cellio | Entries tagged with ljexit

I still have an LJ account, though I stopped posting there after they changed the terms of service in problematic ways. Today I got email notifying me of an update to those terms of service, so out of curiosity I took a look. That's the new version; I didn't look for the old one or attempt a direct comparison. A few things jumped out on a quick skim (conclusion: still not using them):

Section 6.1 says this about termination of accounts: "The Administration reserves the right to delete Account and Blog if User did not access the Account or the access was restricted for more than 2 years due to a breach hereof." They don't say what "access" means, but if you left LJ and thought your posts would remain until you removed them, you might want to check into that, or log in once a year, or something.
Section 7.4, about blogs and comments, says that the commenter and blog owner are "jointly and severally liable" for their content. (If someone posts a problematic comment and you don't nuke it, you're complicit.) The "severally" part means the parties can be sued independently, or at least that's what it means under US law as I understand it. Russian law? No idea. I bring this up because in the next section, about communities (shared blogs), it says in 8.4 that a poster or commenter and the community owner are "subsidiarily liable" with respect to the content. I don't know what that means or why it's different from the blog case.
Section 9.2.6 says that users 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". Do they mean userscripts too? Other clients? That cron job that posts a quote of the day?
Users may also not "post advertising and/or political solicitation materials" without permission, but these terms are not defined. Are you allowed to pitch your new book (with purchase link)? Link to the feedback form for legislation that's out for public comment? I assume the purpose is to support the goals of the Russian government, but the language is more expansive.
Section 11.3 (under liability) says (my emphasis): "Please note that in accordance with the Russian Federation Act No. 2300-1 dated February 7, 1992, the provisions of the said act related to consumer rights protection do not apply to the relationship between the Administration and Users as the Service is provided for free." I paid for a permanent account. On the other hand, they also say (in 10.6): "The Administration may at its own discretion and without User’s prior notice supplement, reduce or otherwise modify any Service function and it’ [sic] procedures." So I guess they have cancelled or can cancel permanent accounts at will.
As with the 2016 change, the English-language document they post isn't legally relevant in any way; you are agreeing to the Russian-language TOS. Can you read Russian?

There are still a few people posting only on LJ who I care about following, so I catch up there every now and then. When the (latest) DW migration started some people were still posting slightly different content on the two sites, so I followed those people in both places. I've recently done some cleanup on the LJ side. So if you got email saying I unsubscribed or unfriended or whatever they call it over there, it's just over there. I'm still reading you over here, and am just trying to eliminate some duplicates in my reading.

Apparently I can't remove deleted accounts from my "friends list" without accepting the TOS, but I can remove people who still have accounts. I assume that's a side-effect of something rather than a design choice, because that's pretty weird.

If you're still reading LiveJournal and are using a user script called "LJ ToS-Boss" to dismiss the "you must accept our obnoxious new terms of service written in a language you probably don't understand" notice, you might have noticed that it stopped working. LJ has finally enabled HTTPS, and the script assumes HTTP. You need to add two characters in your copy of the script to make it work again:

In these two lines:

// @include     http://*.livejournal.com/*
// @include     http://*.livejournal.com

add a "*" after "http", like this:

// @include     http*://*.livejournal.com/*
// @include     http*://*.livejournal.com

This instructs the script to run on LJ whether served with HTTP or HTTPS.

(There are a very few people I care about who still post only on LJ and not here on Dreamwidth. I hope that changes someday, but in the meantime...)

SCA friends,

Did you just migrate here from LJ? Are you trying to find your friends?

Have you been here a while and would like to connect with our new immigrants?

Either way, please leave a comment here to announce your presence if you want to be found. If you changed your user name from LJ to DW, be sure to mention that. Let's make it as easy as possible to rebuild the SCA network over here.

And if you're already somewhat connected here on DW, please boost the signal!

(And if you know of somebody who's already doing this, please let me know and I'll update this post to point to that one.)

Now that you've imported your LJ journal to Dreamwidth, you might have noticed that you have some "people" on your profile of the form "lj-username.livejournal.com". Those are OpenID accounts, and by default they're attached to imported comments. If you've ever posted a comment on a journal that was imported here, you have one of these too.

You'd probably rather see your comments as coming from "you", not "you.livejournal.com". Fortunately, you can claim them -- so long as you still have your LJ account to authenticate to. Then they'll show up as coming from "you" like they should, and you'll have the usual ownership rights (edit, delete) on them.

Here's the documentation. Basically, you log into LJ, tell DW "that's me", wait an hour, and click on the link they email you. That's it.

Dear LJ friends who are pressed for time:

Yeah, having to do this in a hurry sucks. But if you can spare just 5 minutes, you can copy your LJ content over to Dreamwidth. You can defer actually doing anything with it until later, but at least you'll have it somewhere other than the Russian servers.

**Note** (pointed out in a comment): you can only import your journal here if you've accepted the LJ TOS.

Step 1: create an account on Dreamwidth:

You can skip everything other than choosing a name and password for now. Come back and browse account settings when you have some time. (You can even skip the email-validation step for now, though you should do it at some point.)

Step 2: go to the Import Content tool:

Choose LiveJournal from the list. Enter your LJ user name and password. Check all the boxes in the "what to import" list. Click submit. Wait a while (possibly a couple days because of current load).

