preserving the LJ emergency network

[rm]

Can we talk about something?

I don't want to be all, "LJ is dying" but it's certainly slowing down/transmuting/something.

There's the splintering/relocating/mirroring to Dreamwidth and other services; the increased popularity of Twitter and FB amongst LJ people who used to say they didn't care for such; the fandom focus on Tumblr and A03; and people like me fleeing for their own domains.

Yet, one thing LJ has been remarkable for is the people helping people thing, because it engenders (and has engendered over time) relationships that make need and veracity somewhat easier to verify.

So how and how much we use LJ is changing. In the face of that, how do we preserve the "help solve a scary problem" factor in a way that's meaningful, decentralized, participatory, and based on networks of trust and expertise?

Comments

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Does anybody remember how we handled this stuff in the dark, dark days of "IRC is dying" or "messageboards are dying" or "Usenet is dying"? We've done this before.

I have moved to Dreamwidth for all paid-type services, because I cannot countenance giving LJ any money at this point. Most of my content is echoed on LJ because I don't want to be a gated community. (Paid polls - which are mostly humor bits anyway - can't be.)

I've seen calls for help on FB and Twitter. While on some levels I am more likely to pay attention to ones from trusted sources, on another I am less likely to respond to things from people whose ability to sniff a scam I do not trust.

Part of this problem - possibly a big key - is that these calls for help are usually distributed within a community, one which *happens* to be primarily using LJ for its community-forming stuff. Fandoms, for instance; wherever the heart of the fandom community is, that's where the calls for help will go.

A call for help generally needs to be longer than a tweet, which is why most calls there are a link to something longer. FB is too gated to work properly for such calls. They need to be hosted on a blogging-type service. Twitter can shout, but it can't have a group conversation.

I'm part of a few communities and even actual support groups which are more cross-platform. I see and repeat calls for help from someone with my signature illness on FB, Twitter, DW, here, Second Life, and services I don't even use. (I too have no idea wtf Tumblr is and am dubious that it is going to be any good for longform content.)

But I don't want to have to read six dozen different tabs in my browser. I want two or three divided by categories, like my LJ friends' pages (which I kept divided by genre and such like: news feeds, actual people I know, comics, fan stuff, etc. had their own "friends" reading page.) This is the big problem with Wordpress blogs for me.

Also? Reposts that say "please comment over there ONLY" when "there" is a place like Wordpress and isn't set up for anonymous logins? That sucks. I am way too lazy for that stuff most of the time. A friend posts on FB every time she updated her blog. I had the nerve to reply on FB - a one-line reply, I was too lazy to go to her stupid blog - and she was a bit huffy that people did so. Of course she wants blog traffic, but I am not that interested in her content 90% of the time. (Unlike yours, which I do actually read - but don't comment on as often because I'm at my attention span limit on tabs to monitor because of that RSS feed problem, and so my comments to your blog are often late if at all.)

My main problem with net-life is the lack of a good RSS aggregator. I'd been using LJ for that, now DW, but it's still not a very good method of reading a dozen Wordpress blogs and another dozen on BLogger and LJ and DW and so on.

I try to maintain the same ID on all services, so I'm semi-findable and identifiable. (FB excepted.)

I note that a lot of the "content" I no longer see on LJ was a lot of memes and quizzes and one-line posts and "short form" content just as suited to Twitter and FB. And I think some of the longform fiction has moved to other fan archive sites and the like. The hardcore writers - folks who make longform written posts - seem to be going to blog services, Wordpress and the like, if they go, and are more likely to echo content here.