LJ being moved to Russia

LJ is being moved to Russia, according to it's owner SUP. Well, at least all the development work. This doesn't suprise me, it's a natural consequence of LJ being bought by SUP which is based in Russia. The Russian portion of LJ is a money-maker. The US portion brings in very little in the way of solid revenue, the majority is based on advertising which isn't doing very well. So from a business standpoint it makes sense for the Russian owner to move things to Russia and concentrate on it's core business, letting the unprofitable American portion languish with minimal investment other than getting any code changes that result from normal development for the Russian market.

The fact is, I expected this. That's why I stopped using LJ for posts and made sure I had a backup of all posts and comments, why I switched to BlogSpot for my journals, and why I started using RSS to aggregate my own feeds of posts without needing to depend on a service. A lot of LJ users are going to learn a hard lesson: when you outsource to someone else, you place yourself at the mercy of their business interests. And for LJ, those business interests no longer include maintaining an expensive service for the benefit of a user base that doesn't want to pay enough to justify keeping them.