Bugzilla item about it:
http://zilla.livejournal.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583
Previous post about it:
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=lj_dev&itemid=461384
Good news: server does less work. less disk space used. new protocol mode to replace it will let you find out when comments were altered, and probably then let you fetch comments also.
Bad news: some clients will lose functionality (LochJournal, for one)
I'll post to lj_dev when the new protocol is available, but there will be some downtime while neither is available, because it's necessary to start moving users between clusters (we're adding 2 more) and we don't want to move syncitems data (which is a lot) when it's going to die soon anyway. So... we're accelerating its death.