Dreamwidth GRRRR

[outsidetheparty]

Ok, it's becoming clear that approximately half of the people I'm friends with here are ultimately going to move to Dreamwidth, and half are not. Some are crossposting, and some are not, and some are doing it only for certain types of posts, and basically for someone who just wants to see what his friends are up to it's all just about as irritating as it could possibly be.

I could just stay here at LJ and hope that those who crosspost will continue to do so, and that those who aren't will start.

I could give in and set up an equivalent friends page over there and then have to check two separate sites instead of one, and hope that everybody stops crossposting so I don't have to see everything twice.

Neither of those are very appealing options. Is there a third option that I'm not aware of?


For those of you who are migrating to DreamWidth: why? (I had had the impression that the draw was supposed to be that it's more fanfic-friendly, but it doesn't seem to be the fanfic that's moving over there.)

For those of you who aren't: how are you dealing with it? Is this just me?

Comments

[sylvantechie.livejournal.com]

Basically, I'm dealing with it (or failing to deal with it, as the case may be), by being a bit sad that I'll probably miss out on some stuff because it'll be posted at DW.

I'm not switching because
1) it's a pain in the butt to change habits
2) I have a lot of other things I want and/or need to do with my time than spend hours and hours getting a new account set up somewhere and dealing with all the content transfer et al
3) many of my LJ friends are not of the greater berkshire crowd and as far as I can tell DW isn't even a faint blip at the outermost edge of their radar
4) and finally, I'm not actually unhappy with LJ

I guess at some point I'll do the openid thing or something...

[magdalene1.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. I've tried to use OpenID to comment on some x-posted stuff, and it's invariably a pain, and by the time I get it to work I forgot what I was going to say anyway. I wish DW all the best, will have to keep up with my friends who move on some other way. Maybe the telephone...

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

I guess my question is, how is using openid to comment on a dreamwidth post any different from using openid to comment on a blogger or typepad post? When I comment on the blogs of people who don't use the same blogging service I do, I have to log in to leave a comment. I don't think it's that high a bar, but obviously I'm failing to understand something, because some of y'all clearly feel that it's too much to ask. Is it that we have a different expectation of livejournal and its code forks / clones, so that we've grown accustomed to logging in to one place and then never having to log in again?

[magdalene1.livejournal.com]

I think you are right about expectations.

I read LJ, and comment and interact with friends a lot. It's a highly social thing, a bunch of people read me who all read each other (like fandom - a tight knit social group).

I blog and read blogs in my Google Reader. I comment on a blog once every...2 months? 6 months? I don't comment on blogs. I skim them. I follow too many to really follow.

I've tried about 6 times to make OpenID work when I make a comment (maybe about a month or so ago) and it keeps sending me into a "please log in again" loop, so I have made zero comments, so I stopped trying. Sometimes I've just emailed the thing I wanted to say directly to the person.

I can see that Dreamwidth is a cool project and that it's people have their heart in absolutely the right and most awesome place, and maybe it's kind of like Facebook, or cell phones. I got a cell phone in 2006, when I was the person who was annoying for not having one. I joined Facebook 2 months ago, when it was clear everyone I make films with was on there and it was the way to keep in touch.

I'm just trying to be really honest. I see you guys x-posting, and I see you guys locking comments here and making them only available over there, and I see it almost as a training exercise where you train us to go over there, but so far the process of trying to comment there has been annoying, so I stopped trying, and I realize that's probably hurtful and sucky, but LJ is something I drop in on on a limited basis, and blogs are something I read on a limited basis.

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

I hear you, and I appreciate the honesty. It's frustrating because it's never been my intention to raise a bar which would keep my friends from being able to be in touch with me. One of the reasons I never moved to insanejournal or journalfen or any of the other fannish journaling services which have come and gone over the years is that none of them were meant to be interoperable with lj the way that dreamwidth is. It was really my hope that this transition wouldn't be a problem for anyone, and it's becoming clear that that hope isn't necessarily going to be borne out. I've heard people saying that when dw is out of open beta the openid login process won't be buggy the way it is now, but I don't have anything to do with any of the coding end of things, so I don't know how true that is.

(And fwiw, I am still not on Facebook! It doesn't appeal to me at all. I do not want to be in random contact with people I knew in grade school. I love lj/dw and the circles of friends with whom I'm in daily contact here; and for my more professional life, there's the blog, and the circle of friends I've made in that way. Twitter turns out to be fun for me; Facebook just sounds like hell. *g* All the worst aspects of constant online interaction without any of the things I dig about dw/lj. So I guess mileage varies.)

