Dreamiversary

[liv]

Dreamwidth officially came into public beta on 1^st May 2009, and I started using it as my primary journalling space then. So today approximately marks the day that I've been on DW for as long as I was on LJ (I actually joined at the end of May in 2003). Twelve years of blogging, six there, six here.

DW is still most of what I want: something with the positives of LJ but fully Open Source (LJ used to be, hasn't been for some time) and without any adverts anywhere. So I get my long-form, mostly text based blogging, the ability to fully control my space, threaded comments, the wonderful network effect which keeps me meeting interesting new people all the time. And I was really cheered to see denise remarking on Twitter: lololol @ the google employee who just contacted us to pitch advertising on dreamwidth. better luck next time, dude.. I like that Dreamwidth put up the with the inconvenience of turning down Paypal and other major payment providers because they weren't willing to accept censorship of legal but "offensive" content.

That said, I am at the point where I'm considering going back to LJ. DW would still be my primary home, but I might start up crossposting again. Although LJ still has advertising, I get the impression they're moving away from that as their primary income stream. And they're actively developing features in a way that DW just isn't; it's approaching the tipping point where LJ actually wins on features again, which hasn't happened since DW was in early beta. Photo and video hosting are the big ones, and LJ is starting to get better about content discovery – DW's latest things page seems to be basically broken, for example, whereas LJ has been introducing relevant new features, though I haven't explored them properly. Though DW is still head and shoulders ahead on search, thanks to mark who really has serious expertise in that.

Also, LJ impressed me recently by actually going to bat for their users when faced with a lawsuit from a fairly heavyweight media company. They not only went as far as defending the lawsuit, they actively protected users' privacy, and that counts for a lot. I hope DW would do the same in similar circumstances, but it must be admitted that they don't have the resources at their disposal that the much bigger parent site has. LJ is no longer Russian owned or quite so much targeted by shady actors from the Russian political scene, which is both positive and negative in that I quite admired LJ for protecting the free speech of Russian dissidents, but equally makes it less likely that the rest of us will get caught up in attempts to shut the site down.

It's also the case that LJ has managed to persist for long enough that it's actually attracting a nostalgia market. People are writing op-eds all over the internet about how they miss the LJ that got them through their teens and 20s, and how Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr simply can't replace that. And it's showing as increased activity on the site as people dust off their old accounts. People in my personal social circle, also opinion-formers who very much have a strong presence in the wider internet. And no, it's not as active as it was 10 years ago, but neither is DW, realistically speaking there's no way to fight the diversification to the other social media sites. LJ is starting to feel a bit less like a wasteland, though.

Right now the main arguments against going back are: I've been away for 6 years now, that's maybe too long of a hiatus. Though I haven't really been away, I've been reading and commenting all along. And secondly, I really don't want to split comment discussions into two locations, that is just annoying.

People are doing three_weeks_for_dw again this year, and I've slightly missed the boat as we're already a week into the three week fest. But I might try to repeat what I suggested a couple of years back and follow siderea's community building recipe. In the remaining two weeks, I can probably manage three diary entries or surveys and one long thinky post; I am not sure about ten pointers, as that will require me to post nearly every day, but I'll have a go.

In honour of the fest, nanila has created bitesizedreading, which I think is a really good idea. And another way to make sure that supposedly little, unimportant things end up here rather than just forgotten about or posted to more ephemeral places like Twitter or FB.

And oursin is posting dear little original fiction snippets which I highly recommend if you don't already follow her.

Comments

[rmc28]

I started crossposting again recently for a few reasons:

1. I'd started friending more people on LJ (part accident, part friending memes) and it feels a bit unfriendly to say "hey, I'm commenting on you, but you have to come over to DW to see what I write".

2. I am probably going to want to lock (at least some) posts about my children as they get older, and some of the people I'm happy to read about the children read only on LJ, and crossposting locked posts is the easiest way to do this.

3. I feel a bit happier about LJ generally, and as you say people are getting nostalgic about it, and letting my content show up there means that if people do check out their old Friends pages, they might see stuff from me and (I hope) that might be part of a reason to stay.

At the moment I allow commenting on both; if I find that's getting annoying, I'll engage the option which is to turn comments off on LJ for crossposted entries and provide a link to the DW comments.

