my own journals, I'm trying to decide what, if anything, to do about the FKFicFest community on LJ. We played our first game LJ-only, and the first few games were pre-AO3. When DW started, it wasn't possible to import communities, only individual journals. We still have 3 active players who are LJ-only.

I'm not sure that this is something on which the community should vote...? Or maybe it is. But I'm thinking that probably I need to responsibly figure out what's best for all, and do it, even if it makes some unhappy. (Starting with me. ~wry~)

I think maybe letting the community vote would be a good idea. (I meant to weigh in on your post about it, and then things sort of got away from me, as things do.) Honestly, I feel like there's little to be gained by deleting a community from a safety perspective -- the data is already stored in server backups, and that's not going away. All it'll do is break existing links to those stories and potentially lose the stories/comments if they aren't backed up elsewhere. On the other hand, if there is no one to maintain the community, it might need to be shut down, and that's okay, too. Sites have a life cycle and I've never felt THAT bad about old sites going away as the internet marches on. Most of my pre-LJ online life was on sites that no longer exist -- message boards, mailing lists, a Yahoo group I used to run that I ended up deleting once it had gone dead, and so forth. Life goes on.

I understand where you're coming from, but if you feel Americans are overreacting, perhaps you may want to check out a Russian's perspective:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdolboeb.livejournal.com%2F3078638.html&edit-text=&act=url

I definitely think there are valid safety/security concerns for people who live in Russia, which is what this link seems to be talking about. I also think this makes it more likely that LJ, English-language LJ especially, is entering the "winding down" phase of its online life cycle; at some point they're probably going to pull the plug, and I think it's good to be backed up and/or established somewhere else by that point. And if people feel safer deleting their LJs, then by all means they should!

As fragmented as online fandom has gotten, though, I'm not going to abandon the little community that's grown up around my LJ quite yet. For people who no longer have much of an investment in their LJ social lives, it makes more sense to leave than it does for me -- it's still where a good portion of my online interaction takes place.

*waves*

Added you! :D

Thank you!

That Livejournal thing

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