I think I am going to leave LJ for good.

A couple things happened recently that are prodding me in the direction of leaving LJ for good. This means no longer cross-posting, probably no longer reading my LJ flist (although I may syndicate your LJ feed and read you from here, if that's the only way I can read your entries - but note that I won't be able to read your locked entries until DW gets that functionality), and possibly removing my old entries. I'm not doing this yet, but I am probably going to do this soon.

First of all, while I was in Boston I used the terminals in my hotel lobby, and I happened to go to LJ (in order to reply to comments) using the direct link to my journal there, while not logged in. (This is not my usual pathway, for various reasons.) Wow. My journal grayed out and a video ad played. And then, since the hotel terminals had IE and no adblock, I got all kinds of intrusive ads until I logged in.

The thing is, this journal is my public face to the world. Unlike other journals I might possibly maintain (*whistles*), this one is searchable and widely linked. I don't like or want ads on my journal, especially not the way that LJ presents them. (I don't mind certain types of ads - small text ones in the margins don't bother me a lot, for example. But animated ads, and ads interposed between the entry text and the comments, and especially video ads that must be seen before the journal is read, annoy me a lot, and I don't want readers of my journal to be subject to these. I don't want someone googling for an interesting hike (which is how a lot of people find my journal) getting hit with LJ ad hell.

(You might say, why not pay for an account, then? I would, if LJ didn't piss me off so much. But also, I prefer the model that e.g. Flickr and Dreamwidth use, of giving limited services for free and additional services for paid accounts. With no ads. And I still haven't completely forgiven LJ for reneging on Brad's promise that Basic accounts would never have ads.)

Then there is the link redirect fiasco, which you can read about here and here. The problem I have with this is that (as others have found, as well) the redirection interacts badly with NoScript, and now when I click on any link on my LJ or reading page (including trying to expand cuts or leave comments), nothing happens. I can bypass this by allowing their redirect...but I don't want to! I can also disable javascript for LJ, but that gets rid of behavior I like (such as being able to comment inline). So I'm finding reading LJ really difficult at the moment.

I would stay if I felt really close to my flist on LJ, and that was the only way I could interact with them (with you!). But a whole lot of you are on Facebook, and that's been our primary interaction lately. A lot of you I read from another account, which - moving that one altogether is a more complicated prospect, and I don't know what I'm going to do there, or when. (It's not like I post there any more!) Another large chunk of you don't seem to be interacting with me at all.

So, if you're reading this on LJ, let me know what you are going to do. Are you crossposting? I'll read you on DW instead, and please do the same for me. If you're willing to read me at Dreamwidth, but don't want to move, I will syndicate your journal and read you from here. (Remember, you can comment using openID. And I can comment on your LJ using openID. And I have invite codes, or can find some for you.) If you post locked content (I can think of two of you who always post locked, whose entries I would like to keep reading) I might read you from my other journal (which is a permanent account and not going away, although I might eventually move away from it as well) instead, if you give me access. And if you just want to defriend me, that's okay, too. (Probably.)

I dunno how fast this is all going to happen. But I'm feeling kind of like straw, camel's back, kaboom right now.