Tipping the balance

[liv]

It's almost a truism that people don't want to move to DW, no matter how many technical and usability innovations it makes, because all the people and all the interesting discussions are on LJ. These last few weeks I've been realizing that that isn't true any more, at least for me. I load my LJ friends page and most of what I see is fairly desultory reposts from elsewhere, or reasons for not having posted recently. Perhaps a quarter of my 150 LJ friends post more than a few times a year, and that's a generous estimate. In contrast I load my DW reading page several times on most days and there's always new interesting, thinky, chewy stuff.

A few months ago, leaving LJ would have felt like cutting off my own limb; now it would be a minor inconvenience. Of the people I care about so much I have to read every word they ever type, there are only two left who post regularly and exclusively to LJ. (In contrast, by about the mid 2000s, it was nearly all of my close friends.) Now, that doesn't tell the whole story, because there are lots of other people I want to stay in touch with: loved ones who post occasionally, or who cross-post between DW and LJ with different discussions in both places, and people I'm definitely fond of who post regular, interesting, LJ-exclusive posts. I am not quite at the point where I'm angry enough about LJ's bad behaviour in selling users to their advertisers to justify cutting myself off from all these people.

I'm increasingly inclined to rationalize a bit though; I'd been putting that off until DW develops its promised feature where you can read LJ posts from your DW reading page. But honestly I think that feature isn't going to happen any more; LJ have sacked the people who were working on it from their end, and mark, whose project it was over here, is no longer working fulltime on DW. So I think now is a good time to remove all the people I used to know years ago (usually through LJ support), and un-default the people who crosspost anyway. As for the people I'm not personally connected to, but read because they write interesting stuff, I'll stick to DW which these days seems to be better for that from my perspective.

I'm also relieved to know that DW isn't doomed to be nothing but a backup option in case LJ goes bad. Honestly, I think LJ actually is dying, albeit slowly rather than spectacularly. But the great thing is it doesn't matter whether LJ dies or not, DW is active and full of content in its own right, and my decision to put effort into weaning myself off LJ and building up a circle here has been well rewarded.

Talking of which, Diaspora is in alpha. I have an account there, user name Liv. It doesn't really do anything yet, and I'm not even slightly convinced by the "Facebook killer" hype but hey, I'm curious. IMO it's more likely that it will be what Google Buzz should have been, ie simple UI, open API that developers can build on, but with actually decent privacy controls. I have invites if you'd like one, but I think you can just sign up without, at the moment.

The other thing is, I got the most amazing selection of responses to my post about wanting to do more exercise. Seriously, 50+ helpful comments, both supportive and providing practical advice and expressing opinions in a constructive, not combative way. Other than at atreic's place (I still don't know how she does it!) I haven't seen an in-depth, productive discussion like that in places I frequent on LJ in months. I love the discoverability here: I love that, thanks to DW's fantastic Latest Things page, 5 minutes after I post a bunch of interesting people I might otherwise never meet show up and have interesting conversations. (Even if I post at a time when most of my friends are asleep or at work!) Plus, many friends who have chosen to stay on LJ were willing to make a few additional clicks to comment over here; this makes me particularly glad I was bull-headed about keeping my content DW-exclusive from day one. And grateful to you all for making that bit of extra effort.

And having access to that really valuable support has made a real practical difference. This morning mathcathy picked me up at 6:15 am, and we ventured out into the dark, in a snowstorm no less, and took advantage of a one-day free trial at the local branch of Fitness First. As it was I could hardly sleep for nervousness about my first ever visit to the gym; I would never have done it at all without you guys.

An hour at the gym first thing in the morning turned out to be surprisingly positive, too. I discovered that, in warm air and with a machine to keep me at a steady pace, yes, I can move fast enough to raise my heartrate for 30 minutes. (The machine said that a 30-year-old needs to aim for 160 bpm, and, well, even though some of you expressed a helpful degree of skepticism about the necessity for that, I managed it.) I discovered what it feels like to be breathing hard without having an asthma attack; just knowing that I can is the most amazingly liberating thing. OK, I still think treadmills are the most literally pointless thing ever, but it was worth it for me as something that I could do straight away without any specialist training, and 30 minutes wasn't as boring as I thought it might be. mathcathy also showed me her free weights routine. I took the smallest dumbbell (2kg) available, and I learned that doing lifts and stretches with that is actually energetic (as well as being good for my muscles).

