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How do you keep in touch with them on Facebook? What makes your post reach them, if most don’t check often? I want Facebook for this purpose but it feels like

How do you keep in touch with them on Facebook? What makes your post reach them, if most don’t check often? I want Facebook for this purpose but it feels like it’s really not a blog. At all.

ethbr0 5y ago
As someone old enough to remember and have used Livejournal, the Facebook experience is very different.
- amatecha 5y ago
  LJ was awesome! I feel like Mastodon is kiiiinda similar modern-day equivalent (despite the Twitter-mimicry). Huh, now that I say that "out loud", that's interesting - I had never thought of it until now. It seems to really capture that "share your world but also bring in others and socialize as narrowly or broadly as you want", along with sharing media and so on.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Whenever I looked at Mastodon, it seemed cool technologically, but I couldn't really imagine anybody outside of the tech crowd using it. Is that an accurate perception? LJ was cool because you had quite a diverse group using it. Artists, musicians, teenagers, etc. This was before MySpace siphoned away the youth crowd, fifteen years ago or whenever it was. I wouldn't see them ever coming back to blogging. In fact I don't really see anybody returning to blogging. (No disrespect meant to blogs. Blogs are awesome. That was a really good era for the internet.)
- grvdrm 5y ago
  The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ?
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ? https://dreamwidth.org https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.
    - grvdrm 5y ago
      Thanks for the tip!
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  LJ was "peak internet" for me. I had a smallish network of friends on there and we read and commented on each others' stuff. You could be as personal or as detached and anonymous as you wanted. You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself. Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it was mostly crap, but it was often thoughtful and personal if you had the right friends. It felt like nothing was ever created on Tumblr; it was just endless pithy comments and jokes about things created elsewhere.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Livejournal, to me, was a fusion of three things: a simple HTML editor (aka posts) + a time-sorted view and access controls + discoverability through your network. The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested / push), & (3) access controls were simple, understandable, and obeyed user intent.
    - vram22 5y ago
      I enjoyed LJ for a few years (my first blog, 2005-2008). Wrote a good deal about startups that I explored as a user in that period (this was the APG era, where APG stands for After Paul Graham, meaning after he wrote his early influential essays about startups and his launching YC - called Startup School at the time, IIRC) and other software topics. But later, after a Russian group acquired LJ: https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html (2nd post on the subject, there was a previous one on the same blog, IIRC). Interestingly, some years later, I mentioned the same point, on my next blog or on Twitter, and then suddenly my old blog became accessible again (it was not, for a while, after the above-linked incident).
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      Why can’t we have this on Facebook? What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.
RandallBrown 5y ago
I post things about my life, they post things about theirs. We read it and know what's going on. A friend of mine from high school happened to be in my city for a weekend. He posted on Facebook asking if he knew anyone there. We went out and had drinks and caught up. I had a bunch of super close friends at a crappy job back when I was in college. We all went our separate ways but occasionally Facebook reminds one of us of some funny photo from the old days. It's triggered a few large group chats that have been pretty fun. Every once in awhile I'll think about an old friend from school or a job or wherever and it's nice to just see what they're doing without having to go through starting a whole conversation. (Although I often will since Facebook is a good way to reach out to people.)
- soylentcola 5y ago
  That sort of "easy, zero-effort blog for everyone you know" was what made it useful. I got tired of using it when it got harder to surface that sort of stuff and harder to avoid the marketing, link spam, comments-section-style arguments, and scammers that flocked to the platform as it expanded.

How do you keep in touch with them on Facebook? What makes your post reach them, if most don’t check often? I want Facebook for this purpose but it feels like it’s really not a blog. At all.

ethbr0 5y ago

As someone old enough to remember and have used Livejournal, the Facebook experience is very different.

amatecha 5y ago
LJ was awesome! I feel like Mastodon is kiiiinda similar modern-day equivalent (despite the Twitter-mimicry). Huh, now that I say that "out loud", that's interesting - I had never thought of it until now. It seems to really capture that "share your world but also bring in others and socialize as narrowly or broadly as you want", along with sharing media and so on.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Whenever I looked at Mastodon, it seemed cool technologically, but I couldn't really imagine anybody outside of the tech crowd using it. Is that an accurate perception? LJ was cool because you had quite a diverse group using it. Artists, musicians, teenagers, etc. This was before MySpace siphoned away the youth crowd, fifteen years ago or whenever it was. I wouldn't see them ever coming back to blogging. In fact I don't really see anybody returning to blogging. (No disrespect meant to blogs. Blogs are awesome. That was a really good era for the internet.)
grvdrm 5y ago
The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ?
- webmaven 5y ago
  > The LJ community was so great. It was a quirky place that made me feel at home despite publicizing in the "open." It's a community I miss immensely as well. Does any site/platform mimic the magic of LJ? https://dreamwidth.org https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.
  - grvdrm 5y ago
    Thanks for the tip!
JohnBooty 5y ago
LJ was "peak internet" for me. I had a smallish network of friends on there and we read and commented on each others' stuff. You could be as personal or as detached and anonymous as you wanted. You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself. Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it was mostly crap, but it was often thoughtful and personal if you had the right friends. It felt like nothing was ever created on Tumblr; it was just endless pithy comments and jokes about things created elsewhere.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Livejournal, to me, was a fusion of three things: a simple HTML editor (aka posts) + a time-sorted view and access controls + discoverability through your network. The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested / push), & (3) access controls were simple, understandable, and obeyed user intent.
  - vram22 5y ago
    I enjoyed LJ for a few years (my first blog, 2005-2008). Wrote a good deal about startups that I explored as a user in that period (this was the APG era, where APG stands for After Paul Graham, meaning after he wrote his early influential essays about startups and his launching YC - called Startup School at the time, IIRC) and other software topics. But later, after a Russian group acquired LJ: https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html (2nd post on the subject, there was a previous one on the same blog, IIRC). Interestingly, some years later, I mentioned the same point, on my next blog or on Twitter, and then suddenly my old blog became accessible again (it was not, for a while, after the above-linked incident).
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Why can’t we have this on Facebook? What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.

RandallBrown 5y ago

I post things about my life, they post things about theirs. We read it and know what's going on. A friend of mine from high school happened to be in my city for a weekend. He posted on Facebook asking if he knew anyone there. We went out and had drinks and caught up. I had a bunch of super close friends at a crappy job back when I was in college. We all went our separate ways but occasionally Facebook reminds one of us of some funny photo from the old days. It's triggered a few large group chats that have been pretty fun. Every once in awhile I'll think about an old friend from school or a job or wherever and it's nice to just see what they're doing without having to go through starting a whole conversation. (Although I often will since Facebook is a good way to reach out to people.)

soylentcola 5y ago
That sort of "easy, zero-effort blog for everyone you know" was what made it useful. I got tired of using it when it got harder to surface that sort of stuff and harder to avoid the marketing, link spam, comments-section-style arguments, and scammers that flocked to the platform as it expanded.