Dreamwidth. WTF?

[penk]

So. There's this thing called LJ. It's a site that has a ton of journals on it, and people tend to use it a lot because all their friends are there, and it has an interesting way to 'lock' postings to specific readers. Many people are into it, despite it's numerous technical and aesthetic shortcomings.

"Why don't you use a blog site or something else?"

"Nah, all my friends are on LJ, I'll just use that."

But now there's Dreamwidth. Which is...another livejournal installation.

Because of LJ's braindead RSS mechanism, I cannot feed 'locked' posts out to an aggregator, so I generally read LJ for personal posts, and Google Reader for everything else.

Now I'll have to read LJ, Google Reader, AND Dreamwidth?

Folks who are getting Dreamwidth accounts. I'm not going to jump through hoops to read content over there. If you have an RSS feed of your journal there, let me know, I'll happily read it. If you start posting friends-locked posts over there, chances are I'll never see them - which may or may not matter to you. Just a heads up.

However, if you are going to make the jump, may I ask... why? There are tons of livejournal copies out there. It's opensource. And why LJ software, why not use blogger.com or typepad?

Comments

[fraterrisus]

I believe that the major reason is that the owners of DW are not as "evil" as LJ's new Russian overlords. Now, you can argue that point until we all die – will they continue to be not evil, etc. etc. etc.

The DW owners are also planning on (and already have) implementing some features that LJ users have been clamoring for for years with no response. So to a certain extent, this is "LJ2.0", better technically as well as socially.

The other thing is that they have a DW-LJ gateway set up, so you can create DW posts and export them to LJ automatically. Can you do that with locked/filtered posts? Dunno, but I bet you can.

(p.s. I bet that they will fix the retarded RSS problem, too.)

[penk.livejournal.com]

I suppose if it ends up that the majority of users I'm interested in migrate to DW, and there's features fixed, then it might 'be a good thing'.

I hope most folks enable the crossposter. If you do hear of the RSS thing fixed, please let me know. (I believe it's actually a deliberate 'disable' by LJ - you have to have a certain paid account in order to read locked posts via RSS - and even with that, it's quite convoluted to implement regardless).

Thanks for the info!

[etherial.livejournal.com]

As the crossposter currently operates, it appears to not only violate LJ TOS but is a major LJ security breach.

In other news, no blogging software I've seen comes close to LJ for the functionality I want. So, at present, it would have to be LJ or an LJ-clone.

[penk.livejournal.com]

It'd be easy to devolve into a technical tit for tat on merits or non-merits of LJ vs other tools, but I just want to be clear how I see it...

LJ has great -community- tools. Friends lists and locking are wins.

But as a blogging tool, it's -awful-. The interface is byzantine and inflexible. I run an MT4 based blog, and the toolset there is FAR more powerful than anything LJ has for blogging. If I want to publish my blog and have control over it and add or remove features or change the layout any way I want - change authentication, have multiple posters, all that stuff - that I can do on movable type. LJ does not offer this, but it does offer the community features.

I have a big issue with LJ (journaling) vs 'blogging' - it's a well known character flaw. :)

[etherial.livejournal.com]

Honestly, for me, it's the comments. Commenting software is so rudimentary on most blogs I've seen, they're not even on the same *playing field* as LJ.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

This. There is no blogging platform I've seen with a commenting system worth a crap.

[penk.livejournal.com]

So, just for the sake of argument. Lets say I had the god-like ability to modify planet-geek to have any feature I wanted. What would the teh awesomest comment system be?

I know the biggest one that does it it for me is nested comments - being able to follow a comment thread (Bob replied to Bill who was replying to Steve) - traditionally through the mechanism of indents or nested containers.

What else?

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

you answer your own questions in the first two sentences.

[dbang.livejournal.com]

Which two?

"So. There's this thing called LJ."?

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

Oops! you're right. i missed the period after "So". Make that the first 3 sentences.

[dbang.livejournal.com]

OK.

"It's a site that has a ton of journals on it, and people tend to use it a lot because all their friends are there, and it has an interesting way to 'lock' postings to specific readers."

That seems like a reason to be on LJ. I don't understand how that answers the question: Why do/might people jump to DW from LJ?

[penk.livejournal.com]

Wait, what?

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

As said above, i missed the period and read the first two sentences as one. "So, theres this thing called LJ".

That said, i'm on LJ not because i like it's interface (although, really, it isn't that bad. Yes it has bugs. nothings perfect. Anyhow, I'm on LJ because most of my social crowd is. Thats all. Same reason many of us live in the Boston area. Face it, the weather sucks much of the year, the traffic bites, etc. etc. Most of us are here for the *people* that seem to inhabit the place.

If some great "strange attractor" appears and everyone for some unknown mystical reason decides to jump ship to Dreamwidth, well, I will too. Mooooo, Baaa. Thats where the conversations will be. It has nothing to do with any technical aspects.

