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 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.