ghost5576

Well, here I am. When I joined LiveJournal not so long ago, I thought I'd finally found my online home after nearly ten years of searching. For a while, my experiences there were really rather idyllic. I had a phenomenal time lurking around so many gifted, intelligent, eloquent, and thoughtful people and I even made a friendly acquaintance or two that I was beyond thrilled to know. Though I remained in the shadows for the most part, each time I ventured out was a fantastic experience and I became so reliant on my friends list for keeping up with everyone that I honestly never surfed away from it for very long. F5 became my friend.

Then came the mess back a few months ago when LJ started deleting innocent people and communities - people and communities that I'd come to love dearly (if from afar) - on the word of some nefarious group with a completely uninformative website that delivered a lovely little virus to anyone who visited it and I started to feel a little less safe and a lot less at home. Not because I didn't think LJ had the right to only host what they approved of on their servers, but because the account deletions were so completely arbitrary and so sneakily done. And then when they refused to respond ... well, I started to lose a little more of my affection for the site. As the turmoil began to settle, my excitement about being a part of LJ began to sneak back a bit with every post I read and every new person I met.

And then the witch hunt began again ...

Now I'm beyond fed up. Not so much with LJs unclear terms of service, but with the way they've been treating their customers, paid and free. The final straw for me was when I started noticing posts made by people affiliated with LJ/6A in which they were mocking those of us upset by all of this and then blatantly stealing the words of customers for use in their own posts.

So here I am, very glad to be somewhere that seems to be far more welcoming and is certainly a fantastic site in its own right and, best of all, I'm here early enough to watch it grow even more than it already has. And while I'll still lurk around LJ in order to keep up with what's happening in fandom and with all of the wonderful people who are trying to stay there and see this thing through, I'm going to start shifting my attention more and more to this new place.

So thanks to everyone who was here before, everyone who is here now, and everyone who will be here in the future. Thanks also to the IJ team who is working to make us all feel so welcome. And thanks to LJ for shoving me back out of my comfort zone and forcing me to seek out this great new online home. I'm very happy to be here.

Be well all and Blessed Be!