![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
promethia_tenkUPDATED: In light of the new Terms of Service over on LJ, I think I have to amend my basic recommendation here to 'abandon ship as soon as possible.' I personally have deleted my LiveJournal. But a lot of this is still relevant to how to set yourself up over here.
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Hello old friends and new. If you’ve not heard, LiveJournal is now being hosted on Russian servers, leading to many a declaration that this time, really, we are all moving to Dreamwidth. Really, really.
Pity Dreamwidth sucks.
As someone who made the move . . . *boggles* four years ago now, I am here to tell you that this does not have to be a misery. It also does not have to be an all-or-nothing thing, unless you want it to be. You, too, can move to Dreamwidth and like it.
I’m not going to tell you why you should move to Dreamwidth. If you’re still using LiveJournal, your reasons are probably well-established. But if recent events are making you think that you need to suck it up and move anyway, read on.
Look, I’ll be honest, I’m a bit of a technological drifter by nature. I jump hardware and software platforms all the time. Because I’m bored. Because I want a new challenge. Because I like the way my thoughts feel in a new box. It’s an adventure for me. I don’t expect everybody to feel the same way about things, but I will tell you if you can take on even a bit of this mindset, moving will be a lot more enjoyable.
Change! Adventure! A fresh start! A chance to rethink how you do things and why.
Go on, paint your room a new color! Maybe you’ll like it *eyebrow wiggle*
STAGE ONE: Decide you’re going to actually do it, and commit. I will tell you a secret: whether or not you successfully move to Dreamwidth is entirely in your hands. You can’t control what anybody else will do. Other people may follow you, or they may not. Whether they do or don’t, you can still be friends. You will, however, exponentially increase your chances of anybody following you if you actually make the move. Waiting for everybody else to do it properly with you is a surefire way for everybody to end up back on LiveJournal.
I read this advice on some long-forgotten Dreamwidther’s journal lo those many years ago when I was thinking about moving, and they were absolutely right. Choose to do it, and it will happen.
STAGE TWO: Choose your strategy. I would not personally recommend going cold turkey, deleting your LiveJournal, and trying not to look back. If you feel that is what you need to do, go ahead, but I suspect you would be making things hard for yourself for very little practical benefit. As others have noted, the damage is basically done: the Russians have your data already (and have for a long time), and ‘deleting’ it will not fix that. If you want to get your journal down from public view or you want to cut off your ‘escape route’ so you can’t go back, that’s fine, but realize that that’s all you’re doing. The important thing is to decide how much money/data/legitimacy you want to give LiveJournal going forward.
What I did, and I think what most people who successfully and happily move to Dreamwidth do, is migrate in stages. You can take these as slow or as quickly as you want to but, crucially, if you actually, really, truly want to make Dreamwidth your primary journaling platform, you need to take active steps to treat it as such. Just setting up cross-posting and then waiting for Dreamwidth to become interesting will not work. If you want this to be your home, put out your knickknacks, leave your shoes in the hallway, spill wine on the couch, and invite your friends over.
STAGE THREE: The practical stuff that you’ve heard about a million times and may have already done: make your account, set up cross-posting, friend all your friends, and import your LJ (some details on the nitty-gritty of this here.)
Dreamwidth has a brief rundown on some important practical differences between DW and LJ here.
aphelant made a more in-depth comparison of the two sites, with numerous useful links, back during Subject-Line-gate five years ago. Some of it is therefore out of date, but overall I think it's a good primer for people who want to start using DW seriously.
Something that doesn’t get mentioned as much, but I highly recommend is to claim your open ID comments. When you do this, any comments imported from LJ on your or anyone else’s DW will appear as coming from your DW account.
If you need a ‘no going back’ step that’s less drastic than purging your whole LJ (and if you want to keep DW afloat) is to consider getting yourself a paid account. It’s the ‘I bought a gym membership, so I’m going to use it, dammit!’ approach.
STAGE FOUR: Decorate. That Dreamwidth is ugly is a common complaint. Personally, I like the system pages better than LJ's, but I will admit that most of the layouts are pretty awful out of the box. Here’s the thing, though: Dreamwidth layouts are, on average, a lot more flexible than LJ ones. Almost all of them are designed to allow you to tinker with every damn aspect of their presentation without needing to do any coding yourself. Yes, getting something you like will probably take a bit of work, but if you can put aside wanting the site to be a perfect LJ clone, I’ll bet you can find something you will enjoy.
Custom themes are also an option. There are lots of good ones on![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
dreamwidthlayouts which you can install with honestly no knowledge of CSS. It is also, apparently, possible to import some of the LiveJournal themes onto DW, though I have no experience with this myself. I know you can get Flexible Squares over here. Here’s a quick Google search, for example.
About icons: Dreamwidth only allows additional icons for paid users, for reasons of system resources (apparently icons are a lot more resource-intensive than they seem). The good news is if you do have a paid account, you automatically get 100 icons and any additional icons you purchase are yours in perpetuity, for as long as you have a paid account (no annual charges).
Also about icons: if you give your icons on DW the same names as your LJ icons, cross-posting will automatically mirror which icon you use between the two sites (if you use an icon you don’t have on LJ to cross-post, your LJ post will show your default icon.)
If you can’t get used to all the red on Dreamwidth's system pages, maybe give purple a try? Or dark mode. Setting is here, at the bottom of the page.
If other people’s journals are hideous and you can’t read them, avail yourself of the handy ‘reload page in style mine/light/original’ links in the toolbar at the top of the page (available to both paid and unpaid users).
Beta post entries page: If you write your entries in html and never use the rich text editor, I highly recommend going here and enabling the beta test of the new create entries page. They call it 'beta,' but it's been around for years and I've never had a problem with it. It's very clean and pretty and you can customize the controls you see. Neat!
And last but by no means least, poke around in your browser's settings to find out what your default font size is set to. It may be making Dreamwidth look boxier than it needs to.
STAGE FIVE: Start privileging Dreamwidth over Livejournal. This is the crucial bit, and what separates the people who move to Dreamwidth from the people who visit and occasionally threaten to move but never do.
Read your Dreamwidth reading list before your LJ Flist. I made it my fist bookmark instead of my second. That simple.
Watch who reliably posts on both sites and who doesn’t. I recommend giving this some time--at least a month--because a lot of people are going to start and then give it up. If it seems like someone has truly made the move, make the move to reading and interacting with them on DW. Then, remove them from your default view on LJ (how to filter your friends list). No need to unfriend people on LJ, but you don’t want to have to read every person’s posts twice, and your reading list on Dreamwidth is now your primary portal, right?!? *nods*
Import things like newsletters over to your reading list using RSS. It sounds silly, but having![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
who_daily on my DW made a big difference in making it feel like my main site. Anyone can make their own feeds here, no paid account required. Unfortunately not all LJ journals or comms make good RSS feeds. Feeds cannot import anything behind a friends lock, and anything under a cut is going to show up in full on your reading list, so sites with a lot of long posts or content you might not want to see are going to be out. Besides newsletters, icon journals make good candidates.
Your reading list is as full as you want it to be. Find some new content and people to follow on DW. This may mean adjusting your expectations a bit. (I have some suggestions here. The post is pretty old, so some links are out of date, but might give you jumping-off ideas.) Another thing to consider: moving to DW, especially during a time of mass-exodus, can be like the first day of college. Everybody is a bit nervous and looking for a friend. Even old-timers are usually genuinely happy to meet other people who are serious about using the site, just be nice and non-creepy. And Dreamwidth’s separation between the list of who you follow on your reading list and who you give access to your locked posts means that you can get to know new people without having to commit to sharing everything.
Deciding where to comment on cross-posted entries: This is a real ‘weigh your values’ kind of deal. If you’ve decided you can’t give LJ a single scrap of your data any more, your choice is obviously already made. If you’re feeling evangelical and really want to help push your flist over to DW, go ahead and always comment on people’s DW post instead of the LJ one, though expect to meet some pushback and a lot of inertia. Personally, I prefer to take my cues from the person whose journal I’m replying to: if they’ve gone DW-first (or have expressed a desire to), then I’ll comment on DW. If they’re treating DW like a backup only (or if all the good conversation is over on LJ), then I’ll comment there. I think this is the biggest thing you can do to avoid being the annoying Dreamwidth person and, as long as you follow it, you’re probably not losing any friends.
STAGE SIX: The deep cuts. You may never get to this stage, and that’s fine. You decide how far you want to go. In general order of severity:
Disabling comments on your LJ. This scares people, and I’ll admit it’s a bit of a step. I wouldn’t do it right away unless you have serious reasons for needing/wanting to get off LJ right now. You will in all likelihood lose a few people if you do this, though probably less than you think if you take your time about it and let people get used to you being over here first. Unfortunately it can be hard to move discussion over to your DW from LJ without cutting off the option to reply on LJ.
Stop reading your flist. Again, this requires some sacrifice, and I don’t think there’s any need to force it. But you may find at some point that your reading list is much more active and interesting than your flist and that it feels like the right thing to do. There are still ways to keep tabs on the people over on LJ. Making RSS feeds of friends who don’t cross-post is one option, though note the caveats above about the limitations of RSS. If you just have a few near and dear LJ-holdouts, I would suggest setting up LJ notifications so you get an email whenever they post.
Stop cross-posting. This will absolutely lose you people, and in the past I've never seen much reason to do it as cross-posting is such an easy thing to do for the people you've left behind. I'll admit I'm thinking about it, though. I don't much like the idea of giving LJ anything further from me.
Delete your LJ?!? I'll admit, it seems unnecessary to me, though I can see the cathartic allure in the present circumstances. Unfortunately the data’s already out there, and you can’t take it back now. In the meantime, you'd be losing everything you contributed on LJ. Yes, you can back up your journal, but you'd be trashing your posts and comments on other journals and comms. For me, that represents far more posting volume than the contents of my actual journal. YMMV.
EXTRA RESOURCES: I can't possibly cover all the things you might want to do with Dreamwidth, but there is a very passionate community of people on this site who are devoted to helping you do it, whatever it is. I had about a million different pages open that I was thinking of linking you all to, but to simplify things a bit, I'll just give you this, a massive post of DW resources of all kinds. If there's something specific you want badly enough, you can probably find your answers somewhere down the rabbit hole.
I hope this is helpful to anybody feeling a bit overwhelmed about things and not knowing what steps to take and how. Feel free to link this to anybody you think could use it.
Change can be fun, if you embrace it! Good luck!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Hello old friends and new. If you’ve not heard, LiveJournal is now being hosted on Russian servers, leading to many a declaration that this time, really, we are all moving to Dreamwidth. Really, really.
Pity Dreamwidth sucks.
As someone who made the move . . . *boggles* four years ago now, I am here to tell you that this does not have to be a misery. It also does not have to be an all-or-nothing thing, unless you want it to be. You, too, can move to Dreamwidth and like it.
I’m not going to tell you why you should move to Dreamwidth. If you’re still using LiveJournal, your reasons are probably well-established. But if recent events are making you think that you need to suck it up and move anyway, read on.
Look, I’ll be honest, I’m a bit of a technological drifter by nature. I jump hardware and software platforms all the time. Because I’m bored. Because I want a new challenge. Because I like the way my thoughts feel in a new box. It’s an adventure for me. I don’t expect everybody to feel the same way about things, but I will tell you if you can take on even a bit of this mindset, moving will be a lot more enjoyable.
Change! Adventure! A fresh start! A chance to rethink how you do things and why.
Go on, paint your room a new color! Maybe you’ll like it *eyebrow wiggle*
STAGE ONE: Decide you’re going to actually do it, and commit. I will tell you a secret: whether or not you successfully move to Dreamwidth is entirely in your hands. You can’t control what anybody else will do. Other people may follow you, or they may not. Whether they do or don’t, you can still be friends. You will, however, exponentially increase your chances of anybody following you if you actually make the move. Waiting for everybody else to do it properly with you is a surefire way for everybody to end up back on LiveJournal.
I read this advice on some long-forgotten Dreamwidther’s journal lo those many years ago when I was thinking about moving, and they were absolutely right. Choose to do it, and it will happen.
STAGE TWO: Choose your strategy. I would not personally recommend going cold turkey, deleting your LiveJournal, and trying not to look back. If you feel that is what you need to do, go ahead, but I suspect you would be making things hard for yourself for very little practical benefit. As others have noted, the damage is basically done: the Russians have your data already (and have for a long time), and ‘deleting’ it will not fix that. If you want to get your journal down from public view or you want to cut off your ‘escape route’ so you can’t go back, that’s fine, but realize that that’s all you’re doing. The important thing is to decide how much money/data/legitimacy you want to give LiveJournal going forward.
What I did, and I think what most people who successfully and happily move to Dreamwidth do, is migrate in stages. You can take these as slow or as quickly as you want to but, crucially, if you actually, really, truly want to make Dreamwidth your primary journaling platform, you need to take active steps to treat it as such. Just setting up cross-posting and then waiting for Dreamwidth to become interesting will not work. If you want this to be your home, put out your knickknacks, leave your shoes in the hallway, spill wine on the couch, and invite your friends over.
STAGE THREE: The practical stuff that you’ve heard about a million times and may have already done: make your account, set up cross-posting, friend all your friends, and import your LJ (some details on the nitty-gritty of this here.)
Dreamwidth has a brief rundown on some important practical differences between DW and LJ here.
aphelant made a more in-depth comparison of the two sites, with numerous useful links, back during Subject-Line-gate five years ago. Some of it is therefore out of date, but overall I think it's a good primer for people who want to start using DW seriously.Something that doesn’t get mentioned as much, but I highly recommend is to claim your open ID comments. When you do this, any comments imported from LJ on your or anyone else’s DW will appear as coming from your DW account.
If you need a ‘no going back’ step that’s less drastic than purging your whole LJ (and if you want to keep DW afloat) is to consider getting yourself a paid account. It’s the ‘I bought a gym membership, so I’m going to use it, dammit!’ approach.
STAGE FOUR: Decorate. That Dreamwidth is ugly is a common complaint. Personally, I like the system pages better than LJ's, but I will admit that most of the layouts are pretty awful out of the box. Here’s the thing, though: Dreamwidth layouts are, on average, a lot more flexible than LJ ones. Almost all of them are designed to allow you to tinker with every damn aspect of their presentation without needing to do any coding yourself. Yes, getting something you like will probably take a bit of work, but if you can put aside wanting the site to be a perfect LJ clone, I’ll bet you can find something you will enjoy.
Custom themes are also an option. There are lots of good ones on
dreamwidthlayouts which you can install with honestly no knowledge of CSS. It is also, apparently, possible to import some of the LiveJournal themes onto DW, though I have no experience with this myself. I know you can get Flexible Squares over here. Here’s a quick Google search, for example.About icons: Dreamwidth only allows additional icons for paid users, for reasons of system resources (apparently icons are a lot more resource-intensive than they seem). The good news is if you do have a paid account, you automatically get 100 icons and any additional icons you purchase are yours in perpetuity, for as long as you have a paid account (no annual charges).
Also about icons: if you give your icons on DW the same names as your LJ icons, cross-posting will automatically mirror which icon you use between the two sites (if you use an icon you don’t have on LJ to cross-post, your LJ post will show your default icon.)
If you can’t get used to all the red on Dreamwidth's system pages, maybe give purple a try? Or dark mode. Setting is here, at the bottom of the page.
If other people’s journals are hideous and you can’t read them, avail yourself of the handy ‘reload page in style mine/light/original’ links in the toolbar at the top of the page (available to both paid and unpaid users).
Beta post entries page: If you write your entries in html and never use the rich text editor, I highly recommend going here and enabling the beta test of the new create entries page. They call it 'beta,' but it's been around for years and I've never had a problem with it. It's very clean and pretty and you can customize the controls you see. Neat!
And last but by no means least, poke around in your browser's settings to find out what your default font size is set to. It may be making Dreamwidth look boxier than it needs to.
STAGE FIVE: Start privileging Dreamwidth over Livejournal. This is the crucial bit, and what separates the people who move to Dreamwidth from the people who visit and occasionally threaten to move but never do.
Read your Dreamwidth reading list before your LJ Flist. I made it my fist bookmark instead of my second. That simple.
Watch who reliably posts on both sites and who doesn’t. I recommend giving this some time--at least a month--because a lot of people are going to start and then give it up. If it seems like someone has truly made the move, make the move to reading and interacting with them on DW. Then, remove them from your default view on LJ (how to filter your friends list). No need to unfriend people on LJ, but you don’t want to have to read every person’s posts twice, and your reading list on Dreamwidth is now your primary portal, right?!? *nods*
Import things like newsletters over to your reading list using RSS. It sounds silly, but having
who_daily on my DW made a big difference in making it feel like my main site. Anyone can make their own feeds here, no paid account required. Unfortunately not all LJ journals or comms make good RSS feeds. Feeds cannot import anything behind a friends lock, and anything under a cut is going to show up in full on your reading list, so sites with a lot of long posts or content you might not want to see are going to be out. Besides newsletters, icon journals make good candidates.Your reading list is as full as you want it to be. Find some new content and people to follow on DW. This may mean adjusting your expectations a bit. (I have some suggestions here. The post is pretty old, so some links are out of date, but might give you jumping-off ideas.) Another thing to consider: moving to DW, especially during a time of mass-exodus, can be like the first day of college. Everybody is a bit nervous and looking for a friend. Even old-timers are usually genuinely happy to meet other people who are serious about using the site, just be nice and non-creepy. And Dreamwidth’s separation between the list of who you follow on your reading list and who you give access to your locked posts means that you can get to know new people without having to commit to sharing everything.
Deciding where to comment on cross-posted entries: This is a real ‘weigh your values’ kind of deal. If you’ve decided you can’t give LJ a single scrap of your data any more, your choice is obviously already made. If you’re feeling evangelical and really want to help push your flist over to DW, go ahead and always comment on people’s DW post instead of the LJ one, though expect to meet some pushback and a lot of inertia. Personally, I prefer to take my cues from the person whose journal I’m replying to: if they’ve gone DW-first (or have expressed a desire to), then I’ll comment on DW. If they’re treating DW like a backup only (or if all the good conversation is over on LJ), then I’ll comment there. I think this is the biggest thing you can do to avoid being the annoying Dreamwidth person and, as long as you follow it, you’re probably not losing any friends.
STAGE SIX: The deep cuts. You may never get to this stage, and that’s fine. You decide how far you want to go. In general order of severity:
Disabling comments on your LJ. This scares people, and I’ll admit it’s a bit of a step. I wouldn’t do it right away unless you have serious reasons for needing/wanting to get off LJ right now. You will in all likelihood lose a few people if you do this, though probably less than you think if you take your time about it and let people get used to you being over here first. Unfortunately it can be hard to move discussion over to your DW from LJ without cutting off the option to reply on LJ.
Stop reading your flist. Again, this requires some sacrifice, and I don’t think there’s any need to force it. But you may find at some point that your reading list is much more active and interesting than your flist and that it feels like the right thing to do. There are still ways to keep tabs on the people over on LJ. Making RSS feeds of friends who don’t cross-post is one option, though note the caveats above about the limitations of RSS. If you just have a few near and dear LJ-holdouts, I would suggest setting up LJ notifications so you get an email whenever they post.
Stop cross-posting. This will absolutely lose you people, and in the past I've never seen much reason to do it as cross-posting is such an easy thing to do for the people you've left behind. I'll admit I'm thinking about it, though. I don't much like the idea of giving LJ anything further from me.
Delete your LJ?!? I'll admit, it seems unnecessary to me, though I can see the cathartic allure in the present circumstances. Unfortunately the data’s already out there, and you can’t take it back now. In the meantime, you'd be losing everything you contributed on LJ. Yes, you can back up your journal, but you'd be trashing your posts and comments on other journals and comms. For me, that represents far more posting volume than the contents of my actual journal. YMMV.
EXTRA RESOURCES: I can't possibly cover all the things you might want to do with Dreamwidth, but there is a very passionate community of people on this site who are devoted to helping you do it, whatever it is. I had about a million different pages open that I was thinking of linking you all to, but to simplify things a bit, I'll just give you this, a massive post of DW resources of all kinds. If there's something specific you want badly enough, you can probably find your answers somewhere down the rabbit hole.
I hope this is helpful to anybody feeling a bit overwhelmed about things and not knowing what steps to take and how. Feel free to link this to anybody you think could use it.
Change can be fun, if you embrace it! Good luck!
(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 11:48 pm (UTC)Bet it's the huge volume of LJ users jumping ship.
Anyway, any insight is appreciated. Thanks.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 11:56 pm (UTC)Hmmm. Importing the comments themselves takes quite some time (and a lot more time right now because of the volume of imports). Those comments come over after your entries are done importing. But once that's done I've never heard of claiming your open ID involving any delays.
Still, patience is probably the word of the day with any of these processes right now.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 11:58 pm (UTC)May I compliment you on your lovely layout? I especially like the banner up top.