I was kind of shocked while checking email this morning to see a notification from LiveJournal. It’s been nearly five years since I wrote Time to say bye-bye to LiveJournal. It was the culmination of several years of the Russian-based company that bought LiveJournal turning off features, closing down mirror sites, and replacing the terms of service.

The terms of service mention needs a bit of context. At one point they locked out all sorts of functions, including cross-posting from elsewhere, until you logged in and accepted the new terms of service. If your LiveJournal was set to a language other than Russian, they served up a translated terms of service… but at the top it literally said that the translated terms were not enforceable, only the original Russian-language terms. But you couldn’t log in without accepting the translated terms.

And those translated terms included all sorts of bad things. For instance, if you made any mention at all of anything gay, you must mark the post as "not suitable for children" or get your journal deleted. Of course, they also claimed that if you didn’t post for two years it would be deleted. Yet more than five years since my last post the old journal is still there.

Not to mentioned that they had disabled secure socket security on log ins, leaving you vulnerable to digital eavesdropping when you are logged in.

I double-checked and I’m correct, I haven’t posted anything on LiveJournal in those five years, though I was amused to see that four years ago an old acquaintance decided to post a reply to a 6-year-old post. I’m not sure what’s up with that.

To get back to the notification. A friend who hasn’t been posting anywhere much recently posted on LiveJournal a reminder that her blog there is essentially dead and you should follow her over on Dreamwidth (which is also where I moved my old LiveJournal and supposedly cross post from here but I often forget, since I haven’t found a way to do it automatically).

Thus it seems like a good time to say: 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 not-automatic 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 does automatically cross-post).

Please note that Facebook is not on that list. The only reasons I haven’t outright deleted my Facebook account are that 1) Facebook doesn’t really delete your account when you delete it, and 2) the only means I have to reach some relatives is Facebook messenger. Also, Facebook’s just unreliable. The algorithm hides stuff from your friends and followers all the time. As one relative found out after being disappointed that a lot of people she expected at her wedding didn’t even know when it was because the only time she announced it was once on Facebook.

I was, by the way, happy to confirm that the friend who posted on LiveJournal is already someone I’m following on Dreamwidth…