So apart from getting over my anxiety, I achieved that pleasant glowing tired feeling, and I had a shower and was ready for work by quarter to nine. (Also, nobody gave me grief about my weight in any way, which is a great relief.) I was a bit resistant to the idea of paying to do things like walk or cycle on the spot, or do stretches, but having tried it I think it's probably worth it. It isn't weather dependent, and being able to shower and change straight afterwards is a big benefit. Plus, being in a place where there's nothing to do except exercise, so that I have no temptation to just play on the internet instead, especially if you make arrangements with a friend to attend such a place regularly. So, mathcathy and I have plans to join a gym properly tomorrow, and make a regular habit of an early morning session and a class every week. (In fact, we're going to join a different gym, not Fitness First, because they annoyed us with their pushy sales tactics; in particular, not providing water so that people have to spend money on overpriced "energy" drinks is pretty close to downright evil.) I have all kinds of grand plans, too, I want to try out some machines that use my arms as well as my legs, and build up to faster paces or longer sessions, and get fit enough to do all the other cool things I want to do, particularly hillwalking when the weather improves again.

So, squee exercise! Yay internet making me less of a couch potato. And all the gratitude in the world to mathcathy for holding my hand when I was scared today, and for agreeing to buddy me so that I can make a regular habit of this.

Comments

[delight]

Oh man, I was so excited about Diaspora but that is the most visual-disability-unfriendly website ever. I can't even look at it long enough to contact someone about it, but it is embodying everything I can't look at (from what I can tell); DW fixed the profile edit page for my visual issues and I never had the strength mentally at the time to thank them for it (still feel guilty about that) but that's because it was still readable enough for me to comment on.

But in what I really wanted to comment on, excellent times with the exercising. Stuff like that takes a lot of strength; getting over anxiety is the hardest thing on the planet a lot of the time for a lot of people, and I completely feel you on not wanting to pay for stuff like that.

[delight]

Although apparently if you go to diasp.org and not www.diasp.org, the horrible goes away. What.

[tig_b]

Well the terrible eye-hurting colour scheme goes away, which is helpful, but the text/page doesn't resize sensibly. So they need to fix that before we could read without having to scroll to read each line.

[liv]

Yeah, ok, it's in alpha, but having completely different pages depending whether you remember to type the www or not is pretty sloppy really. *sigh*

[liv]

I have the bad feeling that Diaspora is going to go down the tired old road followed by many, many FL/OSS projects: lots of (young, white, able-bodied cis male) people who are excited about programming fancy features, and few people who can be bothered with making it visually attractive, let alone usable, and accessibility and diversity aren't even on their radar. Which means it will never be more than a niche blogging service by geeks for geeks, nowhere near the Facebook killer everyone keeps hyping.

Thanks for the exercise encouragement, though, I really appreciate that!

[oursin]

It isn't weather dependent, and being able to shower and change straight afterwards is a big benefit. Plus, being in a place where there's nothing to do except exercise

Yes, all that. And treadmills are indeed boring, which is why I take my iPod to the gym (even if I find myself doing a boogie which is a bit perilous on a moving belt when some upbeat Motown soul comes up on the shuffle). But no weather constraints, no dog-poo underfoot, no harassing passersby, pretty much makes up for it.

[liv]

Music, yes, I should buy myself an mp3 player (my old one got lost in the move) and ask my wonderful d-roll for recommendations of music to exercise to! The ideal would be if I could read and treadmill at the same time, but I don't think that's going to be quite possible. Also I'm reminded why I don't want to run on the street; even more importantly than the weather, there's the safety issues. The other thing is I don't want to make my heart healthy at the expense of destroying my knees and ankles by running on a hard surface.

The scary conclusion is, though, that it would be very hard to embark upon a programme of virtuous, regular exercise if I weren't relatively rich. (I'm on the 80^th centile for UK salaries, and have no dependents or exceptional expenses, and I live in a cheap part of the country. All those things mean I can afford membership at a nice gym, though I winced at the price.) There are cheaper gyms than the one we ended up joining, but they end up charging quite a lot for extras, and are in dodgy parts of town with no real parking or public transport access. I never really believed in the myth that "anyone" can "just" go running every morning, but this really drives it home to me how much of a class issue exercise is.

[emperor]

I still find most of my social network is on LJ; you're quite unusual in being someone who I read on DW rather than LJ. I'm not ready to shift my posting to DW, largely for that reason. All that said, I am probably going to be posting to a DW community later, so I guess there is some change underway...

[daharyn]

ditto to this.

[liv]

Well, thanks for being willing to venture over here occasionally! I think your social circle is very different indeed from mine; we more or less only have rysmiel in common.

