LiveJournal terms of service

[cellio]

I don't have time to do a close reading of the new LiveJournal terms of service right now, but there are a few things there that are deal-breakers for me:

• I would be bound by a TOS document that I cannot read. They're very clear that the English translation is non-binding and the Russian original is the actual agreement. I am not equipped to review it.

• I would be bound by Russian law, and they explicitly mention political "solicitation". It's unclear whether a post stating an opinion they don't like is enough to be on the wrong side of that rule (since, you know, I don't know much about Russian law). It seems likely that doing something like announcing an event would be. While I haven't done much of this, I'm not prepared to say that I've done zero. I certainly won't commit to doing zero in the future.

• They disallow external retrieval, like Dreamwidth import. It seems that automated backup to one's own hard drive would be similarly disallowed. They of course can't stop a manual scrape, but that's tedious. They are actively impeding users getting their own content out of the system for no good reason.

• ETA: I can be held liable for things that are not under my control. If you get a lot of views, they do...something; I can't tell what but it seems to involve government reporting. Now I don't anticipate writing something that would somehow become wildly popular, but ordinary people can have things go unexpectedly viral. I've seen it plenty of times. I'm not going to bet that it couldn't possibly happen to me.

I do not plan to accept the new LJ terms of service. This breaks crossposting from Dreamwidth, so I hope that my LJ-only friends will find their way here. If you are an LJ user and reading this then please, even if you don't plan to migrate, back up your content somewhere. It takes five minutes to create a DW account and start an import. If you never use the account again, you've still protected your content should LJ delete your account. (Which they do sometimes if someone with unacceptable politics comes to their attention.) I hope you'll start using DW (you can crosspost if you still want to publish on LJ) and that you'll let me know you're here. (For example, by subscribing to my journal, which I'll notice.)

I'm planning to reduce my LJ footprint, selectively deleting entries there. (Everything is here.) I might end up deleting everything, but there are some published links to individual posts that I need to fix somehow, so I'm not just dropping a nuke right now.

Comments

[siderea]

You can still comment on LJ and send Inbox messages (see my latest post re a Greasemonkey script), so I've been doing that to notify my friends who are still there.

Did you know that you can literally cut-and-paste your comma-separated friends list from your profile, and pop it in to the "To" field in the Compose Message inbox page? (Not sure if you can do it all at once - there may be a length limit. But I only had to do a few batches.) Then you can Inbox message everyone and let them know you've moved and recommend they move too.

Now, a whole lot of people don't have email notification for Inbox messages on, so I've also been notifying people by comments that they have an Inbox message from me. This has shaken a bunch of refugees out of the trees.

[cellio]

Thanks for these tips! I've been emailing people directly if I know them well enough and commenting otherwise; I didn't even think of direct messages. That'd be easier than commenting one at a time.

A lot of the people I follow on LJ haven't posted in forever, and I haven't been hunting them down. But with bulk DMs being possible, I'm reconsidering that.