I had gotten a couple of error messages informing me that the LiveJournal cross-posting wasn’t working the last couple of days, but hadn’t had time to look into it. Now I suddenly know why some people were making cryptic comments about not agreeing to new terms of service. This isn’t quite how I expected that service to start killing off the non-Russian content when I predicted that was the next logical move after they removed all of the mirrored servers outside of Russia and disabled secure socket login. The new Terms of Service include a lot of weird and concerning stuff but the real deal- breaker is this:

[The user must] Mark Content estimated by Russian legislation as inappropriate for children (0-18) as “adult material” by using Service functions.

And because of their various anti-gay laws, that means any mention of, oh, say that fact that I’m gay must be marked as inappropriate for children. And that’s B.S. It’s B.S. when YouTube is doing it, it’s B.S. anywhere. There are also clauses that say the journal will be deleted if you don’t sign in for several months, and it seems to say if your journal doesn’t generate a minimum number of hits in a period of time it will also be deleted and so on. There’s some analysis of the situation here and here and here.

The real kicker is that the English translation of the Terms of Service, which you have to click “Agree” to in order to sign in right now, says that only the Russian version is valid. Well, I can’t read Russian, so I have no clue what I’m really agreeing to if I can’t rely on the English translation they’re offering, right? A user who can read Russian has kindly posted a translation of the applicable laws here, if you’re curious.

I’m still weighing whether to log in, clicking “Agree” then delete all the entries except one that says the journal is closed? I mean, I’d be abiding by the terms as quickly as I could if I did that, right?

I migrated my journal to Dreamwidth a long time ago and downloaded back-ups. I do most of my blogging on my FontFolly.Net blog with cross-posting elsewhere. I didn’t delete the LiveJournal earlier because I still have some hold-outs on the friends’ list there who as far as I can tell have not moved to Dreamwidth or followed any other blogs.

Regardless of what anyone still using LiveJournal decides to do with their journals there, I hope that you will at least make a note of the ways to find me on the net: follow my WordPress-based blog on FontFolly.Net (you don’t have to have a WordPress account to do so); follow me on Twitter at @FontFolly, follow the cross-posting from FontFolly.Net to my Dreamwidth journal. If you don’t mind the dozens of reblogs of weird and fannish stuff, you can even follow me on Tumblr (where FontFolly.Net also cross-posts).