End of the road for LiveJournal

[madfilkentist]

I've got some very bad news about LiveJournal. Please feel free to link to this post or otherwise spread the information, but I'd appreciate it if you don't mention my real name.
There have been rumors about LiveJournal servers moving to Russia. Most of the solid information seems to be on Russian-language sites, which I can't read. However, we

Comments

[lastalda]

Personally, I don't quite see the difference it makes whether American or Russian secret services are reading my stuff... (Actually, since the NSA is supposed to share intelligence with our own secret services, they worry me more than the Russians.)

I go by "if it's so sensitive that it would be problematic if found, it doesn't belong on the internet".

[madfilkentist]

If I had any information that would damage the government and it wasn't already public, then the risk would be about equal, and the US government can more easily arrest me. Currently, though, simply criticizing the government is safer in the US or Germany than in Russia, if only because it's gotten so much worse in Russia over the past few years. The Russian government strikes me as just being a lot more capricious. I expect to see accounts closed with no sensible pattern.

The censorship danger in the US comes from a different angle. I'm in more risk of losing my account for saying "Winter is coming" than for saying "Obama (or Trump) is a jerk." But at least in principle, I can fight that within the US legal system.