feedle's LiveJournal

This is my last post to LiveJournal.
As promised, May 1, 2008 will be the last day I actively post to LiveJournal. My reasons for this are varied, some of which I've aired out here in public, some I haven't. My grievances are actually quite minor, but I feel I've "outgrown" LJ.. and further, that it is wandering down a road I want little part of.

Before coming to LiveJournal, I had a moderately busy blogging site, lovingly dubbed the world needs more mayo. That site's traffic, and the content itself, died because I was spending all of my writing energy on LJ. I had stopped writing long, reasoned rants and instead was posting goofy one-line comments and useless web links. In short, I wasn't spending "quality time" blogging, just quantity time.

The intensity and increased frequency of LJ brouhahas in recent months is a very small straw that did, indeed, break the camel's back. Not only has my personal website suffered (which, unlike my posts to LJ, unequivocally belongs to me, not just morally but physically), but I've gotten away from the whole reason I started up the mayo in the first place.

Brutal honesty follows. I don't care about the greater community, in so much as I'm not here posting to LJ to provide entertainment to the masses. I'm not even here to "meet people". There are better sites for that than here. I'm here (and, in the macro, running a website) to primarily vent for my own sanity, secondarily to communicate what is important to people in my inner circle. That's it, folks.

Here's the brutal part. I've realized that the vast majority of people I care about actually don't really read LiveJournal as much as would be needed to keep them informed about what's going on in my life. Worse: I've depended upon this "crutch" to put a barrier in between myself and others that used to be fulfilled by long telephone calls, the infrequent chat, and personal visits.

That seems fundamentally wrong.

Instead of enabling personal communication, LiveJournal has had the opposite effect. It is making the vast majority of communication that used to be personal into an impersonal broadcast, often sanitized and/or spun for a general audience.

Will I still write about things going on in my life? Certainly. I'm not going to stop "blogging", I'm just going to be doing it elsewhere and not on LiveJournal.

If you care to follow, here's what you'll need to know.

http://www.feedle.net/ is, has been, and will continue to be (in perpetuity) my website. In the next 15 days, I'll start feature-adding things to it to make it more "blog"-like, but updates to that site will likely be on a weekly basis moving forward. Note that feedle.net actually allows OpenID logins, so LiveJournal users can log in there using OpenID. It also supports lots of RSS goodness.

http://twitter.com/feedle/ is probably your best bet for the one-liners I'm famous for. I encourage anybody who cares to "follow" me there.

I will still follow my friend's list on LJ, and post comments as appropriate.

We'll see you out there.