So, this Dreamwidth thing...

[johnridley]

I just clicked on a link to go check it out, since it's passed my "well, people have been talking about it for over a year now" "not a flash fad" filter.

Uh, it's a clone of LiveJournal. So why are people setting up both LJ and DW accounts? What's the point? I don't get it. Unless people are really excited that it's open source or something.

Comments

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

I don't get it either - every so often, I will see people do a *WELL!* from something that happens here and talk about marching off in a huff. This time, I see it again, I think, but I have no idea what triggered this!

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

That was me; the system dropped my ID for some weird reason.

[sraun]

From what I can tell, what's really exciting people is that the founders have made promises concerning future actions (more specifically, promises to not do certain things) that are considered credible by my friends or friends-of-friends. Basically, they've promised to not do a bunch of stuff that LJ has done in search of income / profitability, but which annoy the users. Some of this combines to create a space that is very friendly to certain types of on-line fandoms. It's currently considered the LJ-clone to run away to if LJ has finally hit enough of your buttons that you don't want anything to do with it any more, but still want something like the feature set.

Last I looked, I've got some invite codes if you'd like one.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

OK. I remember there being a few issues in the past, but ISTR that they were all just "oh no, the Russians bought SixApart, they're surely gonna can LiveJournal now!" fear. I don't recall anything actually changing, and it doesn't seem to me like LJ is any different now than it was 5 years ago.

Last time I set up a mirror of my account over on InsaneJournal.com (plus a local copy) where it remains. I didn't see any reason to jump ship and lose years of comments (I could have easily copied the actual entries) just on the basis of fear.

I have a cron job on my Linux box that copies over new entries every 15 minutes or so. If anyone wants me to set up the same for them (I'm using an LJ API library, so I assume my code will work for any LiveJournal code base, including DreamWidth) just let me know. If LJ ever does become uninhabitable, pushing to an IJ/DW account after that point won't be any harder or more painful than it is now.

Certain types of online fandoms, huh? That could mean, well, a lot of things, but I have my suspicions there...

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

The main one I recall was the slash pedophilia batch. (Harry Potter with Snape cartoon).

The most recent was the link hijacking.

I'm sure there were others. Meh.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's kind of what I thought. If they feel like they need to go elsewhere, more power to 'em. I certainly don't feel any need to follow them.

[whl.livejournal.com]

Well, the last time this happened, it was because the Russians had just acquired LiveJournal, and people were worried about changes to the service.

I assume they said something that made people nervous again.

[billroper]

It was the option to repost comments (including those, apparently, to locked entries) across to Facebook and Twitter by hitting a checkbox.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Hm. While I kind of knee-jerked about this when I first saw it, now it seems like a complete non-event to me. Totally ignorable. And if you have any bastion in place against Facebook anyway (and you should if you care at all about privacy) it shouldn't affect you. AFAIK unless you actually tell LJ what your FB account is, it doesn't do anything.

Mainly it only bothered me because I thought that here, at least, was ONE place on the internet where I wouldn't see the Facebook logo.

[sraun]

One of the issues w/ the Facebook / Twitter auto-repost is that it can be done by both the original poster, or by any commenter. Many people see privacy implications in 'a comment to my locked post got cross-posted to Facebook' - I can see this being especially true if the commenter quoted some of the original post in the comment.

DW seems to be where my friends that are unhappy with LJ are mostly moving, so I've picked up sraun.dreamwidth.org. I need to do some work with filters, so that I'm only reading the cross-posters on one site. There are some postings only happening on DW that I do want to read.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, that does seem a bit over the top. I guess I don't have any particular loyalty to LJ, I wouldn't care if everyone wanted to move to Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal, or whatever. The look and feel of LJ does fit what I want in a community far better than Facebook though. LJ feels like a gathering of friends; Facebook seems like a trival shouting match. But many sites copy LJ's code so whichever of them gets used is OK by me.

I'll have to look into DreamWidth's so called "promises" and why people believe them. Have any pointers for those?