Dreamwidth: the search for a webhome

[branchandroot]

For those who may have noticed my new icons, or seen mention of this in passing, Dreamwidth is a fork of the LiveJournal code. That is, it takes the current open source code and, instead of making future updates from the LJ version, starts writing it in a different direction. (Kind of like fanfic, really, only different.)

Two months or so from now, when Dreamwidth.org goes live for open beta, I will move there.

The reasons are many and varied, and I have to go back a little ways to explain them all. See, around 2000 when I first made myself present on the web, I figured I would just express myself in static websites. I knew that I am a) a very unreliable correspondent, b) prone to keeping diaries and journals only bit fits and starts, and c) not comfortable with hurly burly verbal interaction when I can't see the other people. So none of the other then-options such as mailing lists or bulletin boards appealed to me.

2003 rolled around, and I was getting properly into the swing of my fandom (my primary reason for an online presence). Blogs were starting to roll but they looked a lot like BBs to me so eh. But a ficcer I had started emailing with waved an LJ invite at me a few times, and I thought I might as well. At least I'd know one person there.

Imagine my startlement when the LJ format fitted me to a T. It had these nifty threaded comments that helped manage conversations in a way the didn't bombard me, and it had equally nifty privacy options that let me have a private diary and a public discussion on the same account. And there were cool people all over! People who liked the things I did and talked about it all the time! What could be better? I settled in and got used to having, not just a presence, but a home--a stable place where I could get to know people and they could get to know me and we could talk about life, the universe and anime everything.

So my websites became a secondary presence and LJ became my HQ, my historical record, my point of interaction, my home.

Then came The Buyout and 6A's ham-handed management, ads, boldthrough, increasing interference and decreasing trust. And finally I had enough. I chose to move my home to another service, one I could trust, and that service was InsaneJournal. And I sighed with relief because it felt like home again. It was slower, there were glitches, but I had left that nasty edge of "you are a product/problem, not a person" behind. Enough other people moved around the same time to support a nice little community. I liked it. Hell, I liked it enough to volunteer to make the new site schemes, which would have run a few thousand dollars if I'd taken it as a commercial contract!

But I read a lot of entries about moving and not moving, about history and inertia, about platforms and migration, and the thing that stuck in the back of my mind was the bit about how people don't move for ethical convictions, at least not many of them. People move because some other model has been invented/completed that gives them more than the place they're at then does. IJ, with the best of intentions, even with a good and responsible admin, doesn't have the infrastructure to do that kind of development.

Dreamwidth does.

DW has an advantage over every other danga-code site, most especially including LJ, in that it's being created from the start with a clear business model and vision of what kind of site it's going to be. And that vision is a small site--something that supports its admins and programmers and other staff at a living wage but isn't looking to make a big profit, to be the next big thing, to be a commercial product that can be sold for astronomical prices before the current bubble bursts.

That's the home that I remember having happened more or less by accident at LJ, by chance and evolution and stubbornness. That's the home that I want back, and this time I can have it by design and be more assured that it will endure.

DW also has a networking advantage. Its founders are part of a group of people who know and love LJ-the-community, as opposed to LJ-the-moneymaking-venture, who have worked on it in the past, who are ready and willing to volunteer for the programming, the brainstorming, the testing, the boilerplating, the deal-with-people-ing to give people more and sustain the effort over time.


I hope that all this will draw enough people over to a) make a thriving community and b) get enough people to transfer/back up their content that we don't lose too much when LJ finally reaches the end it's heading towards.

So! To that end, let me mention some of DW's advantages. At launch, DW will import entire journals, and multiple journals if you want, (including entries, comments, tags, userpics and flists) from other danga-code sites. It will recreate your flist(s) with RSS feeds (the problem of offering you locked posts from other sites is one of the high priority projects and may be available soonish, let us hope and cheer on the programmers). It will split the flist into a 'watch' list and a 'trust' list, just like we've been asking for for ages. It will even let us have longer usernames and comments and entries.

On the to-do list, DW aims to overhaul the horrible Memories function to act more like a sensible bookmarking tool, and to introduce a parent/child account structure so that we can finally link all our journals (from our point of view only, of course) and switch from one to another without all that tedious logging in and out. Even if you don't use Firefox.

There are a lot of other ideas being bandied back and forth about subscription to specific tags, entry and comment management, making OpenID sign-ins both non-anonymous and a way for people to control imported comments and even cooler stuff. There are people combing back entries in lj_suggestions to see what it is users (as opposed to prospective buyers) actually want.

Go see! Mouse around the Wiki. Page through some of the mailing list archives. Maybe chip in your two cents, because this? This is for us.

We're home.

Comments

[afuna]

♥

[branchandroot]

*hearts hearts hearts* And I still feel that way.

[afuna]

♥♥♥♥♥!