I think the big thing for me is that while I could have carried on using LJ quite comfortably, increasingly many of my friends couldn't. I can avoid ads because I nearly always read LJ from my own computer, and while I do choose to blog anonymously, it wouldn't do me any serious harm if my online ID accidentally got linked with my Facebook account and legal name. I pretty much never friends-lock anything, and when I do it's a mild ward against search engines, not a serious privacy concern. I'm able-bodied (don't have pain, neurodiversity or vision issues) and I read the internet using a very conventional set-up, keyboard, mouse and monitor using mainstream browsers. I don't write slash fiction or anything else that pushes the boundaries of freedom of speech. All that being said, I don't want to restrict myself to interacting only with people who have similar privileges to mine; I get plenty of that in my day-to-day life, and the internet is a much more diverse social circle. That's the reason why I want to support a site which is usable and safe for a much greater proportion of that wide range of people.

oh, I don't disagree

[daharyn]

I think it's really, really, really important that we have a number of services out there, being run by different people. All the more important given that we are now in the sort of Age of Online Monoliths... what once was AOL has given way to Google, Facebook, etcetera. And I'm as guilty as the next person of utilizing those services (I am thrilled, actually, to be writing this reply via my Gmail--that is one awesome feature), but I am always really happy when alternatives arise. I'm not always happy with what I have to do to keep up with people, and I'm trying to remember that just as in offline life, online connections come and go.

That said, your round-up posts over on LJ really help me remember to pop by, so thanks for those. ;-)

[liv]

That's entirely reasonable. Partly, I have the advantage that LJ was always several, slightly overlapping networks for me, not just a single social group. Partly, having more connections on DW than LJ took active effort by me. When I moved here, of course everyone was on LJ; this is not surprising, given that I had done nearly all my online socializing on that site for the past 6 years. Because of my admiration for DW and my discomfort with LJ of late, I was willing to plough through the initial period when posts to DW got few comments, when there was nothing to see on my reading page, etc etc. I'm in no way denying that that initial period existed, though, and probably lasted more than half a year.

[dpfesh]

Yay! I've always found gyms to be intimidating *and* fun! (once i stop letting the OMG Scary take over). Lots of fun machines and options, and the air conditioning/heating helps a lot too.

Treadmills can be kinda awesome coz sometimes you can read while you walk (tho i always forgot to bring a book!)

Hope you have continued fun & pleasant exhaustion :)

[liv]

Thank you, this is really helpful and supportive (as were your comments on the previous post). I don't know if I could read and treadmill at the same time, though it would certainly make it a lot less boring. Maybe I could read while pedalling the exercise bike? I may try audio books, because even if I could concentrate well enough, I imagine that the bobbing up and down would make reading difficult!

[sofiaviolet]

"All the good stuff is on LJ" hasn't been true for me for months. I now keep track of 21 accounts: 13 journals (only 4 of which update regularly; the rest are infrequent posters or likely-abandoned journals of people I really ♥) and 8 comms (1 that I moderate and should probably offload, 2 for conventions, 2 for concert ticket buying/selling and 3 misc.).

This is few enough accounts that I keep tabs on them through email notifications for new entries.

[liv]

I think it hasn't been really true for me for quite a while, but it was a combination of events that made me realize the tipping point had passed. I probably could port the LJ accounts I really have to follow into an RSS reader or similar, I don't really need the one-stop-shop aggregation any more.

My trouble is that I'm very reluctant to remove anyone once I've added them, because if I skim their posts I still don't want to lose the last vestiges of contact, and if they rarely post I don't want to miss it when they do. Today I tried to do the long put-off friends list tidy, and ended up removing about a fifth of my friends list, rather than the half or two thirds I'd intended. But it's lack of willpower that's keeping me with a foothold in LJ, not a compelling need.

[rmc28]

I'm really pleased the gym worked out well :)

[liv]

Yay, thank you for your encouragement. I am not quite at the 5 x 30 minutes you referred to, but I am doing the 3 x 20 and I wasn't even managing that before. If I keep that up, and when the weather gets nicer add in some outdoor exercise, I think it will do me a great deal of good even if I'm not quite meeting the targets. Also, I'm signed up for a review from a personal trainer, who will hopefully give me some tips for routines that I can do partly at home (from what I understand, it's a mix of stuff to do on gym machines, and sequences of stretches and sit-ups and things, which I hope I can do at home the days when I'm not going to the gym.)

[polarisnorth]

I definitely know what you mean about DW/LJ. Just about all of the people I follow closely are on DW now, only a few left on LJ, and most of those post publicly so it wouldn't matter if I unfriended them or stopped using my LJ. Definitely most of the important discussions I follow are happening on DW instead of LJ. I'd still like the feature of following LJs from DW, but if it doesn't happen I won't be heartbroken.

