so

[lirazel]

So there's shit going down, and I'm like...what if we actually all did move over to dreamwidth? Like, I feel like the entire Spuffy community could actually get together and emigrate over there. The reason I haven't is because most everyone is still over here, you know? But seasonal_spuffy's over there now, which I feel like is our central kind of thing that holds us together? Is su_herald there? And then if we got sb_fag_ends and fantas_magoria over there, too (which they may already be cross-posted, for all I know) plus all of our personal journals (I already have one, I just don't use it except occasionally I import my lj over there as a sort of backup), that would pretty much take care of everything, wouldn't it?

I'd be willing to buy more icons over there and get a paid account and everything if I knew that y'all were going to be over there, too. I'd say about 75% of my flist is from Buffyverse fandom. And I'd be willing to continue to crosspost over here for the people who aren't, and of course I'd want to keep up with people who stayed and stuff.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily something that we need to do. And I remember when dreamwidth first started being petrified that fandom would splinter and I wouldn't know how to find people. But if the majority of us made a decision together, I think it would be workable.

Because the privacy stuff that's going on here kind of freaks me out. And lj seems to have about as much respect for its userbase as tumblr does, which is saying something. I can't say that most of the problems with lj are things that affect me personally, because they don't (not being someone who rps or makes a lot of changes to the css). But privacy is different. That affects all of us. And it's unacceptable that people are being logged into other people's accounts, including those of people who are selling things via lj and whose inboxes contain information on other people's paypal accounts, addresses, etc. The fact that the management here hasn't seen this as something that needs to be dealt with is what makes me think we might be better off on another site.

That said, I know some people don't like dreamwidth, and I've never got a real clear read on why that is? So if you have strong anti-dreamwidth feelings, do you mind letting me know what your reasoning is? I'm sure there are legitimate complaints, I just don't know what they are.

Anyone got any thoughts? Again, not saying that this is something that definitely needs to happen. I'm going or staying wherever the majority of fandom is. But I'm thinking, you know?

Also, the new font in the entry box is FUGLY. The Fug Girls would not approve.

Comments

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

I actually don't remember at the moment--I feel like I've had both set up for her at different times. But if I left, I'd still keep crossposting as long as I had friends over here, which I probably still would, because I have a not-small number of friends outside of BtVS fandom who are kind of independent free-agents. So I'd want to keep up with them. I'd just move my paid account over to dw, where I could trust the people in charge.

[snickfic]

It's true, flocked posts don't come through the feed. The alternative is to subscribe to the tags that person uses on flocked DW posts, so you get notifications when they post one.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I wonder if that's something that dw could work on?

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

It's not possible to crosspost community entries from DW to LJ or vice versa. It's also not part of the DW code to import an existing LJ community to DW

My question about that is whether that's because it would never be possible to do so or if it's because the ability to do so just doesn't exist yet. Because if it's never going to be possible, then tough for us. But if it's just because the ability hasn't been implemented, wouldn't it be possible to talk to the people in charge about maybe making that happen? Because that would be AWESOME.

Once we get to the end of Angel S5, maybe things will have changed and we'll be able to do a wholesale import to DW for posterity.

Yeah, I was thinking that, too.

and now it will never be all in one searchable place again.

Yeah, I've often wished we could have an archive for it along the lines of Just Rewards.

I'm equally interested in finding old and new material, so I'm all for maintaining existing sources and making them more accessible for discovery, while creating copies in hopefully more stable environments where ever possible. What I absolutely HATE is people deleting existing repositories without backing them up somewhere first.

I am COMPLETELY with you on this.

[fenchurche.livejournal.com]

You've summed it all up pretty well, I think. I have an account over on DW, too... Fenchurch (without the E on th end, because I got it early enough! Woot!). I try to remember to crosspost there, but I'm not very good at it. Of course, lately I'm not very good at even posting here in the first place!

[rahirah]

I would personally be fine with it, but I don't think it will happen unless LJ tanks altogether, because too many people don't want to take the trouble to set up a new home base.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm weird in that I just don't think it would be much trouble? Literally the only reason I'm not over there already as my primary journal is because most of my friends are here.

