On March 17th 2002 I made my first post on Live Journal, late to the game but I’ve been posting their ever since.

So when I say that I decided over a two years ago to leave Live Journal it wasn’t something I took lightly.  I have always found it interesting the story of how Live Journal was created.

“LiveJournal.com, a blogging platform and online community built around personal journals, was started by Brad Fitzpatrick in April of 1999. It was begun simply as a fun project to entertain himself and some of his friends. As friends told friends, more people joined and it became a huge success. The platform soon grew to be bigger than a single person could easily.”

A toy that snowballed into a phenomenon. For years this was the magic that was Live Journal, a group of people under the leadership of Brad Fitzpatrick that loved what they did and were part of a Live Journal family..  Until In 2005 when Six Apart bought Live Journal. I was worried about Live Journal’s future until I read Brad’s post.  This post made me feel okay with the acquisition, because I felt he was okay with it.  Us Live Journal users looked to him as the Neo of the Live journal Matrix.  I’ve been a paid user of Live journal for years, I’ve ran my own personal servers for years too, so to leave all of my personal thoughts and feelings on someone else’s server and platform was saying something.

“If you think my baby (LiveJournal) will be destroyed, you better think again… I’m there to make sure they keep doing the right thing, but I’m already pretty sure that’s all they will do” – Brad Fitzpatrick

So why did I decide almost two years ago that I could no longer trust Live journal’s servers or it’s platform to keep my thoughts/rants/memories? In 2007 Brad Fitzpatrick Leaves Livejournal Without Brad Fitzpatrick at the helm or at least the helm of the development side, who knows what could become of Live Journal.

Then it happened, just a few months after Brad left Live journal. SUP, an international Russian media company, has acquired LiveJournal

This post sums a lot of thoughts up pretty well.  Russia isn’t known for their respect for their citizens privacy, why would they be respectful of a companies privacy?  Six apart got into enough trouble with over zealous use of account and post deletions.

“Why am I leaving? I simply don’t trust this place anymore, and neither should you (citations: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]). Read those links.” – Aaron B. Russell

So I am leaving Live journal and have moved my blog to cpuangel.com I’ve installed Open Id on it and several other plugins that make it more than worth the switch. I haven’t stopped cross posting to Live journal from WordPress and will continue to do so, with a plugin called Live+Press, as I have a few friends still on Live journal.  And why the hell not keep a backup?  Now if Livejournal, Inc. decides I posted something they want to delete my account for, they can fly a kite, my data lives on servers I trust and I back up often.