Anyway. I am still stubbornly hopeful that in six months or so, when dreamwidth is out of beta and a few more things have been hammered out, there will be some way for those of us who are happier there and those who are perfectly happy on lj to continue to have our journal spheres intersect. I know that's been Denise and Mark's goal all along. But there's obviously no guarantee, and I completely understand why this isn't something you'd want to be investing your limited time and energy on dealing with.

[sigerson.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth...
I'm not moving to Dreamwidth--it's a good system, but I have no current problems. I'm reading the crossposts eagerly, and am happy to still see them and hope they will continue. I would be sad if DW content never made it to LJ, and I worry a little about that happening.

I tend to comment less (less than my usual low comment rate, that is) at Dreamwidth posts because it does take a few extra steps between "hit button" and "write pithy/caring/interesting comment". On good days, that's two steps, and it doesn't interfere with the...hmm...flow of my response. On bad days, I encounter the same OpenID bug as magdalene1 and it discourages me from commenting entirely.

The difference, for me, is those two extra steps. It's small, yes. That step of login-then-comment isn't present for me in LJ, and I rarely comment anywhere except LJ.

There's my stake on it.

[squirrelhaven.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, you're way more tech savvy than I am, and it took me maybe 15 minutes to create my DW account and import all my LJ content into it earlier today. I expected it to be complicated, but the import process required little more than pushing a button. Same for setting up the cross-post feature.

That said, reasons 1, 3, and 4 are still entirely valid. And even though I've now gone to the trouble of setting up the DW account, I still see LJ as my primary home online, and if I'd been able to make openid work, I doubt I'd have bothered to create a mirror-journal.

[cybersattva.livejournal.com]

This.

Except that I've finally gone and started up a professional techie blog neither on LJ or DW, but on my own machine. Turns out? WordPress is insanely easy to set up. The DNS is likely to be touch and go though unless I get serious about it. :-/

[outsidetheparty.livejournal.com]

Hey! You're learning Rails! I keep meaning to learn Rails, but haven't had a good excuse (i.e. a paying job, which seems to be the only way I can motivate myself these days :)

[cybersattva.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness, the Rails learning curve is steep. You kind of have to know everything at once in order to really use it, but I think once you've managed to scramble up it it makes web development so much easier (so goes the hope, anyway, OTOH I was so impressed with how quickly you threw together the ATYD card builder web interface back in the day--you may not need Rails ;)). I don't think I ever would have stuck with learning it if I had a full time job to manage on top of it. Learning Rails while kidlet wrangling has been challenge enough.

[sylvantechie.livejournal.com]

We should chat about rails... but not right now, because I'm about to head out for a bike ride...

[cybersattva.livejournal.com]

Heh, I noticed you just posted something about rails tests. I was wondering if you meant RoR or something else. Enjoy the bike ride!

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm sorry it's annoying. I do think it's bound to be a bit exasperating during the transitional period we're in now -- DW is in open beta but not yet out of beta altogether, and a lot of people are still figuring out what we're going to do.

My own intention is to continue cross-posting, but eventually to consolidate comments there, because it annoys me that when I post now, the comments thread is inevitably bifurcated. It's not ideal for those who are staying on livejournal (you'll have to do the openID thing to comment), but it's the best solution for me. *g*

As far as why I'm happier on dreamwidth? A few reasons:

- I know the people who started dreamwidth, and I trust them, and I no longer trust SUP (the company that bought livejournal)

- I like DW's diversity statement (http://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/diversity.bml) and their guiding principles (http://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/principles.bml)

- every few years, livejournal decides to delete fannish journals because we're too porny or too...whatever for their advertisers; that's disruptive to me and it pisses me off and I'd rather put my money (and my fic) somewhere else

- dw isn't ad-supported, so even if you have a free account, you never see ads. (Sometimes I check an lj from my other browser where I'm not logged in, and omg, the ads are annoying! and sometimes offensive)

- dw has features I really like, among them splitting between access list (who I want to have access to my posts) and reading list (whose posts I want to read), easy cross-posting, and a commitment to interoperability with other lj-based sites

Basically, it boils down to: I like the DW people, I trust them, and I don't think they will ever change their minds and randomly TOS my stuff. Whereas I don't trust LJ any further than I can throw them. And if I'm going to pay a few bucks a month for a journling service, I'd rather pay the company founded by a geekboy and a fangirl whose heart is roughly in the right place.