[rahirah]

Although frankly, the average user is simply not going to run into that unless they go looking for it. (Unless they are someone who is directly impacted by DW's committment to site accessibility, which I would think would be an entirely good thing.) The atmospere of one's flist (or reading list) depends on the people you friend/subscribe to.

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

Very true. And I don't mind the social justice atmosphere myself. But yes, if you went over there and just interacted with the people you interact with here, then it wouldn't be an issue at all.

[rahirah]

That said, I know some people don't like dreamwidth, and I've never got a real clear read on why that is?


1. It's not LJ. People hate change. They hate other people telling them that the thing they like may not be as good as that other thing over there even more.
2. Several of the founders were involved in the LJ Abuse team back in the day, and apparently made enemies
3. At least one of the founders is/was a BNF in some Stargate-related fandom, and BNFs always attract wank
4. At the beginning, there were a number of people who predicted that it would fail financially within a year or two, so why bother?

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

I have a DW account under the same name but I only post the daily pimpage post, I find their way of handling things confusing. Plus I'm old and stuck in my ways and the vast majority of my friends are on LJ.

Do wish however they would stop making "changes" and I say the same thing about Photobucket, no good ever comes of these "improvements".

Ever.

[madcap-shiny.livejournal.com]

AAAAAAAAAAAAA THAT GLITCH SOUNDS HORRIFYING

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Okay, now that that's out of the way: I, too, am in the "still on lj because all my friends are here; only use my dreamwidth account for backing up purposes" camp. Also, like...all my icons are here! And my cute layout! And my monies :( MOVING JUST...SEEMS LIKE IT WOULD TAKE A LOT OF EFFORT (lololol laziness)...but oh, man, this privacy thing is just so gross, and I can't believe the staff hasn't said anything about it. (Also can't believe that anyone at all is saying "if you want to keep your info private, don't put it online," but I've see that at least once. Seriously?)

[next_to_normal]

there is a su_herald mirror over there.

There is, but it's not being used at all. There hasn't been a daily newsletter posted there in about a year, and judging by how infrequently my posts get picked up, they don't seem to check their DW reading list for things to link, either.

I've raised the issue before without much success, but if enough of fandom were to move, I imagine they'd have to be more active over there?

The problem with the comms is that, unlike personal journals, you can't simply crosspost entries. So if you want to genuinely mirror a comm on both LJ and DW, it means either double-posting manually, or importing from LJ to DW at certain intervals.

[next_to_normal]

I'd just have a paid one over there and keep this one to comment on the posts of people who haven't moved.

Yep, that's what I've been doing, and it works out pretty well. I sometimes lament the fact that I can only have 15 icons on LJ, but I have 250 on DW, lol, so I'll survive.

[rahirah]

Ditto. It wasn't much trouble to me to move over - but for a lot of people, it seems to be this vast looming obstacle. I don't get it, but I ran into enough resistance when I started crossposting from DW (and that was just crossposting!) to accept that it exists.

The majority of the people on my DW reading list who are active are non-BtVS people - they've moved on to other fandoms, or whatever. I tend to skim it once or twice a week. I would be so happy if there were more BtVS fandom people over there, but so many people on LJ are either indifferent or hostile to the idea that it would be extremely difficult to make it happen.

[next_to_normal]

And I need everything in once place. Even the twitters and tumblrs I follow, I route feeds through LJ.

You can do feeds through DW, too - including feeding LJ through DW. So everything is still all in one place.

[cordykitten]

You don't have me friended back so that will probably not count but I'm staying here. DW isn't LJ but it's good to have back-up. That's what I use it for.

And please, if you didn't do it already, feel free to let LJ know @ lj_releases about the font.
Hopefully they'll listen.....
As far as I know the log into the wrong accounts was only for a short time. Hope that's true.

[next_to_normal]

It's not a problem with DW. It's the feed reader's authentication that's an issue.

LJ's feed process doesn't support authentication, so only unlocked posts can show up on someone's LJ flist via a feed. (I've never tried it in reverse, though, so if you're feeding LJ through DW, I'm not sure if it would work.) Here's the post I made explaining it when I set up my journal.

