Livre d'Or

A few thoughts:

* I am totally onside with dreamwidth being better than everything else on offer (obviously). But I think the real stumbling block to getting people to join dreamwidth as a social network is that the look-and-feel is very 90s. I also become more and more convinced (and more and more despairing about) that this is what will eventually kill dreamwidth.

* Because of this "look and feel" issue, lots of the users Ello is after are never going to consider dreamwidth, so that's not really the best comparison here. But I don't understand what Ello offers that Tumblr doesn't. Why are the people who want to flee Facebook not turning to Tumblr en masse? I loathe the site, but it's hard to argue that it's not a) pretty in that trendy way, b) easy to use from a phone, and c) friendly to people who use pseudonyms. Also, d) primarily a vehicle for sharing pictures and links. I look at Ello and I think "Tumblr can do all of this, but better." (Note to the Ello folks: if someone who hates Tumblr is thinking that about your site, it's doing something wrong.)

* Are dataplans more expensive in the U.S. than in other countries? I hadn't heard that. In any case, I don't think this is the reason why we don't have a way of easily reading dreamwidth on a phone, because livejournal is a Russian site, and they don't really have a good way of reading that on a phone, either. I think the reason must be that there's something about the livejournal code that makes it inherently difficult to turn into a mobile site. (And I agree that this is a pity--it's kept a lot of my friends who are mothers off of dreamwidth since they had kids.)

* A WASP-y name (or English-in-any-way name) is actually a disadvantage on Facebook if you're trying to mask your real-life identity. A lot of my Dutch or German Facebook friends have just chosen random words from their own languages as their "surnames" on Facebook, and none of them have ever gotten booted. One of them even chose their language's equivalent of "Notmyrealname" as the surname, and Facebook seems to be just fine with that. Meanwhile, people who use really common English surnames sometimes get the side-eye from Facebook under the "no fake names" policy (or at least did before they decided not to enforce it).

-J