my livejournal is now officially retired. i just received the emails saying that it is now a “free” account, and that all of my “paid” options have expired.
hooray! no more ???!
and, in case anybody else wants to jump ship, download .xml files using ljArchive and get a wordpress account or follow this tutorial.
it doesn’t matter to me, “do what you will…”
but for me, once my account expired, the benefits of jumping ship outweighed the risks of staying by a long shot: with a wordpress blog on my own server, the account is free, it does everything livejournal did and more, and i am the administrator and i make the rules, for a starter, compared to livejurnal, where every dollar i send goes to support real terrorism, you can’t add people who have blogs on any other service, and you’re constantly at risk of being suspended or deleted for the stupidest reasons…
I guess I’ll stay for now; when I first joined, LJ was offering permanent accounts for $150. Because I’ve belonged for well over six months and been an active user—enjoying “premium” service—I don’t feel I’d be losing anything if I were to stop my account now. I don’t thing LJ is all I expected, but at the time I joined I had just been turned out of my internet “home” of two years or so, and there were a lot of people I knew here.
So I don’t see ads, and I never pay for it; I can effectively jump ship anytime and not feel I’ve lost anything, but I’m in no hurry.