RatCreature (
ratcreature) wrote2016-12-27 05:57 pm
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LJ Scrapbook alternatives?
What are you all doing for image hosting these days? The recent news about developments with LJ brought home again the fact that there's a life cycle to websites and LJ hasn't been on an upswing for quite some time now. I haven't given LJ money for a while, reserving that for DW, but its Scrapbook is still what I use most to embed images.
(I haven't found a proper news announcement about their server move, but comment threads in the last DW maintenance post and on fail-fandomanon said that they've just moved their servers fully to Russia, and that they've been suspending/deleting LJs for political reasons? When looking for more info I've found mostly posts by Russian language LJs, some by former employees, like Anton Nossik, that I could only half-decipher via Google translate.)
Relatedly, does anybody know an easier way to back up your LJ Scrapbook than through the obnoxious interface? I've found some scripts from a few years ago, but they've changed Scrapbook since.
(I haven't found a proper news announcement about their server move, but comment threads in the last DW maintenance post and on fail-fandomanon said that they've just moved their servers fully to Russia, and that they've been suspending/deleting LJs for political reasons? When looking for more info I've found mostly posts by Russian language LJs, some by former employees, like Anton Nossik, that I could only half-decipher via Google translate.)
Relatedly, does anybody know an easier way to back up your LJ Scrapbook than through the obnoxious interface? I've found some scripts from a few years ago, but they've changed Scrapbook since.
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So they aren't too finicky about copyright violations? A bunch of my images are drawing book scans for example, which I posted to illustrate my reviews of these, but technically I think it's more than is allowed for review purposes. I never had problems with these on LJ (though they object to copyright violations as well of course.)
Potentially with image hosting I also may run into trouble for my own stuff. I mean, my own fanart isn't pornographic, but I do have a few pieces that might count as sexually explicit by US standards, like showing naked cuddling and clothed sexual groping and such; also iirc I did some drawbles that technically have gore/mutilation (though since it isn't shock image-like but more the cartoon mutilation, it probably doesn't violate the spirit of their TOS). Do you know whether they are strict about the no nudity thing in their TOS?
But I also have my fanart (which is much less than my giant pile of shared rat pics and such) on my own website, and mostly link from there, despite it being a cheap webhost and sometimes glitchy. So that is less of an issue.
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And of course as soon as a service is known as permissive, whether explicitly or for not enforcing their own rules, it gets used for porn a lot and then the advertisers may balk. I mean, I read that Tumblr has a porn problem, not because fandom, but because of general porn reposting that people don't have the rights to. But they by now they can't just ban every explicit pictures, because they built a user base that expects a permissive environment.
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Since it has FTP uploads and a lot of space, it offers me control over what I've uploaded but also freedom to upload a wider range of fanmedia - podfics, fanart, video tutorials, gifs, fics, ect, and sort them however I want.
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And I don't even mean that they moved their servers (my guess is that they have to comply with that recent Russian data protection law for storing the private data of all their Russian users, and it is impractical and too expensive to keep servers in multiple locations), but that so far nobody has even cared to communicate about the glitches, updated the TOS, or did anything reassuring really, while all sorts of rumors circulate, doesn't fill me with confidence that the site owners are very interested in it anymore.
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I'm not gonna give up Scrapbook either until I have to. It's just too useful for me.
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I'm not actually sure that the site as such makes money at all. I think the main value by now must be that they can combine the demographic data with their search engine data and all that (after all by now SUP is merged with the Russian search engine Rambler iirc), and make better advertising money with ads there, as well as on the popular online news sites they have. Their model must be like Google's by now, not just ads on the site itself and a few paid accounts.
But I can well imagine that by now the added data for ad targeting isn't worth the hassle.
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