The return

[liv]

After 6 years of using LJ just to keep up with my friends who are still there, I'm somewhat favourably disposed to the site again. I mean, I'm still annoyed that they silently took the Open Source code private; I'm fine with them making a profit from 15 years of work, much of it by volunteers, but I am less happy with them ceasing to give back to the community that made the site what it is. And they still have adverts, but they seem to have moved away from a business model based on forcing ever-more intrusive adverts on users, and towards a model of paying for premium services.

Regarding Dreamwidth itself, well. I think after 6 years we can agree that it's stable and functional and not just some passing fad. I perceive it as way more active than LJ, and better for meeting interesting strangers. There are many respects in which it's just technically better, better UI and better accessibility and search that actually works. And I basically hate the current look-and-feel of LJ, both the desktop and mobile versions look awful to me. Also I still love DW's business model of a sustainable site completely independent of advertising or venture capital or payment processors who want to censor legal content, and I love its commitment not just to Open Source principles but to welcoming and training newbies and providing a non-awful environment for contributors. But DW is very clearly being maintained rather than developed (and yes, denise keeps promising that we're just paying down technical debt and there will be features released any day now, but I've been hearing that for too many years to really believe it any more), so it's getting to the point where LJ is ahead on features and just generally feels more modern.

So I sounded out how my LJ readers feel about my starting up cross-posting again, and that was enough to sway me towards returning. Not so much the numbers who voted in my poll, but the fact that several people I thought had drifted away from LJ years ago turned out to be still there, silently reading. And unlike in 2009 nobody seems to be worried about the security implications of DW knowing my LJ password (sensible ways of doing distributed authentication being yet another feature that DW has been promising for years and is probably never going to actually deliver). I do think the thing of split discussions is annoying, but it's also annoying for people who wouldn't otherwise use DW to have to follow me over here, so I hope it balances out.

Since I'm actively posting again, I've been trying to tidy up my filters. I had forgotten just how bad the interface was for friends list management; DW's isn't great but it doesn't do things like divide the list into pages and lose changes when you move further down the alphabet without saving, yet jump you back to the beginning of the list rather than where you were up to when you do press Save, ugh ugh ugh. Anyway, I hope I haven't accidentally unfriended and refriended people several times because of the interface horribleness. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to make cross-posting locked entries work, in fact; I think maybe I have to create two filters with the same names on both sites or something. And boy do I miss DW's WTF innovation of splitting subscribing off from giving access to private stuff! I'll figure it out somehow; I rarely make locked posts anyway, so it's not a big roadblock.

I feel like... coming back to a house that had been shut up for 6 years. It's infuriating because nothing is quite where I expect it to be, and I've got used to living somewhere far more modern and convenient, and the neighbourhood has changed and not entirely for the better. But it's also incredibly nostalgic, this place was home and deeply important to me from 2003 to 2009. So, hi. It's a bit dusty and disorganized round here, but please do make yourselves at home. In spite of my ambivalence it's good to be back.

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

*tilts head* there have been new features in DW in the past year or so, haven't there? I'm using one right now to reply from my reading page. Reading from phones got a ton easier in the past six months, too.

[highlyeccentric]

And yes, you need to set up filters with those names on DW to mirror your LJ ones. You can probably get DW to import them, actually.

[liv]

No, that's fair, they have set up Quicker Reply for replying to posts without loading a new page. That feature is broken for me in odd ways, so I tend not to use it, but yes, good point.

I feel that the mobile stuff is older than six months, I remember it as being late summer 2014. That was the last time I was actively involved in coding for DW too; there was this big push towards responsive design and improving things for mobile, and it broke things unexpectedly, so I got involved in the clean-up effort. There was an emergency fixing the disasters code-push, and I put lots of effort into writing patches for that, and I managed to do something slightly wrong in how I tracked my work on GitHub, so that my fixes didn't get into the release, and when I asked why I got a sarcastic reply from denise about not having used GitHub exactly right.