That's it.

Don't worry; your journal entries will keep their security groups. You're not leaking private stuff to the world.

When you have another 2 minutes: claim the comments you posted over on LJ that have been migrated here. Get rid of that ugly "username.livejournal.com" and replace it with your DW account. You'll need to do this while your LJ account still exists.

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.

A lot of us now have OpenID accounts at Dreamwidth, which means we can log in to Dreamwidth using a Livejournal credential. This allows a Dreamwidth user to give a Livejournal user access to locked posts. These IDs are of the form "name.livejournal.com". For example, here is mine.

A lot of us also have native Dreamwidth accounts, which we log into with our Dreamwidth passwords and use to post entries. For example, here is mine.

These are not the same account.

That means that if you've granted access to "somebody.livejournal.com" (OpenID), but haven't granted access to "somebody" (Dreamwidth account), then "somebody" while logged in on Dreamwidth won't see your locked posts. Similarly, if you've subscribed to "somebody.livejournal.com", that doesn't mean you're going to see "somebody"'s posts in your feed. So if you want to read and grant access to your migrating LJ friends on Dreamwidth, you need to match up the accounts.

Currently, 32 people have granted access to "cellio.livejournal.com". Most of them have not granted access to "cellio", which means I won't see those posts. Maybe that's intentional (hey, intentions change; I'm not offended), but maybe it's unintentional.

I have two requests of my LJ friends:

1. If we're not connected there, and assuming you want to be, please add my Dreamwidth account to whatever lists you think appropriate. When I see email about new subscriptions/access, I check to make sure I've done the same. (If I've somehow missed you, please let me know. If I subscribed to you on LJ I want to do so on DW too.)

2. If you are not planning to use your LJ account to read posts on Dreamwidth, because you have a native account and will be reading that way, please let me know so I can remove your LJ account from my access lists. This isn't about not trusting you; this is about being able to manage my filters more easily -- if you're not using it anyway, I'd rather not be carrying it. Plus, you know, closing unnecessary security gaps.

Yeah, migration is a hassle. We'll get it sorted out.

Thanks!

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1063027.html

If you've ever commented in a journal (like mine) that's ever been imported to Dreamwidth, then Dreamwidth has a stub pseudo-account with your name on it, with a name of the form username.livejournal.com. This is, I presume, so that if you use your LiveJournal OpenID to log in to Dreamwidth, you'll be able to see protected entries and suchlike. If you have, or later create, a real Dreamwidth account, one from which you can post entries, you might want to reduce the clutter by merging the stub account into the real one. You can do that.

For those reading this on LJ, yes I want to make that link at the bottom better, including modifying it to show how many comments are already present on DW. Figuring out the regular expression requires more caffeine. Or maybe somebody who's already done it will share. Anyway, this is a work in progress.

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1062181.html

I have seen credible reports that the LiveJournal servers have been moved to Moscow, where they are now subject to Russian rather than US law. This does not give me warm fuzzy feelings for LJ's already-shaky future.

I've had an account on Dreamwidth, a site very similar to LJ (they forked the LJ code way back when) for as long as they've existed. I think highly of them, but for "social" reasons I haven't used it for posting, only reading, until now. I'm going to be changing that. My intention is to make DW my primary journal and mirror posts to LJ for as long as I have LJ-based readers.

The first step of this transition is to migrate my existing content. Some of it's there already (I tried this in 2012), but I need to refresh it. Migration involves giving the DW migrator tool my LJ username and password so it can fetch all my entries rather than just the public ones. I would prefer a client I can run locally that I use to log in to both sites, but it doesn't exist. I am told that the DW tool uses challenge/response authentication, which sends a combined MD5 hash of the password (does not send in the clear). Nonetheless, in theory the DW migration code could use that credential to see locked posts to which I have access from some of you, so: if you are concerned about that possibility, you should unfriend me here at LJ at least temporarily. I am not concerned about this possibility for myself as other people migrate, for what that's worth, but I am not you. I intend to file the migration request tonight, but in the past, migrations prompted by LJ issues have had long wait times and I'm late to this party, so it might not start for hours or days after I submit it.

I'm sorry for the short notice. I really should have figured out the "import, then DW primary and mirrored to LJ" thing a while back, as some of you have, but I haven't. I didn't want to split my community, with some interactions coming via LJ and others via DW, and I've casually observed that comment volume goes down when people have to click through to another site. I don't yet know if I'll direct comments only to DW because of that; I do value the interactions here. We'll see. DW now has good OpenID support, meaning you can log in there to post comments using your LJ credentials, so maybe that'll work out. Or of course you could create an account there (and let me know who you are so I can add you to access lists for my infrequent non-public posts).

You can find me on DW at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/.

Monica

Livejournal user agreement updated

a little LJ cleanup

public service announcement for people still reading LJ

SCA people: find your friends

LJ users: claim your imported comments

LJ to Dreamwidth in a hurry (5 minutes)

LiveJournal terms of service

Dreamwidth accounts vs. LJ OpenID accounts: check your subscription and access lists

Dreamwidth and Livejournal OpenIDs

migration to Dreamwidth commencing soon

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