I have been here now for a few weeks and I really love it! People are very friendly, and as I put in the effort, I'm getting more commenting contacts, which is wonderful, and I'm making new friends. I can see that if I keep it up, I should definitely be able to recreate the experience I had on Flickr over here on ipernity. That was one of my biggest concerns. I generated a very large contact list over a couple of years and a solid base of commenters have become my friends. I really care about them and a huge number of them are still on Flickr. This means that if I want to stay in contact, I have to visit them on Flickr, and it's just so painful and slow in comparison to ipernity!

When I upload my pictures, I'm still uploading first to Flickr and then importing them to ipernity from there, since that seems the best way to double post. I'm still getting plenty of visitors there and comments too, though I have to admit that the numbers are all down. I'm sure this is due partly because many people left Flickr after the explosion, but also because I'm just not replying to comments like I used to. It's frustrating to me because it IS a LOT slower to open pages and comment. Ipernity is noticably faster and I am making a bigger effort to comment here since I am eventually going to pull the plug on Flickr. However, truth be told, I'm very busy these days and I haven't been commenting like I once did when I had more time to spend visiting and commenting.

One of the things that's frustrating to me is all the information cleanup I need to do with my pictures. Pre-Flickr Explosion, I used to embed pictures into my first upload of the day so that people could see the other pictures I uploaded that day just by scrolling down. I put information in the image titles to let people know there were more pictures below. However, all of this was stripped away when I moved my pictures over here, except the invalid titles of course. So I will have to go through and correct all the titles all the way back to the time I began doing that. About two years of images...*cringe*. Will it ever happen? Ugh. I just don't know. Thinking about priorities, it's way down there when it comes to all the other things I should/need/want to be doing. I hate that my pictures have incorrect titles now, but I don't know when I'll get around to fixing all the wrong info.

I am getting closer and closer to closing the doors on Flickr, but I'm not there yet. I really want to stay in contact with my friends there, but it's like having a foot in two boats that are drifting apart. The reality is that I'm being a horrible commenter on both sites because I can't keep up. I read a blog here from one person who reported that they finally left Flickr for good, and it made them feel so much better. The feeling of relief was very powerful--to not have to think about this decision anymore. I really look forward to that. I feel like I'll be abandoning my friends there, like I'm a bad person for leaving. But what can I do? Well, I'm working on building a new home here, getting new friends, gaining contacts and a foundation of commenting pals, participating in the groups, and you know, it will still be really hard, but life goes on, right?