There are still a few layouts that are a bit broken, and I'm very discouraged from trying to tidy up the last bits of problems. I have mostly heard complaints about the remaining brokenness rather than comments about things being better on mobile, so I think I've been taking an unfairly negative view.

We've also had literally years of excited announcements about how the new update page is coming soon, and how photo hosting (with an actual interface) is nearly ready, and there's going to be scheduled posting (which LJ already has), and that "soon" keeps on receding over the horizon. There is the plan for OSB, which gives me hope; it feels to me like DW is moving to a model of development based on occasional hackathons rather than ongoing development. And that's better than nothing, but what it tends to lead to is a bunch of not quite ready features that nobody ever finishes off.

[liv]

Thanks, that's about what I thought. (One of the really frustrating things about LJ is that in 2009 I was a real power user, I knew every obscure feature and clever hack and I've lost that.) The problem is that currently on DW I don't use filters; I just subscribe indiscriminately and only grant access to people I trust. I don't think I can auto-import filters from LJ, though I know it's technically possible; after 6 years my circles on the two sites have diverged too much. I'll work it out somehow :-)

[sfred]

I've added you on LJ too because I like to be able to see all the comments on a post, but won't be offended if you want to keep DW people just on DW.

I experience DW as a bit more active than LJ, too, but I still have some friends who live only on LJ.

[liv]

Yeah, I'm in the same position: DW is more generally active, but some specific friends are LJ only. Thanks for letting me know about friending me; I am totally happy to friend you back so that you can follow discussions on both sites. But I'm a bit surprised that LJ didn't send me a notification that you had done this, I checked my settings and I should be getting notifications of new people friending me. Never mind, since you commented here I found you anyway.

[highlyeccentric]

Quicker Reply is my bff these days.

The last news post listed a bunch more respnsive design things that I didn't understand - i almost never understand the list of 'stuff we did' in text-format, it's when i see it on my dash that I notice. So I generally suppose that whatever's been going on has been happening where I can't see it, eg, for screenreaders.

I did notice the drop-off in frequency of news posts in the past year or so. Less news means less stuff happening, i assume?

[liv]

You're right, but. The last newspost was in January, and immediately followed on the heels of another Open Source conference where DW were able to get a bunch of volunteers together physically in the same place to do some hackathon type feature development. That's fine, but under the current regime it's the only positive development of new features that happens. Yes, bugs get fixed, and yes, some of the backend is being modernized glacially slowly. But that doesn't look like active development to me.

The thing with less frequent news posts is not directly that there's less happening, so there's less to post about. It's that denise has a pain condition which means she can't really type for any length of time, and she is absolutely unwilling to delegate communication to anyone else, so news posts never happen. But also feature development never happens, because we are totally reliant on denise handling all the coordination between senior devs and more occasional volunteers. And she can't type and won't delegate (the first is extremely unfortunate and not at all her fault, the second, well), so there is no communication, and also for historical reasons we don't really have a functional bug tracker any more, so nobody has any idea what to work on or what's most desired. Which is not the only reason why development has dried up, but it's a big factor.

[redbird]

I handle cross-posting by setting up access filters here with names that match my LJ access-and-reading filters, and then I can just tell it to use (say) the "sweeties" filter here, and it will use the same-named filter on LJ. I have a lot more LJ filters, but the DW cross-poster doesn't care, it only cares that if I use a filter name, it exists on the LJ side.

[damerell]

I suppose what strikes me about this is I would say that the current look-and-feel of LJ is revolting _because_ it is developed, not maintained. That DW doesn't change under my feet is, to me, a feature, not a bug. I care way less about photoposting than I do about not having to rebind my fingers and brain.

Of course, we are not the same person.

[ayebydan]

I feel dw has very much remained as is for several years but as the as is suits me I have no worried too much about it. I enjoy the simplicity of it. The real thing that got to me with lj were the comment sections. People were getting ill trying to read them and such and I too struggled. I was not ill but certainly strained my eyes on them. It seems to have settled into a better way of things these days. I find far more interesting people on dw but fandom things still seem to cling to lj.

