liv | Three weeks for DW (Reply)

So some people have been reviving the old Three weeks for Dreamwidth fest, where people try to be a bit more active here for three weeks starting 25 April and including the anniversary of DW's official opening, May 1^st. May 1^st 2009, in fact, which arguably makes this year DW's bnei mitzvah.

ysabetwordsmith has set some prompt questions, the first being: What brings you to Three Weeks for Dreamwidth? How many times have you participated in this fest?

I'm not completely convinced that

3weeks4dreamwidth (new comm, the old one was moribund) is timely, but then initiatives that encourage more activity are generally good. Certainly for me, almost regardless of whether anyone else participates. I am certainly not undertaking to post every day for three weeks but I'll try to post a bit more often and also include at least a couple of substantial thinky posts.

I have participated in 2010 (the first time 3W4DW ran), did one meme in 2011, mentioned but didn't participate in 2012 as I got married in the middle of it. I did it more or less on my own in 2013, I don't think there was much official activity. 2015 I posted quite a lot. And since then I haven't really been playing. So, let's give it another go this coming-of-age year.

And maybe people will start to drift back on the back of panicking about Elon Musk's proposed Twitter buyout. (I don't actually think he's substantially worse than Jack Dorsey, personally, but sometimes DW gets a boost from panics about badness on other sites.) I totally agree with Abigail Nussbaum: fracturing our online life into awful walled gardens controlled by horrible people wasn't a decision we made, it was deliberately imposed on us when Google and Facebook spent most of the last decade razing [open internet] to the ground. At least DW isn't controlled by horrible people, it's controlled by really quite nice people, and has at least some protections against being swallowed up by horrible tech billionaires. And it's a lot less of a walled garden than most modern sites; DW isn't perfectly usable without an account, but at least it is somewhat usable, and at least it's Open Source. So although there's no way I can beat Google / Alphabet and Facebook / Meta and Disney and Microsoft and Twitter, let alone nation states that really don't want open internet, I can continue to make my main home somewhere less ethically awful than the big sites.

Thirteen years is a pretty good run, for a small indie website. I don't expect another 13 but I also wouldn't completely bet against DW outlasting FB and Twitter like it's outlasted Tumblr and Google+.