Life in a Northern Town

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? ( Cut for nattering )

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.