[liv]

Thank you, that's good to know that the cross-poster works more or less as I'm expecting. It sounds like the secret is that I need to set up a mix of reading and access filters on LJ, essentially recreating Dreamwidth's split watch/trust system. That's a pain, but not at all insurmountable.

[liv]

I sympathize, I kind of hate change myself, I like going to a website and seeing all my options and links exactly where I left them. And honestly I don't need photo hosting or a modern mobile site, I was entirely happy with LJ back in the early 2000s when it didn't have those features! But lots of people say they don't use DW because it lacks these features, and ultimately the main factor in which sites I use is whether most of my friends are there and secondarily whether I can meet new people.

So I'm certainly not leaving DW because it isn't rolling out new features fast enough. But I think keeping a site in a kind of fossilized state where bugs get fixed but nothing ever changes is probably not sustainable either. The world moves on, people seek novelty and the kinds of tools that the last five years of technological progress have led us to expect. Hardware changes too; DW has basically missed the shift from desktops to smartphones and tablets and I'm not sure how long they can get away with remaining oblivious.

There's also the financial side: DW isn't growing much (though it is stable), and therefore it doesn't have enough money to hire professional developers or any of the other roles that ideally should be carried out by full time staff as well as volunteers. And even though mark is brilliant, there's only so much he can do while holding down a fulltime job with a much bigger web company. At some point I suspect even maintaining a large, complex site like this becomes too much for one and a half full time people, especially as volunteer contributions have dwindled almost to nothing, mainly IMO due to lack of communication within the project.

I would in many ways like to be wrong, I'd like to see DW in 2020 pretty much exactly as it is today, neither "improved" nor bitrotted. I just don't think that's very likely!

[liv]

Yes; DW has accessibility baked in and LJ barely even cares about it. Making the comment sections unreadable is one example of how that attitude is a disaster. The problem is that many of my friends who don't have any accessibility needs that prevent them using a computer with a standard setup prefer LJ. And that's understandable, I'm sure I've made choices like visiting a restaurant that doesn't have level access because it has tastier food and I personally am fine climbing stairs.

I definitely agree with you that I'm finding more interesting people on DW, your good self included, I don't think I would have met you on LJ because we don't have that many friends or interests in common and there's a somewhat different culture there. So I do still hugely prefer DW over LJ, but I think the balance has tipped far enough that it's worth it to me to use both sites in parallel.

[skibbley]

Welcome back

[rysmiel]

fwiw, I never have figured out how to make DW give me text in the format I have strong accessibility-based preferences for, and LJ doing that very straightforwardly is a large part of why I stay there; I doubt that's a conscious design decision on either side because my particular combination of visual issues seems likely to be a very small constituency indeed.

[andrewducker]

Yes. This has been bothering me too.

It bothered me when Brad was like this for LJ, and things got stuck a lot. It bothers me as much with Denise, because we were promised that things would be more Open, and then communication all dried up.

And I don't blame her for being in pain. But I do wish that she'd delegate more, and lead rather than trying to do it all herself.

[andrewducker]

I get vastly more comments on LJ than DW. Which is a huge shame, really. I was hoping that more people would migrate.

[altamira16]

I get more comments and interaction on LiveJournal too. That is why I tend to read it first and comment there unless people force me to comment here. I love that reading and giving people the ability to read your stuff are decoupled over here. I love that feature.

[siderea]

also for historical reasons we don't really have a functional bug tracker any more

Wait. What?

[cjwatson]

Yeah, I do this too. It works, but it does spook me a bit, partly because I have a strong assumption that there is no reason for things of the same name on different sites to be in any way connected, and partly because I have a nagging feeling that if something went wrong somewhere then a post to a custom filter might easily accidentally end up being just friends-only. So I use it, but I always always check that the crossposted result has the security settings I expect.

