It's looking very likely that LiveJournal will soon start displaying ads on my posts: I'm using their (now-discontinued) "Basic" ad-free level of service, and they're proposing to replace it with an ad-supported service under the same name. It would be possible to pay for a service level that doesn't show ads, but I don't trust LJ management to maintain enough quality in their site that I'd want to pay for it. If they start decorating my posts with ads, I'll remove them and myself from LJ; but what to do instead?

What I like about LJ, compared with other services:
- A big pool of other interesting users, communities, and syndicated RSS feeds, with convenient aggregation of their postings in "friend lists"
- Threaded comments, with automatic notification by email when I get any replies to my posts or my comments
- Easy posting, automatic RSS feed generation, cuts so that I can write long posts and have only shorter summaries show up on the front page of my journal, and the ability to apply arbitrary CSS to that front page
- Multiple user icons as a less-annoying substitute for emoticons
- Tags and tag clouds
- I haven't used this much, but the ability to control who sees and who can comment on my posts is also a plus

What I don't like about LJ:
- After several buyouts, a set of owners that seems to be intent on squeezing as much revenue as they can out of the system, regardless of any longer-term damage to the community that their actions and attitudes will lead to
- Unnecessarily low limits on icons (6) and tags (1000)

There's a big list of alternatives using (mostly) the same software here; these would have the advantages of easy migration, threaded commenting, and (probably) tags, but many have suffered from stability problems. I could easily host the posts myself, including the existing comments, generate an RSS feed, but new comments would be more difficult. I know a lot of other people use blogspot or blogger or wordpress, but I don't know a lot about them (other than haloscan=annoying). Any other suggestions?