LiveJournal lays off staff, closing down? User buyout possible.

[kevyn]

By now you've probably heard the news that LiveJournal has laid off a significant part of their staff. This is not good news, and may mean that LJ is imploding as a for-profit service.

A group of users are starting to rally to buyout LJ as a non-profit. It's worth considering -- if LJ is owned by users, instead of a corporation only interested in the bottom line, it could continue.

ljuser_buyout is a new LJ group founded for just that purpose. Below is the first post from the group. I'll hope you'll consider joining this effort to keep LJ alive.

Once upon a time, Brad Fitz sold LJ to SixApart, which then promptly sold it again to Sup for $30 million.

Sup, in the meantime, has had difficulty making a profit on LJ and now seems to think the whole deal was a loser. They recently fired 20 of LJ's 28 employees, leaving only a caretaker financial staff with little or no technical expertise. It turns out to be very difficult to make money on a network and blog site like LJ.

Which means LJ will languish and wither for lack of support, or be sold off to somebody else to see if they can make a go of it.

But what if a million or two LJ users got together and pitched in to create a not-for-profit foundation to buy LJ back and run it for the benefit of its users?

This community now exists as a rallying point for the organization of exactly such an effort.

Welcome. If you are interested in joining us in planning, organizing, and effecting a user buyout of LiveJournal, please join us.

(Ganked from ogam)