[liv]

Precisely. I don't actually care about weekly news posts, I think that was reasonable when the site was very newly launched, right now four times a year would be plenty. But all the communication depends way too much on someone who physically can't do it (not that she doesn't have the skillset, just she physically can't), between the site and users, yes, but also between developers.

[liv]

So, in my understanding: there was a Bugzilla instance. It died, and in one of those very unfortunate concatenations of circumstances, the backup server died at the same time. There's one very decided volunteer who had subscribed to email notifications of every single bug in Bugzilla, so the old bug tracker is not completely irretrievable, but it's not exactly in a format that's convenient to import.

At the time, DW was in the process of migrating from Mercurial to Git for version control, partly with the goal of using GitHub to host the code. So it was decided we should probably move over to GitHub Issues rather than Bugzilla. There was a policy decision, which I agree with, not to try to recreate the old bug database, but to use the data loss debacle as an excuse to do some sensible housekeeping and make sure that only up-to-date relevant information should be entered into the new shiny GHI system.

However, triaging the history of Bugzilla from the volunteer's emails and deciding which subset should go into GHI, and setting up clear processes for how volunteers are supposed to use GHI, and tweaking GitHub to act as a bug tracker in ways that match how DW development actually works, and curating what's in GHI on an ongoing basis, and migrating user-submitted feature requests from dw_suggestions (which you'll note hasn't even been updated for a year), or verified bug reports from the Support board, into the new bug tracker, and setting priorities and bug dependencies and fitting bugs into broader projects and goals and a bunch of other rather necessary functions for a bug tracker... all depend on denise being able to do far more typing than is physically sustainable for her. I think they automated claiming and assigning of such bugs as haphazardly happen to be in GHI, because for a while even that was depending on denise doing stuff manually.

So, in short, no functional bug tracker.

[liv]

Thanks for the data! I kind of instinctively don't trust the matching up names of custom filters system either, I agree it's not a reasonable expectation that the two sites will be connected like that and it feels very much primed for either user error or actual security bugs. I think it's the best the cross-poster can do, given the very limited extent LJ is prepared to cooperate with DW (basically, not actively hostile, but also understandably not willing to update the extremely ancient and bitrotted systems by which automated third-party tools communicate with LJ – I believe there's not even APIs, or not in any systematic way).

The other problem is that I currently don't have access filters on DW, given that I only grant access to people I'm prepared to trust with relatively sensitive information anyway. So on a minor practical level it's a pain because I have to start out by putting all my DW friends into a filter.

[liv]

Ugh, that's unconscionable. Having made this post in a state of mind that I don't want to try to write any more code for DW because it's just too frustrating, getting comments like this makes me really want to fix this.

Can you tell me what you need visually beyond white text on a black background? Is it that the available light-on-dark schemes aren't high contrast enough? Or is it that you want text to take up the whole screen without a lot of margin space? Cos that is one combination of visual preferences / needs that DW doesn't seem to cater for very well.

[liv]

Thank you; I'd been thinking of you as someone present on DW, but it's great if my moving back to DW is a positive for you as well.

[liv]

Yes, your LJ really does reach a wide audience, especially your link poster. So that's a huge reason for you to stick with LJ, it would be very strange to do otherwise. But yes, I hoped that DW would be enough clearly better that more people would come over here, and it's partly that I underestimated the desire not to change, and partly that DW hasn't continued to stay as far ahead technically as it was for the first few years.

[liv]

Well, I'll see how things go now that I've started cross-posting again. In terms of posts on my friends page / reading page, DW has been way ahead in activity levels for years. But perhaps LJ has more comments, as people are reading fewer journals there and are therefore commenting more actively. And I do think decoupling reading from access was a brilliant innovation by DW.

[andrewducker]

I would be happy if the readers all switched over to DW instead though. I wonder if there's just a sense of intertia.

(Although I can't get to my DW from work, so I'd be having to make comments from my phone, which would be annoying.)