I looked at their demo and it looks pretty good to me. Has a lot of the bits that I like on Tumblr and Dreamwidth, and is trying to go for an ad-free model, which is what I want. I'd much rather pay a regular fee for a service that I (and my friends) actually want and I'm happy to sponsor others to get that. So I've signed up for an invitation.

However, owing to the deluge of people fleeing Tumblr at the moment, it's been overwhelmed with a lot of new traffic, so the joining process is currently running very slow. They said they'll send out more invites once traffic calms down a bit, so I'm trying to leave it alone at the moment, while I wait "patiently" for my invite, ahem.

TL;DR - It's still very early days, so it may not work out, but I think it's worth a shot.