Hi Guys

[estepheia]

Okay, I have been too busy to visit LJ. Now I realize that there are adverts everywhere. Under every single post!

How are you guys dealing with the stupid ads? Did you all migrate? Is anyone still here?
Have you deleted your LJs? Reposted your stuff elsewhere? Did you decide to pay to get rid of the ads?

I already created an account at Dreamwidth. I meant to use it for the occasional fanfic, but now I'm thinking of going there and just crosspost to LJ, without actually reading posts here....

*grumbles*

Comments

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

Most of us have LJ and Dreamwidth accounts these days, and do cross-posting.

I have a permanent account so don't know anything about ads.

[querida-bonbon.livejournal.com]

I have a DW but I haven't imported my journal yet. However, I have a paid account here on LJ so I'm probably staying here for now :)

(I don't see the ads but I'm told they are horrible - adblocker?)

[justhuman.livejournal.com]

The ads have been on the site for a few years now - I've got a perm account, so I don't see them. I did log off and muck about. They are at the bottom of every page, but not between the posts on the f-list.

There is a fannish migration away from LJ, and some of that is driven by the site administration (ads, shifting site interface to be more like Facebook, migration from US to Russian support staff, etc...). More of the migration seems to be associated with different communication tools. Twitter, Facebook and especially Tumblr are all drawing a lot of users.

That being said, there were some recent friending memes on LJ and DW pointing out that the various services have their advantages and disadvantages. Long conversations is still preferred at LJ and DW. Of course the one thing that was clear in the friending meme was that we need to be the change we want to see in the long form media outlets -- if you want to read more, you need to post more and comment more.

For myself, I consider DW my primary home now, but I still read my LJ. Dreamwidth and LJ are not an either/or situation. Like many DW adopters, I crosspost everything - to me it's an excellent back-up. However, if I have the option of commenting on the same post on DW or LJ - I choose DW 95% of the time. That being said, on a hot topic post, sometimes different conversations come up in the comments of LJ and DW and I might choose one, the other or both to comment in. I have noticed in the last couple of months that the same post on DW and LJ is getting more comment son DW for the first time for myself and for the folks that I follow who crosspost.

The improvements that DW made to the branch of the LJ open source code have been substantial. The site administration is stellar - they talk to the users constantly about the status of the business and plans for site improvement.

Among the features at DW that make it very attractive is the Crosspost and import utilities. You can now import from LJ you're entire journal, including icons, tags and all comments to posts. Comments are optional. They recently set up importing of comms, which has given a bunch of fannish comms the opportunity to at the very least archive their content. Some of them have migrated fully or in part. That being said, older fandoms are still better represented in comms on LJ. Newer fandoms start up in both sites, but apparently a lot more traffic on newer fandoms is taking place out on Tumblr and other venues.

For me, crossposting from DW is the right solution. I post it on DW, it crossposts to LJ (and IJ, because why not?). I can have conversations in both places. If I edit the post on DW, all the changes happen in all the crossposts too <--- I'd like to star this feature, because as much as I loved Semagic, it never did that for me when I used it to crosspost. There's another huge advantage to long fic writers - the post size limit is *HUGE* on DW. You don't need to break a fic into 3 pieces. That being said, I don't always take advantage of that because I crosspost and LJ will just cut off a long post. I'm still working on that. I think last time I ran into it, I posted it in pieces to LJ and IJ via the DW and then hid the DW post. Then I reposted in a single post on DW, giving the readers the option to go there and read in one sitting. Of course, I also post everything to AO3 now.