Our new Russian overlords

[rfunk]

Is it better for LJ to be owned by a Bay-Area company that just wants to make money with questionable regard for its customers, or a Russian company that just wants to make money and do Putin's bidding? (Have you heard about the current state of Russian media freedom? Or that LJ is literally synonymous with blogging there?)

I'm starting to think about moving to someplace like InsaneJournal, GreatestJournal, or Blurty. Comparisons can be found in various journals and Wikipedia, and migration instructions can also be found in various places. InsaneJournal seems to be the most popular migration choice right now, according to my brief research. Note that (if their LJ code is recent enough) they should all support Livejournal users logging in using OpenID, and possibly vice-versa.

I've now created an rfunk account at all three of those. I don't know whether I'll move, or which one I might move to. I'll probably at least try to back up to one. Of course, the network of friends at LJ is vital and the reason I came in the first place, so I'm interested in where others might go too.

Maybe dachte's scheme of a personally-hosted blog gatewaying into LJ is the way to go.

Comments

[dachte.livejournal.com]

It might be worth looking into what the openid support LJ has might mean for the integration - there's someone on my friends list whose account is from another site (through their openid link, not the syndication link), and in some respects (but not others) they're "just another lj friend".

(oops, I guess I didn't read your whole post before replying)

[stega.livejournal.com]

I have the same qualms....and am currently moving my blog to WordPress. I'm pulling everything back to purgatory and am even working on archiving all my old entries and comments.

I moved to LJ because it offered things my home-grown scripts didn't offer, and the boxed packages like WP and MT were sadly lacking, but 6 years later and I can finally do what I want to do with ease. I'd been putting the move off/debating it for the last two years, but the scary Russian company has pushed me forward.

[rfunk.livejournal.com]

Is this the same WordPress that just had a huge systematic password vulnerability revealed? Somehow I wouldn't trust them either. At least the code behind LiveJournal seems solid, even if the company is questionable. Of course, having done my time in PHP-land I'm now skeptical of *anything* written in PHP, though some are OK.

[rfunk.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I'll be impressed if you get comments ported over well. That seems to be a big sticking point even in migrating from one LJ system to another.

[stega.livejournal.com]

I managed to get everything moved over fairly easily....the new blog will go live after I fix the style sheet stuff--I need to make a new theme to work with WP and my site's existing cron'd css stuff.