LJ lays off over 70% of staff

[ciphergoth]

20 of LiveJournal's 28 staff laid off (propogated from dennyd; Valleywag may not be a reliable source)

That's what I should have done over the holidays - started building a lifeboat...

Update: Another report says 13 out of 30 staff; this post is collating links (propogated from pw201 via palmer1984).

Comments

[deviblue.livejournal.com]

if true i wouldn't give it long before this place starts falling apart.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

LJ won't die overnight. I'm holding out for the Dreamwidth project to provide a new home for my content, such as it is.

The numbers in the Valleywag report aren't accurate, but the bulk of it is. Something closer to the source here:
http://xb95.livejournal.com/635394.html

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Why, what's different about Dreamwidth?

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I'm personally in favour for technical reasons (e.g. long-overdue porting of the codebase to work with Apache2) and practical reasons (e.g. the separation of the friends-list concept into two directional concepts), plus because I believe that the particular people involved in starting the project have a reasonable chance of starting it with a large enough snowball for it to (re)build a practically-useful amount of the network effect which has made LJ worth using when DJ, IJ, GJ etc are not.

I also consider them a lot more likely to take major patches, to add features such as the federation stuff you're interested in for instance.

There's also a load of political stuff about how they're going to structure themselves as a company/organisation/community, but my opinion on that is mostly of the 'wait and see how it works out in practise' variety.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I really don't understand why everyone's so excited about it then. It sounds exactly like LJ did when it started, and without either a technical or legal framework in place to prevent it, there seems every reason to suppose it will suffer a similar fate.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you should read the bits on their site which I reference in the last paragraph then. They do appear to have given that stuff some thought, I'm just not particularly interested in it personally so I can't give you any detail.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

http://dreamwidth.org/principles.html has shiny words of admittedly vague good intentions.

I can't find the bits of the mailing list where this stuff was discussed in more detail right now, and it's possible that some of what I remember was from the early IRC discussions anyway.

It could all still go hideously wrong, of course, but at least it sounds like they're going to try to avoid it doing so. *shrug*