That's great about the exercise! Good job. I need to get into the habit myself. I actually like doing various exercises with weights -- it's cardio I have to force myself to do, since I hate running.

[liv]

There definitely is a shift happening, but it's gradual, and it's not enough that someone who's newly joined DW from LJ would immediately find the activity comparable. But yes, DW seems to be working a lot better these days for important discussions rather than just journalling and memes. I do hope we get the following LJ from here feature, if only because it'll bring more people over who might otherwise be reluctant to make the leap. But as you say, it's not a disaster if we don't get that.

Thank you for encouraging me about exercise! I think I probably will turn out to like weights more than running, but then I really do hate running. In fact it's starting to click that a lot of my angst was about the fact that I hate running, and I needed to find myself a form of exercise that allowed me to move fast but without the running part. Fast / power-walking, no problem. Riding a bike or paddling a canoe, no problem (though logistically tricky, especially in winter). I bet I could get good enough at swimming and climbing for them to be cardio exercise to at least an extent. Dancing, if I can make it happen (even if it's only dorky types of dancing like DDR or country dancing) seems appealing. But I'm finding that there are ways to do non-running forms of cardio exercise, even if there is a slightly higher entry barrier than for running, so I'm feeling really encouraged on that score.

[forestofglory]

The econ jargon for the "all my friends are there" is network externalities. Which are probably my favorite type of positive externalities.

And yes latest things is awesome. I read Latest things:Books most days, and have added people who write good reviews.

[liv]

Network externalities, great term, thank you!

[mathcathy]

That's completely a two way gratitude!

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.

[liv]

Yay! I'm almost starting to look forward to the gym sessions, but getting to hang out with you is definitely a strong aspect on the positive side.

[kaberett]

I am very glad that you are successfully moving over here (I'm nowhere near that stage, alas) and also very glad that you have in the first instance found the gym a helpful and positive thing :) I've avoided my gym for the past... nearly two weeks, eek, but will be going this evening and expect to feel much better for it.

[liv]

Thank you. It did definitely take time to "settle in" here; I came close to giving up because I wasn't getting any comments on my posts, and I wasn't finding much material on my reading page. But I am pretty convinced now that it was worth just pushing on through that initial lag.

Also yay you getting back to the gym after a break. I feel a bit like Miles Vorkosigan in this, really need to keep up the momentum otherwise I'll stop and never start again. I do seem to get that endorphin boost everyone talks about, so that's definitely a plus to exercising!

[kaberett]

Hurrah for the endorphin boost - and thanks enormously for the paid time! :)

[yalovetz]

Honestly, I think the main reason I am still around on LJ is because of some extremely active support communities I tend to read and comment on that simply do not exist on DW. If it were just a case of keeping up with the individual people on my friends list, well, a lot of them do now have a DW presence and there's cross-platform ways of keeping up with the others. But the active community thing is the real non-transferable factor. These days LJ feels less like a social network to me and more like a tool for accessing some specialised support forums.

[liv]

Yeah, I do think that LJ is better for communities. DW communities haven't really taken off, partly because of the need for invite codes, and partly because any community takes time to get established, and the ones that have already gone through that process over on LJ are going to look a lot more attractive. In contrast DW is much better for promoting interactions between individuals. People seem more likely to continue discussions across multiple journals, to surf their Network (equivalent of LJ's friendsfriends) pages, or to just chip in on interesting posts that appear on the front page of the site.

I was never really a community person on LJ; I still follow polyamory, and occasionally dip into theladiesloos. For me, though, they don't really fill the role of communities so much as crowdsourced agony / advice columns which are a lot less sexist and stupid than most of the ones that get published in the mainstream media. DW doesn't really have any equivalent, I agree. For me personally that's fine, because I'm a huge neophile and I like meeting new people more than I like having an established group of people I interact with regularly.

[ephemera]

I'm not quite at that tipping point yet, but it's noticeable how much more balanced it's getting between the two.

[liv]

I think that the DW side is partly weighted down by meeting interesting strangers. I do appreciate that not everybody wants to meet interesting strangers, though; if you use LJ purely as a one-to-many email system for keeping in touch with your friends, then clearly you're not going to prefer DW no matter how active or shiny it is, if your friends are still over at the old place. I'm not really happy to see LJ getting less active and interesting, but I must admit it is contributing to tipping more and more people towards here. And DW definitely is getting more active and interesting all the time, which I'm delighted about!