[liv]

Yes, all those reasons make sense to me. I'm definitely meeting more new people on DW than LJ, but I'm meeting more people offline who have LJs and friending them. You're another person who moved completely to DW, so if you're going back to crossposting that's an argument in favour of my also doing so. Interesting that you find the split commenting non-annoying so far, that's good to know.

[rmc28]

I think my comment-patterns are probably different to yours though, so take that with at least one pinch of salt.

[liv]

That's a point too. The other disadvantage of crossposting is that it requires giving DW my LJ password, which although I basically trust DW doesn't seem like good practice. I have a couple of friends who as a matter of principle unfriend everybody who cross-posts because of the vulnerability introduced by another site having the password which allows me to read their locked entries.

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't realise you'd stopped using LJ! I figured you were using filters a lot and I wasn't on the ones you used. Sorry, I should probably have sorted out DW reading earlier.

[jack]

Oh, interesting. That makes sense, at least to start cross-posting. Though it's sad DW has had such a difficult time :(

FWIW, I cross-post and never got round to directing comments to one place or another, and but it seems to muddle along ok with comments 75% on LJ and 25% on DW.

[wildeabandon]

That's about my experience comment-wise as well. For a while I did turn off comments on LJ and just linked over here, but at that point nearly everything I posted was public, so it was easier for people without DW accounts to click through.

[liv]

How are you managing the cross-posting of locked entries? I think I may need to go back and redo my filters on LJ, and I know I'm going to miss the watch/trust/friend split.

[wildeabandon]

Ah, by basically not using filters, which probably isn't much help, sorry.

[jack]

I almost always give people permissions at the same time as I follow them anyway. I only have a couple of filters, mostly "everyone" (which doesn't need any attention), and occasionally "everyone other than close family" and "people I'm fairly close to for very personal posts".

When I started that, I took a little bit of time to create the corresponding filters on LJ and get them up to date. AIUI if you crosspost, DW uses an access filter with the same name if there is one.

And I have one reading list on both sites which is basically everyone (except people I read on the other site, and people I friended because they friended me and then decided I didn't really know).

After that, the only thing that took effort was, when I friend someone new on either site, I add them to the reading filter, and to the "not close family" access filter. I had a few "oops" of friending someone and forgetting, but I'm fairly used to it now.

apologies if this is unwanted advice

[ironed_orchid]

You can import filter categories from LJ, so if you make a filter there and import it, it has the same name here and you can add DW people to it.

Then if you crosspost entries to LJ, which were made on that filter here, they match that filter there.

I access lock all posts on LJ, but not all posts on DW, so my public posts here turn up as locked there, but all filtered posts here are filtered there.

Like you, I sometimes forget that new people who I become more trusting of through interactions are not on certain filters, and have to update from time to time.

[liv]

Yes; I always said I'd be satisfied if DW was steady rather than showing vast growth, but it's hard for a site to continue if it's completely stagnant. And I'm glad your experience shows that split comments isn't too bad.

[ironed_orchid]

I split my comments, but I import them all to DW every few months, so as to have a complete record in one place. I added a warning about this in my "comment on DW" footer that is included on all my LJ crossposts.

[damerell]

I've always crossposted. I appreciate that LJ is becoming less evil, but it's also become a complete steaming mess of Javascript - DW is one of the few things I can still routinely read in w3m. So I read here, when possible.

[liv]

Yes, I don't especially love the recent design decisions on LJ, and JavaScript is one reason. But at least it has some recent design decisions, it's not completely stuck in the past.

[andrewducker]

I crosspost for two reasons:
1) My readership is still largely there. At least, the ones that comment.
2) My work allow me to get to LJ, but not to DW, which is blocked by the firewall.

[ironed_orchid]

Realised recently that I've been using DW slightly longer than I used LJ before DW, I joined LJ in October 2003, and signed up for Dreamwidth mid-April 2009.

[silveradept]

I crosspost, but I have different audiences on the platforms and they mostly don't overlap.

DW is still my "going to someplace where the policies are what I like" entity, and is the place where I've discovered a lot of really good community, apparently by having and commenting on the right nexus journals. That same community might be present on LJ, but I haven't hooked into it yet, so maybe if more people appear again, I'll pick up some new people.

That said, I'm not exactly posting content that's good for getting new people to comment and read.