Why fandom won't leave LJ until LJ collapses

[antennapedia]

This is pretty much what went through my mind when all the kerfluffles happened last summer. I've only gotten around to expressing it coherently now. I continue to think about it because the project is tempting: I look at fanfiction.net and I see a terrible archive platform; I look at LJ and I see an even worse one. But today seems like a great day

Comments

[quivo]

This is a nicely comprehensive post. And I think you're right that the alternative to LJ will probably have to come outside from fandom, if only so that it doesn't get bogged down in the kind of strife that OTW has already seen from early on, as well as the usual grumble-mumble of people who don't think their I-want-a-pony feature requests are getting adequate facetime :P. Just like you said, no one knows until someone manages to build something, and that just adds to the inertia of people on LJ.

As for synecdochic's poll, I'm boggling at how many (almost 60% at last refresh) people wouldn't budge from LJ unless all their friends were going. I guess that just reinforces how intensely the social nature of LJ has bound people to it-- makes me wonder if there would have been such a great move from Usenet et al if there were better social features :P. This is one of the things I quite like about decentralized blogging a la Wordpress and Blogger: the blog's identity is mostly separate from whatever system it is built on, so switching to better or

[lassarina]

I have to say, the thing about synecdochic's post that intrigued me most was the bit about complete interoperability with the fooJournal sites. If I could move to another hosting platform while keeping my LJ friends without hassle I'd be about 5 billion times more likely to hop.

As it is, I post to both LJ and IJ, and whine to myself about having to read two f-lists. I'd love to send that the way of the dodo.

[quivo]

I guess the thing that intrigued me most about her entry is more to do with the assumed attitude that the hypothetical other journal would be set up with. As in, an attitude of 'how do we keep this sustainable?'. Sustainability and portability of content are more important to me now, as is innovation

jumping in

[worldserpent]

The finding features in LJ itself truly do suck. This is why IMHO LJ has major issues as a blogging software. However, by using LJseek and icerocket you can mitigate some of the search suckiness, although by no means do they produce comprehensive results

Re: jumping in

[quivo]

I think from LJ's perspective, it isn't in their interest to make it easy for you not to use the site, so I'm not surprised that it's not super easy and encouraged by the FAQs to do this.This, I feel, is because they're still floundering around on the monetization/attitude issue, and don't seem to understand that their main draw right now is still the content that users create. I don't see how making it harder for users not to directly use LJ helps their site in anything more than a superficial way. If it was easy to use/track LJ via RSS, cellphones and desktop apps and so on, it would probably make it more likely that users would post and comment. Walled garden tactics is Facebook and MySpace territory, that's true; but it was also AOL territory, and look where it got them

Re: jumping in

[worldserpent]

Eh, but considering that Facebook and Myspace have achieved so much success.... I think if anything, the conventional wisdom is on that ground. Anyway, I don't think it's necessarily a deliberate decision, just that there is not much incentive, plain and simple, for them to do it. The posters who would benefit the most from broadcasting are the ones who don't friends-lock, after all (because they're going for a mass audience), and right now, RSS is mostly used by technologically sophisticated people, who can figure out how to make it work for them.

Well, the question is whether there are enough people who use markdown to make it worth the $$$ it would take to code it. You could try going to suggestions and suggesting it.

I find that Google blogsearch really, really sucks for finding livejournal posts on the topics I'm into. The other two sites that I tried give results that are much better, but YMMV, I guess.

I find it totally unsurprising that LJ hasn't gotten around to creating an internal search engine? It would be a serious strain on

Re: jumping in

[quivo]

I find it totally unsurprising that LJ hasn't gotten around to creating an internal search engine? It would be a serious strain on the servers.This is one of those points I both understand and don't: I feel like giving users the ability to find things is important enough that they should probably have put some thought behind it by now. And as far as server strain goes, this is why LJ really needs to sort out monetization. Knowing what is paying for server costs and that means you know what might pay for the extra servers and server load, or, alternatively, how to make sure stuff shows up in Google blogsearch and all. As things stand, users don't have an incentive to make their LJs searchable; that would be another thing to tackle

Re: jumping in

[worldserpent]

It depends on how you use LJ. If you just use it to communicate among a rel. small number of friends (the avg. LJ user, I read somewhere, has less than forty friends), and if it's mostly about your everyday life, short entries like that, it's more of a social networking tool. If you use it as a blog, then it's v. important to you to be searchable

Re: jumping in

[quivo]

It depends on how you use LJ.
Well, getting back to the context of our discussion, fannish use is the kind of use I'm thinking of. It's both important to me as a fan to have the fannish content I produce (well, not so much now :P) be searchable, AND to be able to connect with my fandom friends privately. This is why (and I am sorry for saying this so many times!) I don't blog at LJ anymore. It isn't worth the effort to bet that LJ will be what I need fannishly over the next few years, especially when there are alternatives that I like more (Tumblr, future OTW archive, FF.net, etc). And SUP's involvement has only strengthened my mental position on this: they want to be a blogging service, something like Blogger.com, and I need more than that.

But why should LJ try to convince users to make their LJs searchable? They are by default.Because, people who turn off the feature aside, the default feature is not enough to help people (read: me) find content on LJ. When I was still reading fic in HP fandom (I still do, just at a way, way

Re: jumping in

[worldserpent]

Oh, what I meant was that one reason why it's hard to find content on LJ is that people turn off google indexing as an option. That's why you can't find a lot of stuff. When I do search for stuff, sometimes stuff on LJ does come up. I really think a lot of it is because people turn off the indexing feature, unless there is some other reason why it doesn't? The tags people specify do show up on search engines, for example, icerocket. However, a lot of that is dependent on people actually tagging their entries with tags that actually are useful and make sense. But actually, I think the number of people who have turned off search is non-trivial within fandom.

Yeah, LJ pretty much sucks ass on finding content. I wonder why they don't integrate a search into the English website? It's probably that they don't have the resources or it's just not that high of a priority, I suppose.

/shrug. You said you were jonesing for them, so I assumed you were interested?

Re: jumping in

[quivo]

You said you were jonesing for them, so I assumed you were interested?
Sorry about this-- I guess I should have made it clear that though I'm interested in these features, I'm not really watching out to see if they come from LJ or an LJ-clone. I watch metafandom
>'s del.icio.us account and <lj user= out of habit, so I'd hear about new stuff coming down the line. But I know that if I want stuff like this, I'll just have to put in the effort and sort out a blog of my own with other software.

[siderea]

This is one of the things I quite like about decentralized blogging a la Wordpress and Blogger: the blog's identity is mostly separate from whatever system it is built on, so switching to better or more secure building blocks involves only counting the costs of a software upgrade.

And that is one thing I'm starting to want for the LJ alternative, whatever it is: more of a separation between social features and the building blocks of a blog. I'm tired of walled gardens and half-walled gardens because it is so hard to move out of them.

Hi. I'm here from metafandom. And I'm part of a newly formed OpenSource project to do that: to make a distributed version of LJ, where each person runs her own (just like WP) at the hosting company of her choice, but it's LJ: they all interoperate smoothly, just like being all on one site.

antennapedia, respectfully, I disagree: most of what you want (but not all) does not, technologically, require "a site" or "a business" any more than everyone's email all needs to be on one site for everyone to email one another

[antennapedia]

Distributing the content everywhere does dodge the scalability and legal issues; or rather, it distributes them along with the responsibility for site administration, and so on. I think it won't fly for social reasons, but then, I can imagine software that solves the social problems as well, so hey, that might work. There is a reason, however, why fans don't like running their own web sites. Most of them don't know how to do it, and appreciate the convenience of going to a site somebody else runs.

That project sounds interesting! Good luck!

[siderea]

There is a reason, however, why fans don't like running their own web sites. Most of them don't know how to do it

Right. Which is why the plan is to integrate it with popular hosting company admin tools, and to promote it to hosting companies as a product they can offer customers. So a determined user could put it on any host if she really wanted to do it by hand, but the less determined user would have lots of hosting companies offering turn-key installs as part of their standard $7/mo packages to choose from. Just like WP. (You realize all those WP users don't have any more clue how to run a site than the average fan does, yes? They just go to any of a zillion we-install-it-for-you companies.)

Won't solve it for everyone, but then it doesn't have to if it provides interoperability with LJ and clones. I'm far more concerned that hosting (e.g. $7/mo) may be too rich for most people's blood.