[brutti-ma-buoni.livejournal.com]

Well, if LJ's explanation of the glitch holds good, it's rather less horrific than had been feared. Which is a relief. Though I think they could sound a little less smug about it - being able to read someone's flocked posts, even briefly, could be damaging even if you couldn't edit etc.

I think 'we', meaning a nice little bunch of Spuffies, could move over or at least move enough to shift the centre of gravity a little. The seasonal Spuffy experience doesn't suggest it would be hugely effective with a wider fandom, but we could keep on chatting as we do here.

Thing is, being a bit pairing-agnostic, I have a *lot* of non-Spuffy, even non-BtVS people and comms here, and I'm afraid I'm staying with LJ as a result. Will probably go through a brief spasm of crossposting from DW, which usually happens around this time in an LJ crisis, then get fed up and come back here.

I must find out, actually, how Seasonal Spuffy were allowed to import the comm - last I read, DW wouldn't allow comm imports because it was multiple people's intellectual property being duplicated and you couldn't get sufficient consents to make it legal. That was quite a while ago, though, and quite possibly they've changed their minds. It'd be nice to have Phantasmagoria backed up if it's considered acceptable now.

[gillo]

Like lots of others, I have a DW for backup (though it's been refusing to import posts and comments for the last week) but my flist is predominantly on LJ. It's not just the "hassle" of moving, more the fact that the eclectic mix of people I have on my flist here could never be reproduced there.

I don't know what it is about DW that makes me feel less comfortable; the people who run it seem friendly and respond pretty quickly. Currently I even have a paid account there too, to show appreciation for their handling of the DDoS crisis. But I don't want to move over there completely - it feels cramped compared to LJ, somehow.

I was very, very sad Seasonal Spuffy moved over to DW, and I don't feel it worked as well. There was far less "passer-by traffic" this time, and the RSS feed to LJ seemed very bare and stark compared to the actual posts. I agree with rebcake about the tagging, too - I put a heck of a lot of time and effort into doing my share of that job and it feels totally wasted now.

If all my Spuffy friends moved over there, I might move a little further towards regular posting there and crossposting here, but I'd be very sad. Not only is there an emotional attachment for me, there's the practicality of trying to keep track of two groups on two services.

I feel very sad that the sort of fragmentation I feared when DW got started does seem to be happening. Very sad indeed.

[silverusagi]

I know, but that means I have to change all of it. And as I doubt everyone from my flist will go to DW, it still means maintaining a presence in two places.

[next_to_normal]

except they really need an Expand option, like, stat

There is one. Maybe it's only for paid accounts, though (which is how it is on LJ). I was like, "Wait, there isn't? I never noticed that!" and had to go check my journal, lol. But yep, comments expand. In fact, in the last code push (or maybe the next one?) they're implementing a feature where you can expand ALL comments at once, rather than expanding each individual thread.

[next_to_normal]

But dw is pretty much just like lj as far as the most obvious uses go, so I personally don't understand why someone would rather drop out than move over there. I just don't think it would affect anything (if everyone did it) other than the url of the website at the top of the page. But that's just me.

Not just you! Me too. I am baffled sometimes at the reasons people give for not wanting to go to DW. Like, if you're lazy or don't like change just say so, don't make it out to be this huge obstacle to learn a new website. It's nearly identical to LJ (and any changes have almost universally been improvements).

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

My main reason for not wanting to move to DW is just the boring one that I'm settled here (and my account is paid for as permanent). I suppose that part of me does resent that LJ is splintering off so much as well. Already a lot of my friends have switched to spending most of their time on tumblr or on Facebook, sometimes twitter. I guess I just miss the days when the bulk of fandom was in one place. I don't feel like DW is ever really going to replace LJ in that way with everyone from LJ making the move there, most of the accounts set up there seem to be more used as back-up accounts actually, so it just feels like more of the same of people drifting off to all these different sites and losing the fandom network that we once had with LJ. If that makes sense Idk

[bobthemole.livejournal.com]

I got the impression that the mods exported the Seasonal Spuffy entries manually, or at least via some serious programming mojo with 3rd party software. Verity would have details.