Livre d'Or

You're absolutely right that the world has changed and there's no point trying to recreate the golden age of blogging from the early 2000s. I suppose my view is that a lot of people don't really like being spread thin, they're just forced to because their friends are in different places. You're absolutely right that time is limited, and cross-posting is a very imperfect solution IMO; different sites have different cultures and styles.

I do quite often come across people who complain that "everyone" is on FB and Tumblr these days, and they miss the in depth interactions that LJ used to provide. Intuitively, you might think that the solution is to make sure to post profound, interesting, long-form stuff on DW. But it seems like this is counter-productive. DW already suffers because its old-fashioned user interface means it's a lot more effort to post or comment here than somewhere like Tumblr or FB. If you pile on extra effort still by believing your posts and comments have to be detailed and perfectly composed, then activity here will soon grind to a halt. So instead, I'm suggesting that people could try posting small low-effort things, just to keep things lively and create a fertile ground for the in depth interactions.

Obviously not everybody is going to want to do this! Some people actively prefer FB for general day-to-day stuff and Tumblr for posting and sharing cool stuff and would be just as happy if everybody abandoned DW and moved to newer sites. And I am somewhat optimistic that the technology is starting to emerge to allow people to easily be in lots of places at once. The point of signal-boosting siderea's idea was as a suggestion for people who do want to see LJ/DW be more vital and interesting, as she put it. If the only way to achieve that is to put in as many hours as we did 10 years ago when there wasn't any viable alternative, then ok, it's never going to happen. I don't know for a fact that it can be done with less effort than that, but I am quite interested in trying the experiment to see what happens!