Well, hell.

[rushthatspeaks]

I'm giving Six Apart five days.

And if they don't do something about this, I'm archiving on a different journal site and moving over to Blogger or Wordpress or something.

Which would suck, because I have had this journal for six years now. I have friends here, I have a community here.

And I am not going to put up with 6A taking it upon itself to outdo the Miller Act. It's a private company. It's legal for them to do. I will not patronize a company that does it.

Five days. Starting now.

Comments

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Argh. Why do they keep being assholes?

I created a GreatestJournal account during the last fiasco, in case things didn't improve; unlike Blogger and Wordpress, it's based on the same code as LiveJournal, and thus has the same kind of friendslocking options. (Wordpress apparently lets you set it to be, essentially, friends-only, but doesn't provide a good option for mixing public and locked posts; the best they let you do is password protect some posts if you have a public blog.) Though I suppose one could simply create two accounts, one public and one private.

[wayman.livejournal.com]

And wasn't the last time less than two months ago?

I'm failing to see how the Six Apart acquisition was good for anything but Brad's wallet.

[weirdquark]

A fandom friend of mine is going to InsaneJournal -- she also has a GreatestJournal account, but said that since GJ doesn't have paid accounts and therefore depends on advertisers to make money, the same problems will come up eventually there too.

InsaneJournal does have obscenity restrictions, but they seem to be more relaxed and communative about what is and isn't okay, and the way LJ is failing to handle communication is what is pissing off most of the people I know in fandom.

[rax.livejournal.com]

If you actually want a hosting provider that won't balk at this sort of thing, your only real option is to become your own hosting provider*. Other services have similar controversies over different things; the mass exodus of fandom communities would likely lead to examination by those service providers as well, and they might have less reason to react kindly, since they don't consider you existing business. Though maybe there is some service provider who just doesn't care.

Becoming your own service provider makes dealing with friends groups, &c. a technical problem; it's a solvable technical problem but not something that looks like a lot of fun to tangle with. It's possible someone like GreatestJournal mentioned upthread (hadn't heard of it before) is willing to do the technical legwork for you and willing to go to bat for you if people start grumbling that it's hosting "kiddie porn," but I'd guess it's more likely that they'd just count on flying under the radar and balk if things got too hot, much like LiveJournal is.

I mean, honestly, if I were your (general you; I have no idea if you do anything "sketchy" and it's not really the point) hosting provider, and a bunch of lobbying organizations came to me and threatened to start a bunch of costly legal battles with me over objectionable content, I'd have to sit and think about it for a while. Even if the accusations were without merit, it would burn resources and time for me to deal with that. It's likely that I personally would tell them to go choke on a lawyer (and provide one), but larger organizations have more to lose and less personal stake.

I'm sure that inside LJ/SA/some-parent-company-that-is-either-Nabisco-or-Phillip-Morris there are a bunch of people who feel the same way, and also a bunch of people who say "We're going to spend how many dollars defending pictures of Harry Potter having sex??" Both of these persepctives have merit, unfortunately, because a company is ultimately bound to do the best thing for its shareholders (represented by a board of directors), and unless the board has a serious slash habit, you're in trouble.

I'm not saying that your anger isn't legit, just that taking your business elsewhere may not help unless you choose your elsewhere carefully.

* and they can still go after your ISP, DNS, &c. :/

[rax.livejournal.com]

Apparently someone thinks there is a market:

https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq.php#Unpopular

[rabidfangurl.livejournal.com]

I have heard that Finland is a good place to get a hosting provider, as they have very, very loose restrictions on what is allowed to be hosted on their servers. Just a suggestion for those of us without access to servers and stuff.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Becoming your own service provider makes dealing with friends groups, &c. a technical problem; it's a solvable technical problem but not something that looks like a lot of fun to tangle with.

You'd need a network of people using similar technical solutions and a set of tools to make it easy. I've thought about this around all of the recent Great LJ Migrations, and I think it would be totally awesome if someone put the technology together.