How to view the post-LJ diaspora?

[andygates]

Various friends are moving (or have moved) to all sorts of other blog sites.  My LJ Friends page, once the one-stop shop for the good stuff, is starting to look a bit raggedy and it's only getting more so.

How's a chap supposed to keep all his friends' blogs in one easy roll?

Comments

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

Who's moving?

I'm not moving. I've got a dreamwidth account I never use. I have a tumblr account, ditto. Other than the RF blog what other blog sites are there?

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Even on yours, which is via WordPress, the fragmented comments vex.

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

It's via the same RSS system as it was before I moved from blogger to wordpress. That's not a move as far as LJ is concerned. It's exactly the same as before.

The comments are fragmented? In what sense?

[andygates.livejournal.com]

There are two comment threads, one on rf and one on lj. This is only moderately vexing, but if I was the poster it'd bug the knickers off me.

[lurkingcat]

Unless your friends always make public posts on their blog sites of choice I'm not sure that there's a satisfying answer to that.

If your LJ friends page is your preferred reading place then you could try creating rss feeds in LJ for friends blogs on other sites. The problem with that is that some people might have blocked rss feeds and some people will friends/access/whatever-lock their posts meaning they won't show up with rss.

I've resigned myself to losing people to Facebook. (I can't cope with some FB terminology and suspect that since I used to find MySpace alerts too high maintenance FB is overall Not The Place For Me). So there's not much I can do to keep up with friends that only update there. Since I still do most of my online stuff by browser I keep LJ and DW open in separate tabs and that works fine for my reading habits but would be more irritating if I regularly read either via my mobile...

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Friends-locking and communities don't work so well for feeds, and I have both in my flist. Vexation!

I try to resist FB wall posts. They're too transient and lost in the froth; a Proper Blog (OMG mediashift culture shock) has stability and just plain space for wordiness. If only everyone fb-updated their myriad blogs, then the fb friendfeed would be an adequate aggregator.

Well, apart from those friend-locked and community ones. Flocked blogs generally don't trumpet their updates.

[despaer.livejournal.com]

Agreed on that. FB for 'what I did 10 minutes ago, like you care', and a blog for an actual thought process that needs words to express it.

If you do solve the everyone's gone everywhere problem, please let me know how. I can't be doing with site hopping every year or two.

[calum]

Some of my friends have started using posterous, i think it looks promising, so may check it out

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Looks neat; is yet more diaspora.

[aldric.livejournal.com]

What you need is a client that allows you to log in to all those blog sites at the same time and presents them as a single entity. I'm not sure if such a thing exists though...

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Apparently there's something called Friendscreen on the HTC mobiles that gloms. I'll have to dig around, I think.

Of course, we still have to trust that - like you said at the weekend, if the middleware is unscrupulous, it will use my credentials' view of a friends-locked LJ (for example) to slurp interesting data from a privacy-concerned friend who is unaware of it. A knotty problem, that.

[aldric.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. I think a local client that runs on your desktop that you have to pay for is likely to be more trustworthy. A website that offers the services for free not so...

[xeeny.livejournal.com]

Option 1) Anyone who leaves LJ obviously hates you, so ditch them and then make new friends from any of the fandom groups.

Option 2) Use all the time you save from not reading those LJ posts to go out and meet new real people instead (try striking up conversations with strangers in public places to get you started).