Livre d'Or

(Borrowing jenett's useful idea of subheadings...)

Facebook: I'm not on Facebook and never have been — for me, there's never been a problem to which it is the solution, if you see what I mean.

Email: I've started scheduling time to reply to emails-that-need-thought, rather than keeping them in my inbox, and I do find that helps. It's also good for chatty ones as it lets me leave a reasonable time between replies yet I know it's not going to get forgotten about completely. I think one major advantage of this is that I don't have the email nagging away at me when I know I don't have time to do anything about it, so when I do get to that point in my schedule I'm coming at it without guilt or other negative emotions. (I'm a big fan of Inbox Zero, again for this reason.) I don't know if this would work for everyone. It works for me partly because I rarely procrastinate, so I know I can trust Future-Me to do the thing I've scheduled (either at the time I've scheduled it, or at a sensibly-rescheduled time if later events mean the original time is suboptimal).

IRC: I really like IRC in terms of interface and user-friendliness, and miss the days when a lot of my friends were on it. I talk to bob on it quite a lot, but that's usually in private messages. I'm also on the Computer Anonymous IRC channel, but the people there are acquaintances rather than friends. (I have tried Dreamwidth IRC several times, but I don't really get on with it.)

LiveJournal: I still post there because it helps me have long-form conversations with long-term (decade or more) friends who won't move to Dreamwidth.

Dreamwidth: I would like this to be the primary place where I have long-form conversations online, as I find it technically and philosophically superior to LiveJournal. However, I haven't yet managed to find the time to start building up a group of long-term friends who use it, and I'm not sure when I will have the time. I generally prioritise maintaining existing relationships over creating new ones, and I'm already very stretched for time. (I do have some friends who post here, obviously! But there are more on LiveJournal.) I'm trying to make a start on this by posting more public posts on Dreamwidth, which is something of a departure for me as I've generally been friends-only on these platforms.