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It's interesting to see how my habits have changed. A few years ago, I looked at Facebook when I got notifications, but put little on here, and looked at little, barring events, and LARP event photos. Now? It's usually an open tab, and I'm regularly in back and forth discussion most days.
I do miss the benefits of blogging, of my LJ - the better setup for long-form writing, the ability to set what the page looks like, to use formatting, spoiler tags, all these sorts of things. But, much as I do like those things, they can't survive without that which keeps the engagement, which keeps me coming back to whichever site it might be - the engagement.
Livejournal I first joined via my friends (later housemates) at university; a fair number of people there were on it, it was an okay way of organising things, good for discussion, good for posting silly little quiz memes, and good for posting a rant if you felt like it.
But over the years, people have drifted away from it. For a while, my engagement was sustained by people who, though I don't interact with them IRL, write or share interesting things (specifically![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
andrewducker and bart_calendar featuring highly in that category). But then, as evidenced by that tagging, I added them on FB. And whilst not everything goes on FB, I still get to see a lot of the interesting stuff from them here, so it's another strike against the need to go look at LJ.
The big thing though, is the fact that I now have fairly few IRL friends regularly posting to LJ, and pretty much nothing that I'm involved in gets organised there anymore. And that just drains away the *need* to go on there. And once I don't need to go on there, the amount I do, even though there's still a lot of interesting stuff being posted, just drops ad drops. Whereas FB is something I interact with a lot of IRL friends through, and the use of groups and events is growing and growing - I'm now in quite a few groups that are "We do a regular event, we discuss it a bit through this group, then whenever the event is coming up, send an invite to all members of the group and see who can make it." It makes it much easier to run publarps and board games evenings, things where you've got a larger possible pool of which not everyone will make it each time, and stuff to organise before hand.
The other thing that has raised my use of FB is how it ties into work. Partly this is work-work; part of campaigning is social media, so being involved in such, liking and sharing infographics, interacting with people and planning events. But also, the social and jokey side of work - jokes firing back and forth, trolling each other, posting silly photos. Helps become closer to people, and is also quite fun.
Finally, Facebook has become at least *slightly* better at dealing with long-form posts. Time was, this post would have to be done as a 'note' rather than a post itself, and whilst ordinary users don't yet have threaded conversations, it's hopefully coming, and stuff like picture comments helps to.
So, yeah. Whilst I do have LJ open on a tab somewhere, and I'm reading back through stuff there, it has drifted away to the point where it's just unlikely to become a regular read for me any more. Whereas Facebook, though I may sometimes curse it, is pretty damn well ensconced.
I do miss the benefits of blogging, of my LJ - the better setup for long-form writing, the ability to set what the page looks like, to use formatting, spoiler tags, all these sorts of things. But, much as I do like those things, they can't survive without that which keeps the engagement, which keeps me coming back to whichever site it might be - the engagement.
Livejournal I first joined via my friends (later housemates) at university; a fair number of people there were on it, it was an okay way of organising things, good for discussion, good for posting silly little quiz memes, and good for posting a rant if you felt like it.
But over the years, people have drifted away from it. For a while, my engagement was sustained by people who, though I don't interact with them IRL, write or share interesting things (specifically
andrewducker and bart_calendar featuring highly in that category). But then, as evidenced by that tagging, I added them on FB. And whilst not everything goes on FB, I still get to see a lot of the interesting stuff from them here, so it's another strike against the need to go look at LJ.The big thing though, is the fact that I now have fairly few IRL friends regularly posting to LJ, and pretty much nothing that I'm involved in gets organised there anymore. And that just drains away the *need* to go on there. And once I don't need to go on there, the amount I do, even though there's still a lot of interesting stuff being posted, just drops ad drops. Whereas FB is something I interact with a lot of IRL friends through, and the use of groups and events is growing and growing - I'm now in quite a few groups that are "We do a regular event, we discuss it a bit through this group, then whenever the event is coming up, send an invite to all members of the group and see who can make it." It makes it much easier to run publarps and board games evenings, things where you've got a larger possible pool of which not everyone will make it each time, and stuff to organise before hand.
The other thing that has raised my use of FB is how it ties into work. Partly this is work-work; part of campaigning is social media, so being involved in such, liking and sharing infographics, interacting with people and planning events. But also, the social and jokey side of work - jokes firing back and forth, trolling each other, posting silly photos. Helps become closer to people, and is also quite fun.
Finally, Facebook has become at least *slightly* better at dealing with long-form posts. Time was, this post would have to be done as a 'note' rather than a post itself, and whilst ordinary users don't yet have threaded conversations, it's hopefully coming, and stuff like picture comments helps to.
So, yeah. Whilst I do have LJ open on a tab somewhere, and I'm reading back through stuff there, it has drifted away to the point where it's just unlikely to become a regular read for me any more. Whereas Facebook, though I may sometimes curse it, is pretty damn well ensconced.
