Interesting but too much

I stumbled across the LJ group abandonedplaces yesterday, and added it to my flist. Wow, it's pretty cool really, some very interesting photography, but it's a firehose. It was swamping my flist so I had to unfriend, but if you enjoy photographs or descriptions of abandoned places, it's worth a look.

IN CASE OF LJ DEATH

There are rumors around today of LJ's imminent death.

I'm not sure I put much stock in it, because honestly, LJ could probably continue just fine with hardly any employees, just because they're laying off employees doesn't mean they're folding soon.

Nonetheless, I'm thinking about what could replace it.

Unfortunately, AFAIK there aren't any real alternatives that do the same thing that LJ does.

I'm currently running "LiveJournal Backup" to grab my entries and comments. If you want to do the same, here's the URL:
http://ljbackup.yamnet.co.uk/

Caveat: I've never tried to restore from this. The data does seem to all be there though.

If LJ does die, does anyone have ideas on where to move to?

I'd be willing to set up something on my web page, there's a lot of blogging software available, perhaps with the ability to restore LJ backups to an archive, if there isn't anywhere else to go that offers similar functionality. I don't know if anything similar can be built by configuring existing software, but we can try.

Obviously I don't have the bandwidth to replace LJ, but I could easily accomodate GT/PFRC, for instance.

[EDIT] - as an alternative to a replacement for LJ, has anyone come across any blog aggregators? If one exists or could be built, that would have a similar functionality to a friends-list. I suppose you could do it with an RSS feed, but it might be nice to have a one-stop aggregator, even if it simply put out an RSS feed.

It still wouldn't handle friends-only post filtering, etc.