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

[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.