PSA: LJBF: Goodbye's too good a word...

[mdlbear]

If you use Livejournal, you will already have seen the pop-up demanding that you agree to their new terms of service. med_cat has an excellent partial translation and analysis. A full copy of the agreement can be found in archangelbeth | And the translation of the New User Agreement for Livejournal

I will add more as they come in. The salient points are:

• [The user must] Mark Content estimated by Russian legislation as inappropriate for children (0 −18) as “adult material” by using Service functions.
  Who the heck knows what this includes? Play it safe.
• The user may not:
  • without the Administration’s special permit, use automatic scripts (bots, crawlers etc.) to collect information from the Service and/or to interact with the Service;
    Which arguably covers backing up to DW or your local hard drive.
  • post advertising and/or political solicitation materials unless otherwise directly specified in a separate agreement between User and the Administration;
    This presumably covers promoting one's CDs or other ventures.

Many of my friends are leaving altogether. I don't blame them.

What I have done:

• I post no original content on LJ -- it's all cross-posted from here on Dreamwidth.
• Copied all LJ content -- posts and comments -- over to Dreamwidth.
• Comments on cross-posts are disabled; the footer has a link to the corresponding DW post.
• I use LJ only to read comments and posts that are not on Dreamwidth. I read DW first so that I can skip cross-posts that don't have comments.
• I have started to take people who no longer allow comments on LJ off my friends list.
• Effective immediately, I am marking my journal as "adult content", and disabled my participation in "user rankings".
• I have reduced the amount of information shown in my profile. In particular, I have removed my list of interests.
• I have taken my website link off the journal headers and out of my profile. If you want more information, look at my DW profile.

Future action:

• Sometime in mid-April, I will disable comments altogether on LJ, at which point all existing comments will be hidden. They've already been copied over to Dreamwidth, so nothing will be lost. This is for your protection, in case you've posted a comment that could be construed as violating Russian law.
• At some point, I will stop cross-posting, both because of the legal risk and as a protest.
• At some further point, I may delete all or most of my posts, or possibly replace them with links to the corresponding posts on DW.

Sorry, LJ. We had a great time together, but I think it's best for both of us if we go back to being just friends. OK?

And I'm not saying you treated me unkind / You could have done better, but I don't mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time. / Don't think twice, it's all right.

Comments

[archangelbeth]

Thanks for this; reminded me to do some of that myself.

[firecat]

Good way to handle it, I'll probably adopt some of these actions.

[elf]

I'm debating whether to delete my journal. It's all backed up here, and I even paid for BookBlogger (formerly LJBook) so got a nice downloaded copy, PDF and Word, in case I want to look through it offline.

I suppose I at least want to figure out how to hide/shut off comments, and possibly how to hide all entries.

... Probably just delete. The only reason I even visit there is that the yuletide group at LJ is much more active than the one at DW.

[mdlbear]

I have a permanent account, which still appears to be permanent, and there are still a few people who only post over there. Mostly, though, I'm here.

[wendelah1]

Here via my network. May I post a link to this? Your approach makes sense to me.

[mdlbear]

Hi! Absolutely! My journal is all public, and linking is encouraged.

[kellan_the_tabby]

Yeah, I already stopped crossposting to there; I think it's time to just shut it down.

[jcfiala]

I, also, am done with livejournal. But then, I'm jcfiala across the internet, so anyone trying to find me should be able to find me here.

I got a dreamwidth account a long time ago, so I'm glad to already have it set up.

[solarbird]

Wow, I think this may finally truly be it. My LJ - despite crossposting being disabled because I haven't accepted the new ToS - is now nr. 364 by popularity site-wide.

[solarbird]

Oh, but I can tell you one thing "Content estimated by Russian legislation as inappropriate for children" includes - any mention of LGBT people existing. (Exceptions made for condemnations, of course.)

Russia has the fundamentalist right's "no gay propaganda" law set in place. If you mention queers (like me), you can only do it in condemnation if there's any chance at all anyone under 19 could see or hear it.