LiveJournal is one of the largest BlogSoftware hosting services. They've been growing pretty rapidly and have been having a hard time keeping up for quite a while. One of my big complaints about their service is that their RSS feeds don't contain the full post content.
This post from AndrewWoods is interesting.
reasons for leaving livejournal
I'm currently in the process of ditching LiveJournal for movable type.
Livejournal has a few things going for it, and so the reasons I've grown to feel such disgust toward it weren't immediately clear.
LJ has an incredibly low overhead to operate for an average user. The five percent nation of fourteen year old indie girls probably isn't into harassing their hosting provider about perl modules.
The primary benefits are the social network one is able to tap into; in the pre-RSS world, the friends page is really cool. Similarly, in a pre-FOAF world, the profile page provides much of the same information, and one can surf the network fairly easily.
However, of the two fairly obvious things I've just mentioned, only one has been done (RSS), and it took haxoring of livejournal's style system by the 0xDECAFBAD (see DecafBad) guy (he's had similar thoughts here). This is fairly indicative of livejournal as a whole. Most new, useful features are created externally, subvert pre-existing functionality, and generally result in a snarled mess.
Another example is livejournal's xml-rpc methods, which were created (as far as i know) in the dawn of the protocol. No planned support can be found for either the rather universal blogger api, or the new metaweblog api. There's a cgi out there that will translate blogger calls into livejournal ones, but it barely works.
I think this is mostly a side effect of massive, crippling growth. LiveJournal Inc. has been under such sustained interest that the impression they've given is that for the majority of livejournal's existence, they've barely kept enough metal underneath it to keep it up. This has changed recently, somewhat due to a technological change to clustered databases, but mostly due to a social one: invite codes.
In order to sign up for a new journal, someone has to give you a code. New free users get one code. Users who pay get one per month of paid time. We're told this has slowed new user registration to a managable velocity. There's a problem here, though, in that the barrier to entry is probably a bit high, resulting in a mustier social network, and detracting from a major benefit of LJ.
As LJ gets stale, the technically competent devotees of the other blogging systems implement standards-based linkage ware, building a decentralized social network in the midst of the self-publishing ethos. RSS/RDF and badass aggregators dilute the novelty of the friends page. Blogspot and Radio lower the barriers to entry to levels similar or to those at livejournal.
At some point, LJ was innovating or keeping up with innovation. That era has passed. A look at lj_dev seems to indicate their focus on putting out fires, optimizations, etc., which is a perfectly acceptable and probably necessary choice, it's just not that interesting.
Livejournal is an inward-looking monoculture, an isolationist member of a larger, diverse ecosystem. Monocultures are boring. So I split.