So what I do now is, I have two tabs open: one for my dreamwidth reading page, and the other for the segment of my lj friendslist who isn't on dreamwidth or isn't cross-posting. My guess is that it'll take a year or so for all of this to shake out, at least at the fannish end of things.

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

and some are doing it only for certain types of posts,

btw, as far as I've seen, I'm the only person who's done that, and I only did it once, and I'm not going to do it again.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

I got the DW account Just In Case, and transferred over my archives Just In Case. But I haven't used it at all since. Haven't even bothered to cross-post, actually.

I want to keep in touch with many many people who are staying put (as far as I can tell) on LJ, and so far, nearly everyone is cross-posting to LJ, so I'm just checking LJ for now. I have a bookmark to DW, but it's buried way over in a long list of stuff - and I haven't been motivated to move it, because why? Mostly I can't be bothered.

Mostly, I guess I agree with sylvantechie. It's nice to know that my journal and all the comments are archived elsewhere in case LJ blows up. But otherwise, meh.

[ethicsgradient.livejournal.com]

Boycott your friends that don't use a system that provides RSS feeds.

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

Dreamwidth Studios has RSS and Atom feeds for all accounts. (http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=117)

(Mine would be at:

http://kass.dreamwidth.org/data/rss
http://kass.dreamwidth.org/data/atom)

You're welcome to boycott me anyway, of course. *g*

[ethicsgradient.livejournal.com]

I was trying to be a little silly, but failed to come across that way.....a few years back when I started using RSS heavily I tried to switch to reading LJ via RSS, and the lack of good support for feeds that require authentication prevented me from doing it.

I have, on occasion, considered moving to RSS completely and just dealing with not being able to read locked posts, but haven't bothered.

Someday soon I'll gather my thoughts on permission based blogging (I'm anti, for reasons I have a hard time explaining, so far) and post them somewhere...

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

Sorry, didn't mean to jump on you. I'm having kind of a Day.

Yeah, the permissions thing would be a problem, wouldn't it? I hadn't thought about that.

I might actually make the argument that livejournal/dreamwidth/etc are designed for something that isn't exactly "blogging," per se. They're much more interactive than even the most comment-heavy blogs are, there's more community focus (many of the posts I read are in communities, not individual journals, which changes the dynamic) and there are layers and levels of access (flock/filter/etc) which make the experience of posting here entirely unlike the experience of blogging as I know it. Especially as I increasingly use filters to talk about personal RL stuff, I think of my journal as something like a series of interconnected password-protected chatrooms which happen to be asynchronous. This isn't a blog, to me, at all. *g*

[ltlbird.livejournal.com]

As so often happens, Kass is able to put beautifully into words an opinion I also have, but wasn't sure how to express. :) I don't think of my LJ as a blog. I think of a blog as a public thing, and a more formal one in some way. If I were "blogging", I would feel the need to generally keep to a certain theme or domain, to be entertaining, and to proofread more. My LJ, on the other hand, is a place I can share my thoughts with friends, seek feedback, and keep in touch with folks (many all at once - the efficiency of that appeals to me greatly.) That's why the vast majority of my posts are friends-locked.

Have to say that I also love the way comments work on LJ, as opposed to other blogging sites. It bugs me that on blogger or facebook you can't attach your comment in response to someone else's in the same way you can here. It's so much easier to skip the off topic threads or see what others have to say about one comment. Again, more efficient.

[outsidetheparty.livejournal.com]

I had not realized that DW had RSS feeds, that's actually really helpful.

[samtheeagle.livejournal.com]

Yep, I'm making that non-fannish jump, because just enough people I know are doing it as to hit my tipping-point, or at least my first tipping-point. I'm crossposting because lots of folks are staying on LJ. I do not know what this is gonna mean, and I'm pathetic enough at basic Computer Life Stuff that I don't pretend to understand half of this thread... but hey.

[winterborne.livejournal.com]

I am feeling like you, and it's actually really nice to hear that somebody else is having these thoughts. The reasons why some people are choosing to move seem perfectly valid, but they are not reasons that apply strongly to me. So the doubts aren't balanced out by the feeling of needed freedom that doubtless is a key element of excitement around DW.

I have this pessimism around an inevitable fissioning of the community, options for crossposting notwithstanding, and that is a saddening thought. I am hoping this is just FUD, though.

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

I got the account, because logging in with Open ID before the Open Beta date gave me a free account, and I played with it a bit and imported archives, like kcobweb. Now I'm crossposting, but that's mostly because I know kassrachel only reads me on DW now. :D For the most part I'll just keep crossposting and waiting and seeing.