There is great social inertia in these sort of changes. Dreamwidths enabling of easy cross-posting is clearly an acknowledgement that such changes have great activation energy. That they are making it so easy, in my mind, is a masterstroke. Will it work? I have no idea.

[soong.livejournal.com]

Yup. There have been other attempts to enact migrations from the lj mothership to lj clones and sometimes they're partially successful but they break the nifty ACL feature that the monolithic LJ has.

Someday there will be a federated crossposty solution with good ACL support and good readability, but I (nor anyone else) haven't written it yet.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I joined chiefly because I had been hearing rumblings about Dreamwidth doing some interesting things with the LJ codebase, and I was curious to see what they do. (So far it looks like the answer is "not much" but I'm still interested.)

[wotw]

First of all, I don't understand what advantages
people are seeing (phrases like "less evil" convey
exactly zero information to me). Therefore maybe
I'm missing something important.

But, that said, it seems very unlikely to me that
any technical or policy difference can outweigh the
advantage of having everybody in one place. And
since we're already all *in* one place, it is my
fervent hope that everyone stays here.

[dbang.livejournal.com]

What he said.

[cos]

It shouldn't affect you. Dreamwidth offers great integration with LiveJournal (that's one of the most interesting things about it, they're making a significant step towards distributed LJ), and pretty much everyone so far who's on LJ and trying Dreamwidth is having all their Dreamwidth posts automatically crossposted to LJ (a feature DW makes very easy to enable).

Crossposting ickyness.

[mangosteen]

Regrettably, the DW->LJ crossposter works only if you're willing to trust DW with your LJ password.

This implies that I'm willing to trust DW with all posts that I have access to, including the locked posts of my friends.

Once they figure out a better solution, I'll be more interested. I'm aware that this means that anyone who has enabled the crossposter has given DW access to all of my friendslocked postings. I'm still tempted to do a temporary deletion of my LJ because of that, but I haven't decided, yet.

Re: Crossposting ickyness.

[geekchick]

Someone on my f-list just posted that they'd asked the DW folks about crossposter security; the response from DW was that the privacy policy is being updated to include a section clarifying that the information given to the crossposter program is used only for crossposting as the individual user intended it to be used. They're also working on modifying the crossposter functionality to allow you to manually enter your password any time you want to use it rather than storing your password. This may or may not affect how much you trust them, granted, but they're aware that this sort of thing is a concern.

[penk.livejournal.com]

Can you detail this 'great integration'? As far as I've seen so far, DW will duplicate your post to LJ.

That's it.

Period.

Sounds like an RSS feed to me.

If I comment here, it doesnt' show up on DW. If I comment on DW, it doesn't show up here. So now you've got two different forums for commentary on the same topic, and neither sees what the other is doing.

So what's the 'great integration'?

(BTW, my blog cross-posts to LJ. Is that 'great integration?')

[cos]

There are other aspects to it, but you clearly don't care or want to know about them, and they shouldn't affect you since you're not going to use DW.

[penk.livejournal.com]

You made the point of 'great integration'. THe only integration I see is that DW crossposts to LJ. If you can't make any other points to support your claim, then I'm sorry that I consider your claim weak.

DW crossposts to LJ. My blog software does that. What else does DW do that supports your 'great integration' claim?

[cos]

I didn't "make the point of", I mentioned it without describing everything. I don't want to get into a debate and your tone is hostile and snarky. There are other things DW does to better connect LJ and DW. They're not relevant to you since you don't plan to use it.

Why live in Mosaic? There are tons of neighborhoods out there.

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

If I end up using Dreamwidth it'll be because all my friends are on it. If they aren't, I won't. I grabbed a couple of accounts with names I like just in case that should come to pass.

You really did answer your own question.

It that "social networking" thing all the kids keep talking about. Kinda cool, really.

[geekchick]

Now I'll have to read LJ, Google Reader, AND Dreamwidth?

DW plans (in the future, it doesn't work now) to support reading your LJ friends page from within Dreamwidth. I don't know what the timeline for that is though.

I'm not planning on migrating wholesale over there, but I wanted to check out some of their features (particularly separating out "people I read" from "people I want to read my locked posts" if those two categories don't overlap). I still don't know what I'm going to use it for, I mostly wanted to stake out my preferred username until I figure it out.

[nadreck.livejournal.com]

What braindead RSS mechanism? All you need to do to view locked posts in an RSS reader is use a reader that supports authentication. I know (from personal experience) that Vienna for OS X supports it, and I can't imagine there aren't others for other OSes as well.

There have always been a slew of LJ clones, and whenever another one launches, there's a kerfluffle about folks having to read another site... and then it dies down and everything goes back to normal. I don't see why this is going to be any different.

[penk.livejournal.com]

This only works if you have a paid account.　I must pay LJ for the privilege of reading my friends posts without hitting LJ directly.

[scatmania.livejournal.com]

Don't know if you'd be interested, but you can proxy LJ, DW etc. posts (including "friends only" ones) through to your Google Reader or other aggregator by using Feed Proxy (http://lj.abnib.co.uk/).