i am thinking of coming back here. it's driving me nuts how fb has no calendar option to go back and see what you wrote on a specific day. that's maddening. and they filter my friends list feed so i don't see everyone's posts. frackbook.
i am in the process of archiving all my fb stuff onto my site and calling it "the facebook years"
Plus, I really miss having a full range of HTML over here ... it makes me nuts when I can't italicize or bold over there.
hands down easiest way to find out what you wrote.
tumblr is nice but no one can comment!
blogger is ok but it seems i cannot block anyone?
and their calendar system is not so hot.
i dunno.
there is no perfect solution.
and i hear lj goes down a lot here now and is very unreliable.
however i can't beat it for ease of finding my posts...people replying...banning and deleting, etc...everything really i want except reliability it seems.
unreliable ...
There have been some connectivity issues here over the past year, but they've been intermittent and infrequent. The worst (for me) was when the image server was having issues and I wasn't able to upload pics for a couple of days. However, LJ has, generally speaking, been fine. I still use this as the main node for all by book reviews (both in my primary journal and over on
The one thing that's happening at LJ that didn't "back in the day" is that they get frequent DOS attacks, and I think that's because they're now a Russian company and there are Russian hackers looking to get "a feather in their cap" for taking down a high-profile service like LJ. Fortunately, so far, these usually just slow things down, and not stop them ... although there were a few days when LJ had to "triage" its services and made things like the Profile pages unavailable for a time.
yeah, well..
1. Ownership by Russia
2. uncontrolled spam that is Russian in nature.
3. Occasional denial of service attacks when something big politically is going on in Russia (although LJ has been working to minimize or prevent those after the first time it happened - it's been mild ever since, and they still do offer credits for downtimes/disturbances in serice.)
4. The shiny appeal of different communication mediums that in my opinion, have bloomed with the popularity of smartphones, which also changes people's availability or desire to be at a full sized keyboard and screen. I would imagine it's harder than hell to blog frequently with any substance on a smartphone. And to me, Twitter and Facebook and similar sites are not 'blogging' by definition.
But there are people who are coming back, or try to. For the reasons above (or others) that they've left, they seem to feel by their own admission that they don't know what to write anymore, or feel like what they do is worth writing down. But it's a habit. A lifestyle. You have to get back to where you were when you were actively doing it and liking it. There's time and room to do so, if you enjoy it.
That's the primary thing I notice. And for lower attendance, there's less feedback and interaction. It can't be hard to re-grow a group again if you have content here that isn't on other places, or that can't be presented easily elsewhere - but that's the problem - so much of digital media has been optimized or dumbed down to satisfy the demand for mobile people with postage stamp sized screens, which are now re-growing to tablet size, but that's comparatively early as a trend.
The one thing (if I had a voice or influence upon you) I'd encourage you to do (per another commment you had made) is to not just robotically pipe stuff to LJ via one app that sends it everywhere. It feels a bit insincere on a platform like this which enables so much powerful writing to go with any mix of multimedia. Even now, there are people who simply forward their twitter links to LJ, and I can't understand the appeal of that -it's like spam to me. If I have a Twitter account, I'm reading them there. If I don't like Twitter, then seeing a link here to go THERE isn't really an appealing thing to do, for example. LJ just isn't another place to automate as a drop-off point for a mass communication that would fit 'everywhere', to me. Although I support the right of you to do what you want in your own journal, of course.
That's my spontaneous answer to your question. I like it here, and have still remained posting, but it's a shift in the way things were even 2 or 3 years ago. I hope you'll find the time and habit to come back and write and share regularly like you used to.
yes, i agree i don't want to just forward stuff here.
but i do fwd stuff to my twitter :)
i don't have time to be on everything so i have narrowed it down to LJ to write my personal stuff, facebook to share links and stories i find on the net, and tumblr and pinterest for photo sharing.
and twitter...well that is a bit of a "forwarding" dumping ground for my stuff. i don't see that as a place to have a real conversation but simply to let people know i am active in other places and where to find me