I think for me part of the difference with Wal-Mart and McDonald's versus LiveJournal is that LiveJournal has unique content created by people I care about, while Wal-Mart and McDonald's do not. I'd happily pay more to get goods from somewhere less evil, and would happily pay more to get content from somewhere less evil, but this is where the unique content I want to consume is. (I also don't find LJ as evil as other people do, but they are clearly not made of angel-ponies.) I expect this is the case for most people --- although in some cases, McDonald's may have the unique content they want, or the effort investment of not going to Wal-Mart may be much higher due to geographic or financial constraints.
Dreamwidth sort of helps with this, but has a bunch of similar problems; the solution I've seen and liked most made an actual LJ post and authenticated against openID, but when you clicked on the cut tag, magically it wasn't actually a cut tag, it was a link to the off-site page --- sort of like what Dreamwidth does, except homebrew. If it were a higher priority for me (I want to get away from using MIT for mailing lists and set up wiki stuff first), I would probably do something similar.
Part of my problem when people change things is that I find infrastructure change emotionally expensive; when someone says "I'm leaving LJ" and I want to follow them, it can be very hard for me to make following them a part of my routine, which is actually very much set in stone. I've managed to get Dreamwidth mostly into it, but it took a few months of hemming and hawing and researching and then around a month of actually having it set up. It may be that other people aren't like this, but I know I'm very much helped by transition periods between technologies and the option to use legacy stuff for a long time. (I still use twm, and I finally learned how an RSS feed worked this year because I had to for work. Seriously, I'm bad at this.)
Maybe I misunderstand, but looking around in it, Prismatic (http://prismaticmedia.com) seems way more like a webhosting service than like a blog? The things I see hosted there I wouldn't have wanted to put on LJ anyway (though maybe that's erroneous thinking on my part --- I tend not to put creative work here). Although now I know where all your content is! I should check out your fiction sometime.
Also if you want LJ syndicated feeds of anything, I can make them.
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regna
Re: Service Providers
Date: 2010-05-25 12:49 pm (UTC)Dreamwidth sort of helps with this, but has a bunch of similar problems; the solution I've seen and liked most made an actual LJ post and authenticated against openID, but when you clicked on the cut tag, magically it wasn't actually a cut tag, it was a link to the off-site page --- sort of like what Dreamwidth does, except homebrew. If it were a higher priority for me (I want to get away from using MIT for mailing lists and set up wiki stuff first), I would probably do something similar.
Part of my problem when people change things is that I find infrastructure change emotionally expensive; when someone says "I'm leaving LJ" and I want to follow them, it can be very hard for me to make following them a part of my routine, which is actually very much set in stone. I've managed to get Dreamwidth mostly into it, but it took a few months of hemming and hawing and researching and then around a month of actually having it set up. It may be that other people aren't like this, but I know I'm very much helped by transition periods between technologies and the option to use legacy stuff for a long time. (I still use twm, and I finally learned how an RSS feed worked this year because I had to for work. Seriously, I'm bad at this.)
Maybe I misunderstand, but looking around in it, Prismatic (http://prismaticmedia.com) seems way more like a webhosting service than like a blog? The things I see hosted there I wouldn't have wanted to put on LJ anyway (though maybe that's erroneous thinking on my part --- I tend not to put creative work here). Although now I know where all your content is! I should check out your fiction sometime.
Also if you want LJ syndicated feeds of anything, I can make them.