It's an interesting commentary on LJ...

[hrj]

…that my "user information" indicates that 226 people list my journal as a "friend" but even in my recent burst of activity for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, the maximum number of unique LJ-user views I've gotten on any particular day was 14. On that same day, I had 25 unique non-LJ visitors. (I plaster links to this series all over: fb, twitter.) On the average, I've had 20 unique visitors total each of the 15 days I've posted LHMP entries. This compares with an average of 29 unique visitors daily for a 10 day period in May starting with my first Kalamazoo postings (though some of the traffic at the end of that period was for several writing-related entries). The main thing that all this says to me is that if I were to move my blogging to a different platform, it would have very little impact on my readership. One of the worries I've had about, say, setting up a blog on my alpennia.com site (which is still very much in larval form) has been that I'd lose readers who couldn't be bothered to follow me over there. But the LJ stats show that the majority of my readers aren't reading my through LJ accounts. (On some days, as few as 10% of my readers are through LJ and the rate is always below 50%.)

So here's a question: is there anyone out there who is currently reading me regularly through LJ who would not be willing or able to follow me on a separate blog (presumably one with RSS capability, and where I'd be providing links in fb and twitter)? LJ has essentially lost its usefulness as a community-building or community-maintaining tool. I suspect a lot of those 200+ accounts still listed as following me are leftovers from people who have long since drifted away. On the other hand, I don't see myself stopping reading my friends-list here because there are a number of very good friends who still post regularly. So I'm dithering.

Comments

[luscious-purple.livejournal.com]

Just as a data point, I looked up my LJ activity from five years ago today (because there was a large, multiple-fatality train accident in DC on that day), and I got 16 replies to my brief "I'm OK, not on that train" message. Today ... well, I can hear the crickets chirp.

I have a WordPress.com blog that is the home base for my professional nonfiction writing, but hardly anyone ever reads it.