Right now, the imminent death of LJ is being predicted due to the Valleywag report of LJ laying off 20 of 28 employees, without severance. Of course, that’s not correct. The actual number is 13 out of 30, and it has been confirmed by someone close to the situation. The news is currently spreading, with some particularly good discussion on permmembers. There is also a press release from SUP. A number of links have been collected in this post in no_lj_ads.
After reading those posts, and the comments thereto (which I highly recommend), I don’t think panic is in order yet. I don’t think the service will go away immediately, although we’ll likely see less features be added (ala carte userpics — keep waiting). Perhaps this might get those who constantly complain to rethink the value of this service to them — perhaps they didn’t realize that their defense of free accounts and their fighting against ads actually affects people’s lives and livelihoods. Still, the income from a site that won’t support a US staff of 30 might support a US staff of 17 (and note we’re only talking about layoffs from the US staff, which is likely more costly in terms of overhead… we don’t know what the non-US staffing is). In fact, the press release seems to be implying they are doing a common corporate trick: replacing expensive US staff with cheaper non-US labor.
So, I’m going to adopt a wait and see, after I do a backup of my posts. There are a number of tools out there to do it, LJ Archive, LJ Backup, and LJ Book. But I have yet to find a blogging/journaling platform that provides the features and community of LJ. Facebook is something different, and most of the other bloggers out there are public posts only. So it is wait and see.
