Lord Andrei's Blog

6 Comments:

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  vixenesque93

  May 18th, 2008 at 12:24 am

  Had to look closely at the image before I caught what you were looking at…

  Reply
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  marta_s

  May 18th, 2008 at 7:32 am

  Huh? Details?

  Reply
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  foxipher

  May 18th, 2008 at 7:46 am

  Very possibly.

  Reply
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  ashabeth

  May 18th, 2008 at 2:42 pm

  Something is afoot I see….

  😀

  Reply
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  satyrblade

  May 18th, 2008 at 3:31 pm

  Would we be talking about the River effect, by chance? 😉

  Reply
• 

  insomnia

  May 22nd, 2008 at 9:09 pm

  Hi Lord Andrei. My name is Mark Kraft, best known on LJ for being its business manager in its early, pre-dotcom days. (See this Aug. 2000 post by Brad for an explanation.)

  I wanted to get ahold of you as you are one of the candidates for the upcoming election, to let you know about my latest project, .

  It basically grew out of concerns I had that something needs to be done soon in order to turn LJ around from the brink, as well as a general awareness that LJ’s advisory board election would turn into a beauty contest dominated by joke candidates and the like, unless enough people united in a way to both elect a strong candidate and to give them a strong grassroots organization behind them so that the advice they give to LJ’s management would be less likely to be ignored.

  LJ United’s platform, and the basic beliefs that unite our members, are primarily based on the original promises that were made to LJ… the ones that have been systematically broken by LJs management for years, at the cost of the site’s longterm growth and success.

  These original promises are:

  Working with the community, for the community.
  Honoring the status of every account.
  Maintaining the uptime and performance of the site.
  Staying advertisement free.
  Never sending us unsolicited e-mail.
  Supporting the Free Software movement.

  In addition we also explicitly support:
  – free speech for all LiveJournal users
  – the privacy of LiveJournal’s users
  – the rights of fandom in all its forms
  – our fellow LiveJournal Code sites, who we view as rightful users of LJ’s open source code, and as an essential part of the greater LiveJournal community

  Our goal is to work towards defending and restoring the original promises made to LiveJournal’s members, standing up for the free speech of LiveJournal’s members, restoring LJ’s original strong support for community-based Open Source Software development, and restoring community participation in the successful operations of LiveJournal.

  To this end, I have attracted about 200 fairly motivated people in the past few weeks from various communities, as well as two of the most serious candidates running for the election. We voted to endorse , who is a very knowledgeable, thoughtful individual with a lot of persuasive oomph who has been on LJ since its earliest days.

  One person who joined us you might know as Squeaky, the guy who runs InsaneJournal. He has a lot of issues relating to the open source side of LJ that he thinks should be addressed, and I tend to agree with him there… He’s also been talking about doing independent development on the LJ code.

  I’d like to ask you to join us, as we could definitely use your advice and assistance. We’re ideally looking at getting candidates to support our positions, and potentially to urge their supporters to back as their alternate candidate of choice, so that in the event they can’t beat the big “joke” candidates, they can at least see to it that a skilled candidate is elected who will specifically address their interests.

  Our goal is to see to it that everyone’s rights are respected, rather than face the kind of “divide and conquer” scenarios we have seen over the past few years, where some minority of users have their freedoms impinged upon. We should stick together on these issues, as enough people’s rights have already been imposed upon.

  Thanks –
  Mark

  Reply