A further thought about why FB seemed to thrive at the expense of LJ:
It's not that FB was a better LJ; it's that a lot of people may have been using LJ more for its social networking features which were not its core strength, and not because they actually wanted a blogging platform in the first place. So when FB became known as a much better social-networking site, that being its primary purpose, a lot of the "just here because LJ's social-networking afterthought features work better than some primitive social-networking sites" LJ users migrated their online presence to the site that's better at what they had really wanted in the first place. Leaving a bunch of really-did-want-a-blogging-platform users and really-like-the-hybrid users to stay here.
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It's not that FB was a better LJ; it's that a lot of people may have been using LJ more for its social networking features which were not its core strength, and not because they actually wanted a blogging platform in the first place. So when FB became known as a much better social-networking site, that being its primary purpose, a lot of the "just here because LJ's social-networking afterthought features work better than some primitive social-networking sites" LJ users migrated their online presence to the site that's better at what they had really wanted in the first place. Leaving a bunch of really-did-want-a-blogging-platform users and really-like-the-hybrid users to stay here.
Maybe?