New Year, New Blog

[ceemage]

It wasn't meant to end this way. But, Livejournal has been down for me pretty much since before Christmas. Although general access is supposed to have been restored, LJ have advised that "some people using ISPs which have contributed to the malicious traffic are still being blocked by our mitigation system." Their advice in the meantime is to either use another ISP (no dice for me: clearly both Virgin Media and EverythingEverywhere are on the "naughty boys" list) or use a web proxy (which is something I have the technical nous to do, but which is not something I'm keen on for https & private logins).

I've been following Dreamwidth with interest since they started back in 2009, and will now be making the jump across. It's the old Livejournal code base, and the old Livejournal business model (no ads, reasonable free accounts, with tempting paid accounts, and invite codes where necessary to keep the split between free and paid in balance). Several people I know off LJ have already made the switch, some of them very early adopters indeed.

I go back a long way with LJ. (If I could get to the site, I could even tell you exactly how long, but so it goes.) I had certainly been around for several years when Brad Fitzpatrick sold the site on to Six Apart in 2005. They they sold it on again to Russian media company SUP in 2009. By then, it had already become the dominant blogging platform in Russia, to the extent that the Russian word for "blogging" generally was the service's Cyrillic name. (As in, "I'm just going to hoover with my Dyson.) Sadly, this meant it also hosted many of the more political and controversial Russian blogs, which made it a target for Denial of Service attacks from people who would rather said blogs were not generally accessible.

Up to a certain point, this just added to the kudos of using the service; you weren't just contributing to your own blog, but to a service that was an important part of freedom of speech in a country where the rest of the media is, in many ways, as tightly controlled as it was in the Soviet era. But, when the constant attacks get to the stage where the service becomes unusable for days at a time at random, inconvenient times, then it sadly has to be time to look elsewhere.

Of course, the current level of inconvenience for me is arguably mitigated by the fact that I haven't really been updating my livejournal that much recently in any case - I think my last entry was back in October. (Once again, without access to the site, I can't really be any more precise than this.) Maybe I should try a new year's resolution of trying to post a bit more in here than I had been doing in the old blog, then. Of course, we all know how well new years' resolutions usually work out: