![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Dreamwidth
So, in my continuing inability to keep my creative work on the same website/codebase/blogging platform for more than a couple of years at a time, I'm thinking about jumping ship from Livejournal to Dreamwidth (when it opens - April 30). Or, well, cross-posting and maintaining friendlists in both places, but having Dreamwidth be my main blogging platform for this blog.
Dreamwidth is a new LJ-style blogging platform that's opening up this summer. There have been a few others that cropped up over the last few years (Insanejournal, Journalfen, Greatestjournal, etc) but they've been either specific to a certain userbase (i.e. Journalfen was only for fandom) or hampered by varying levels of fail.
I guess it remains to be seen if Dreamwidth will suffer from fail too. I guess the thing is, I've interacted with one-half of their main development team around fannish circles for a few years now, and she seems to be a smart and dedicated person who has a good business head and is willing to put her money where her mouth is when it comes to free speech and protecting the interests of their userbase. Both of DW's main developers used to work on LJ's development team, and set out with a goal of fixing LJ's buggy and bloated code and lousy customer service. Their stated goal with DW is to build a sustainable blogging site that's user-friendly in as many different ways as possible: easy to use, doesn't allow its growth to outstrip its bandwidth/support, allows its users maximum freedom of expression, and so forth. And I've been watching
Some links:
- Dreamwidth's wiki-style FAQ
- Dreamwidth's changes from LJ along with a brief account of its founding
- Dreamwidth's diversity statement
- Features available on Dreamwidth's different account levels
- A listing of posts by LJ users talking about why they're switching to Dreamwidth
So ... why am I considering moving? I haven't had any bad experiences with LJ; I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
But I have noticed some things that make me kind of nervous. LJ is, as we all know, owned by Russians, which isn't necessarily a problem by itself, but they recently fired half their US staff and I don't know if it's just my imagination that I've been noticing slower loading times and occasional brief outages over the last few months. Last year, of course, there were problems with user accounts getting TOS'd without notice for things like posting sexually explicit fanfic, and scans_daily was just recently TOS'd in the same manner, without giving them a chance to argue their case or back up anything.
I don't think LJ is going to vanish overnight by any means. But I am starting to think there might be some validity to those who suggest that LJ's owners are more interested in catering to a Russian-language userbase who want a Facebook-style social networking site than in supporting the needs of users, like me, who want a low-key blogging and writing platform. And while I'm fairly confident of my ability to quietly crank along in the dusty corners of LJ for quite awhile (and, like I said, I'd still be cross-posting if I moved), what I really want is somewhere stable and not too large that I don't have to worry about being TOS'd or having the user agreement change out from under me.
I could host a blog on my own site -- I still pay for webspace on the laylalawlor.com domain -- but I don't for two reasons: a) because LJ is easy (I don't have to worry about customizing and updating a Wordpress installation; I have all of LJ's little toys to play with), and b) social interaction -- my main purpose in blogging here is not so much to put my words out there for the world and posterity, but to stay up with the people that I know.
As far as #2 goes, though, I can still have my cake and eat it too -- I've still got my LJ account, I'll still be cross-posting and reading my LJ friends list. And I don't really have a huge circle on LJ; my LJ friends list has been pretty static and small for the last few years -- it's largely writers' blogs or communities that I read, plus a small number of people I interact with on a semi-regular basis. (I admit to being an inveterate lurker; I read you guys' blogs, but I don't comment all that much.)
And I am very wooed by the opportunity to start over fresh, and get a chance to reorganize my creative stuff. This is WHY I end up redoing my website every couple of years (and I think it's about due for another ...), because I'll come up with an organizational scheme that works for me, and then start to actually use it and discover that it doesn't really work for what I'm actually doing with it, end up with everything tangled in a snarled mess and move on to something that I think would work better. Only it doesn't.
In this case, I don't like having my creative stuff spread out between here and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
icefallpress and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
icefallstudio. It made sense to me in the beginning to separate things out into a personal blog, an artblog and a locked writing journal, but, well, I've only ever posted one thing to icefallstudio before abandoning it, and there's nothing I post to icefallpress that couldn't be posted just as easily to laylalawlor, if I would just organize and update my tags to make things easy to find. And, well, there's the other thing ... my tags are a mess. I'd like to do a total tag overhaul and then start posting all of my fiction and creative updates (comics, etc) to ONE journal along with my relatively infrequent personal posts, so there's only one blog to watch for all of my different stuff. I think the other way used to make more sense to me because I wasn't really used to creative-blog subculture -- these days, after spending several years watching writers' blogs and getting used to reading fiction on blogs, I actually prefer having their creative stuff mixed in with their personal stuff rather than having it spread out to a bunch of different blogs and websites so that I have to remember that "blogfairy" (or whatever) on LJ is also the writer "janedoe.com" who is also the maintainer of the "fairycircle" artblog.
In short, I am a flake.
But, also, I'm using the Internet differently now than I was five years ago, so I want to manage my website differently than I used to. And since I've been wanting to do an overhaul, moving to Dreamwidth might be a good catalyst for going about it. You can import the contents of an LJ to Dreamwidth, complete with comments and all. I'm thinking about doing that, and then cross-posting (which I understand from the beta-testers works pretty well), and basically shutting down both of the "icefall" blogs -- well, I won't be deleting the content or anything like that, but I won't be adding anything new; all of that will go here. Or, er, "here" on Dreamwidth, that is.
So, Dreamwidth's accounts go on sale April 30th. At this point, you need to either buy at least 1 month of a paid account ($3/month) or get an invite code from an existing user in order to get in. I'm still dithering about it, as I do, but right now I'm definitely leaning in the direction of buying myself a Dreamwidth account for a month and checking it out.
Dreamwidth is a new LJ-style blogging platform that's opening up this summer. There have been a few others that cropped up over the last few years (Insanejournal, Journalfen, Greatestjournal, etc) but they've been either specific to a certain userbase (i.e. Journalfen was only for fandom) or hampered by varying levels of fail.
I guess it remains to be seen if Dreamwidth will suffer from fail too. I guess the thing is, I've interacted with one-half of their main development team around fannish circles for a few years now, and she seems to be a smart and dedicated person who has a good business head and is willing to put her money where her mouth is when it comes to free speech and protecting the interests of their userbase. Both of DW's main developers used to work on LJ's development team, and set out with a goal of fixing LJ's buggy and bloated code and lousy customer service. Their stated goal with DW is to build a sustainable blogging site that's user-friendly in as many different ways as possible: easy to use, doesn't allow its growth to outstrip its bandwidth/support, allows its users maximum freedom of expression, and so forth. And I've been watching
Some links:
- Dreamwidth's wiki-style FAQ
- Dreamwidth's changes from LJ along with a brief account of its founding
- Dreamwidth's diversity statement
- Features available on Dreamwidth's different account levels
- A listing of posts by LJ users talking about why they're switching to Dreamwidth
So ... why am I considering moving? I haven't had any bad experiences with LJ; I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
But I have noticed some things that make me kind of nervous. LJ is, as we all know, owned by Russians, which isn't necessarily a problem by itself, but they recently fired half their US staff and I don't know if it's just my imagination that I've been noticing slower loading times and occasional brief outages over the last few months. Last year, of course, there were problems with user accounts getting TOS'd without notice for things like posting sexually explicit fanfic, and scans_daily was just recently TOS'd in the same manner, without giving them a chance to argue their case or back up anything.
I don't think LJ is going to vanish overnight by any means. But I am starting to think there might be some validity to those who suggest that LJ's owners are more interested in catering to a Russian-language userbase who want a Facebook-style social networking site than in supporting the needs of users, like me, who want a low-key blogging and writing platform. And while I'm fairly confident of my ability to quietly crank along in the dusty corners of LJ for quite awhile (and, like I said, I'd still be cross-posting if I moved), what I really want is somewhere stable and not too large that I don't have to worry about being TOS'd or having the user agreement change out from under me.
I could host a blog on my own site -- I still pay for webspace on the laylalawlor.com domain -- but I don't for two reasons: a) because LJ is easy (I don't have to worry about customizing and updating a Wordpress installation; I have all of LJ's little toys to play with), and b) social interaction -- my main purpose in blogging here is not so much to put my words out there for the world and posterity, but to stay up with the people that I know.
As far as #2 goes, though, I can still have my cake and eat it too -- I've still got my LJ account, I'll still be cross-posting and reading my LJ friends list. And I don't really have a huge circle on LJ; my LJ friends list has been pretty static and small for the last few years -- it's largely writers' blogs or communities that I read, plus a small number of people I interact with on a semi-regular basis. (I admit to being an inveterate lurker; I read you guys' blogs, but I don't comment all that much.)
And I am very wooed by the opportunity to start over fresh, and get a chance to reorganize my creative stuff. This is WHY I end up redoing my website every couple of years (and I think it's about due for another ...), because I'll come up with an organizational scheme that works for me, and then start to actually use it and discover that it doesn't really work for what I'm actually doing with it, end up with everything tangled in a snarled mess and move on to something that I think would work better. Only it doesn't.
In this case, I don't like having my creative stuff spread out between here and
icefallpress and icefallstudio. It made sense to me in the beginning to separate things out into a personal blog, an artblog and a locked writing journal, but, well, I've only ever posted one thing to icefallstudio before abandoning it, and there's nothing I post to icefallpress that couldn't be posted just as easily to laylalawlor, if I would just organize and update my tags to make things easy to find. And, well, there's the other thing ... my tags are a mess. I'd like to do a total tag overhaul and then start posting all of my fiction and creative updates (comics, etc) to ONE journal along with my relatively infrequent personal posts, so there's only one blog to watch for all of my different stuff. I think the other way used to make more sense to me because I wasn't really used to creative-blog subculture -- these days, after spending several years watching writers' blogs and getting used to reading fiction on blogs, I actually prefer having their creative stuff mixed in with their personal stuff rather than having it spread out to a bunch of different blogs and websites so that I have to remember that "blogfairy" (or whatever) on LJ is also the writer "janedoe.com" who is also the maintainer of the "fairycircle" artblog.In short, I am a flake.
But, also, I'm using the Internet differently now than I was five years ago, so I want to manage my website differently than I used to. And since I've been wanting to do an overhaul, moving to Dreamwidth might be a good catalyst for going about it. You can import the contents of an LJ to Dreamwidth, complete with comments and all. I'm thinking about doing that, and then cross-posting (which I understand from the beta-testers works pretty well), and basically shutting down both of the "icefall" blogs -- well, I won't be deleting the content or anything like that, but I won't be adding anything new; all of that will go here. Or, er, "here" on Dreamwidth, that is.
So, Dreamwidth's accounts go on sale April 30th. At this point, you need to either buy at least 1 month of a paid account ($3/month) or get an invite code from an existing user in order to get in. I'm still dithering about it, as I do, but right now I'm definitely leaning in the direction of buying myself a Dreamwidth account for a month and checking it out.