Dreamwidth is the Portland of Fandom

[promethia_tenk]

I'm moving (ish)!

While I'm not raging over the recent LJ changes the way so many seem to be, I have been looking for awhile for a decent excuse to push more of my fannish life over onto DW. The current crisis seems as good a reason as any, and if we all of us sit around saying "I'll move to DW as soon as there's more fandom activity over there," then, well, there's never going to be more fandom activity over on DW, now is there?

Therefore from now on, I will be disabling LJ comments on new entries and directing commenters over to my DW. I will continue to cross-post to LJ so you can see my posts on your flist!

If you don't have a Dreamwidth account of your own, you can comment on Dreamwidth with your LJ account using OpenID. Learn how here. (Your OpenID URL would be username.livejournal.com.) I will also leave anonymous commenting on on DW for as long as it doesn't give me any grief : P

Anyone on my LJ flist who is also on DW, please feel free to friend me! Let me know who you are if I won't recognize your DW username.

Anyone on LJ who is interested in testing the waters, DW is currently having an open enrollment period (no invite code needed). Create an account here. And here's a handy guide to DW for LJ users!

Change is fun! See you all around.


ETA: elleth has an excellent linkspam here of LJ/DW news, features, and changes relevant to the current situation. Of particular interest to me among the things she's found: aphelant's beautifully in-depth post about the differences between LJ and DW. Also: apparently a feature for importing communities from LJ to DW is imminent!

Comments

[chaila]

I'm not raging as much as others either, since at least my personal journal isn't affected (yet?) but somehow I'm just annoyed on principle. It's weird but it's just...WHY? Nothing they did makes any sense at all (having to select icons by *picture*, and when the keywords are no longer actually in alphabetical order wtf; and loss of the ability to preview, whyyy), like even moreso than prior "fixes that actually break things," and I'm inexplicably offended by that.

if we all of us sit around saying "I'll move to DW as soon as there's more fandom activity over there," then, well, there's never going to be more fandom activity over on DW, now is there?

True that. That's why I finally started crossposting, although I still haven't been able to force myself to actually turn off LJ comments and direct people to DW to comment. I'm so afraid of deterring comments! *wavers some more* (Though I kind of waffle on whether I want LJ comments now, because I can't use most of my pretty, pretty icons).

[promethia_tenk]

I haven't gotten a thorough look at all of it yet, although my immediate reaction was that no one's mentioned how pretty the new comment fields are! The loss of functionality, though, just seems stupid, as you say. And it's part of a general pattern of stupidity I'd rather just get away from.

Still not as bad as Facebook, at least. Had a rage-quit them over their manhandling of privacy policy . . .

I'd been holding back from migrating comments over here out of fear of losing commenters, but actually I've been hoping for slightly less traffic lately. Not that I want to turn anyone away who's interested in my posts or end up f-locking everything, but . . . Sometimes I wish my journal felt a bit more intimate again, you know? So I figured why not.

[owlboy]

I only wish Dreamwidth had nicer layouts /design elitist

[promethia_tenk]

Yeah, it's all a bit . . . boxy. Fortunately they give you a lot of fine-grained control over customization?

[savvyliterate]

Yeah, I'm a design elitist as well. I did manage to get my LiveJournal layout over here to Dreamwidth, and it's amazing how having a good layout increases your enjoyability of a site.

[owlboy]

Oo, how did you do that?

[savvyliterate]

The person who did my layout did a tutorial. I have a Mixit-based layout, and lovelythings gave a couple more tutorials for Flexible Squares and Smooth Sailing.

Mixit-based tutorial
Flexible Squares and Smooth Sailing-based tutorial

[owlboy]

tyvm~

[promethia_tenk]

Oooo, very interesting--thanks for those. I may have to look into that later.

And your journal does look amazing!

[savvyliterate]

Thank you! The only thing I don't like is how it added in the "unknown view" (that goes to the network link) and I want to get rid of memories since I don't use those - just tags for the fic. I'll probably poke around with it at work tonight to see if I can get rid of those.

[kaffy_r]

I'm going to cross post things, I think, and try to be more active over here, but LJ still feels like home to me. Still, all places can become home, with enough time ....

(I'm curious; did you start feeling you wanted to go to DW for any particular non-rage-ish reason, then?)

[promethia_tenk]

Yeah, I'm sure the bulk of my online fandom activity will still be happening on LJ (it's not like I post to my own journal all that often), and I know what you mean about "home." Still, sometimes I get antsy and just want to change things!

I really like DW's general open-source, Creative Commons, non-commercial, radical transparency, listen-to-our-users thing : ) It's all principles I just think deserve supporting and am willing to inconvenience myself a bit for, and if I can manage to tip some other people over with me, so much the better. I've also been toying with getting a paid account of some kind in the foreseeable future, and I'd much rather give my money to these guys. Also, I like the finer-grained level of control this site gives you over a lot of features. (Ooooo, and I just found out DW supports comments up 3-4 times as long as LJ's! That alone automatically makes my online life 25% better . . .)

[snogged]

I'm really not raging yet.
It helped a lot that I had disabled the customized comments on my journal layout. That's kept things a bit more basic on my end anyway.

[promethia_tenk]

Yeah, I'm not one to rage over website changes in general, though I'll admit that LJ has been rather more ham-fisted with this stuff than other sites I use. Really I feel more like "I want to go to Dreamwidth" rather than "aaarrrgh, I need to leave Live Journal!" Glad to hear you're faring alright with things!

[honeynoir]

I applaud your decicion to move! \o/

I've been crossposting things randomly for a while and probably will continue to do that. I'm thinking about reducing my fandom-ing to commenting, and I can do that wherever, so. :)

And those links are excellent!

[promethia_tenk]

Why thank you : ) Yeah, I'm hardly a frequent poster myself, but I felt like making a clear stand on the matter, so . . .

I'm sure most of what I do will be on LJ just as before.

Love you icon, btw!

[honeynoir]

Making a clear stand is what's needed -- like you said, fandom activity won't go up on its own. The cross-post feature is genius, though; as is being able to gather all comments in one place.

This icon is my new favourite!

[promethia_tenk]

I've been admiring the people who have basically moved their journals over here. Then I realized, dammit, I can be one of them too!

[savvyliterate]

They're going to be doing community imports finally? Yeeeeees! I've gotten my entire main journal over here, but since I did my writing journal as a community, I've been gradually copying/pasting stuff over as time allows. I'd love to just be able to import the lot of it.

[promethia_tenk]

Right? Community import seems like it's been a huge stumbling block for migration. Hopefully it's up soon and works well!