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 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. LJ is actually not so bad in that respect, since you can export entries and (with a bit of work) comments, but the social bit doesn't come with you. I feel like I'd rather start with a social component that is easy to import to and from from the get-go, so that's just a part of transferring your online identity elsewhere. So I guess I'd add "makes a better, more portable Social API available as well as older ones" to feature #4.

As far as importing the flist goes, the most plausible way I can think off to do the flist "transfer" is to integrate some kind of RSS reader into the service and offer new readers the option of grabbing their LJ foaf file or whatever and feeding it to the RSS reader, and then use that same RSS reader to perform the flist function by adding whoever the person friends/follows on the new site. I really, really hope it's that simple: build a less basic RSS reader that's sensitive to input, and make it work with authentication for LJ clones.

[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.

Simply put, it isn't happening here at LJ anymore-- not in the direction I'd prefer it to, anyway. What use are the flagging and adult content notice and explore area to me if it is still hard to, I don't know, FIND ANYTHING? What good is it to have a friends list here if I can't move it anywhere else, or add all my friends to an RSS reader without hassle, or have one giant feed that pushes out everything my flist spits up? What good are security levels and filtering if it is hard to get the hang of? What good is the (godawful!) WYSIWYG editor if I can't switch back to plain HTML (or plain Markdown or Textile, how about that!) to fine-tune things?

There hasn't been much of a direction here (apart from the ads initiative, which I wouldn't mind so much if the ads didn't look like shit and fuck up layouts) for the last few months (maybe even years), and it shows. And that's sad-- LJ was ahead of its time way back when. Now, it's not. If there wasn't such a community here, a good chunk of people would have been gone already.

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.
You know, I blame this on LJ's handling of security filters and how that interferes with RSS. In theory, it shouldn't be hard to set up the feeds of whoever's on your flist in any modern RSS reader. In practice, locked entries don't show up, and you end up having to make a pilgrimmage back to whichever flist. I think LJ might even have left that buggy on purpose, because there's really nothing an flist can do that an RSS reader can't do (and do better, in some cases). If all three of my flists were updated more often, I'd be forced to read my flist more regularly.

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.

You can just not use the rich text editor, I think... I turned it off, though I can't recall how.

As for RSS, actually, you CAN read authenticated RSS feeds (friends-locked entries). You just need a reader which supports the format. I think Google Reader and Newsgator, of the web based ones, do, and many desktop readers also support them. You can also generate an OPML file to automate the process.

Supposedly paid users can also make an RSS feed of their friends-list, but since I am a free user, I can't vouch for how it works. http://community.livejournal.com/howto/40882.html

Eh, basically, 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.

However, many people have turned off their RSS feeds, so this is, I think, a severe problem for interoperability.

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.

This is where my beef with the text editor options LJ has comes in. I would much, much rather write posts in Markdown, because the syntax is easier to read and write than HTML, and can be converted to whatever I fancy later on. I have several posts on my laptop (including some from October of last year) that I haven't bothered to go through with simply because it wasn't worth the effort to sort out the html for them-- wouldn't LJ rather have that content on their site rather than on my computer? If they were monetizing based on user-produced content, the answer would be yes.

This is also the root cause of my beef with the crappy/non-existent LJ clients available for the Mac. I know about Deepest Sender (FFox extension. Long story short: I couldn't stand using it anymore), and about other random editors, but I don't use them because I don't like them. If LJ cared more about content, they would probably be making (more/better) apps like that themselves to encourage people to post more, or at least encouraging or helping out developers trying their hands at it.

The finding features in LJ itself truly do suck.
You know what is absolutely hilarious about this? LJ could be an even better tool for finding and connecting with interesting comms and people if they had a search engine (and properly indexed pages) that was worth a damn. It probably wouldn't impact privacy if there were options for opting out of the more extensive internal search as well as the external search, too. I don't bother to use LJSeek and such services because they suck in their own ways, and it's often easier to find what I want using Google.

As for RSS, actually, you CAN read authenticated RSS feeds
Here's where I wish I could edit my comment *sigh*. After posting it, I decided to try it out with NetNewsWire, and it worked like a charm. I don't know when I last tried it, but at that time I was using Google Reader, and it just wouldn't work. Now I'm going to see how often I end up visiting here for flist purposes, I guess :P

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 the servers. It's a huge, huge project to do something like that.

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.

As far as markdown and RSS and the Myspace/Facebook gold that SUP is probably eyeing, I'll just say that I've kind of given up on this site as far as positive change (from my point of view) goes. My priorities now are on decoupling and making sure I have favourite fics saved rather than trying to encourage change here. SUP, like someone else said down below, is going for being the it blog service in non-English-speaking countries.

Though some of their future changes might make things more favourable for fandom over here, it is more likely that they will not. It is probably not in SUP's favor to waste time on coding in Markdown or Textile support, or making their RSS features a little more robust, or making it easy for people to get off the site. I understand that, but that won't stop me from jonesing for more.

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.

Now, this may be why in SUP/Cyrillic LJ, there IS a search feature! Because those users are said to use it more like a mass audience blog. [I don't know how this search works, but it is integrated into the site.]

But why should LJ try to convince users to make their LJs searchable? They are by default. Anyone who has turned off search-engine indexing has already decided, for whatever reason, that they do not wish to do that. Imagine the wank if LJ tried to cajole peole into that.

Ahaha, but to play devil's advocate, how do you know that LJ hasn't sorted out their monetization? And reached the conclusions that have led them to take recent actions. They would have to be intensely dumb NOT to focus on monetization, to the point where I would be astounded if they had not done this research. And of course, hard figures on that would probably not be made public.

Like I said, you can ask for Markdown/Textile support. Just write up a suggestion. Sometimes they are implemented.

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 smaller volume), I never really bothered to try finding fic on LJ, as there were already a ton of archives that offered better search ability. Posting a fic on FF.net and pretty much every substantial archive includes specifying the category and a few other things that help make the fic a ton more findable than anything crossposted to a billion comms on LJ. When I search for random stuff on Google, ten to one it is Wordpress-, Blogger- and MT-hosted blogs that come up in/among the search results. LJ-- especially english/US-based LJ-- is currently just not going after content visibility to the degree that other blogging software does.

To be more specific, LJ has no:
- sitewide *text* search function, however bare-bones (well, US-specific LJ). Or, if the server strain would kill them,
- sitewide categorizing/tagging function. This is why that Explore LJ thing will have inconsistent performers: getting people to categorize their content for you through meaningful incentives (a la del.icio.us) is more efficient (and more likely to give meaningful results) than having an algorithm do it

This sucks because while it is easy to find more content through clicking on links and usernames and so on to go from journal to journal, it is hard to find a meaningful starting point. No starting point means no links to better content, and that means newbies that don't know the common starting points for communities stay confused until they are pointed to somewhere useful. Anyone can go to FF.net and dig up Naruto fic. Here at LJ, you'd have to do an interest search, and you *still* might not find anything because people didn't put in the kind of interest that you might start out searching for.

Ahaha, but to play devil's advocate, how do you know that LJ hasn't sorted out their monetization?
Actually, I know that LJ has schemes for monetization underway. SUP's recent actions make that clear. I just don't think US-style LJ is going to continue to function the way it is currently doing due to that, and while that's good on one hand (service likely to be around longer), there are some negatives (decreasing user influence on how things work).

Like I said, you can ask for Markdown/Textile support. Just write up a suggestion. Sometimes they are implemented.
How will I benefit from this if I don't want to be here, though? I feel like my time is better spent on sprucing up my IJ and Tumblr blogs and copying my fanfic from FF.net onto another stable site to back it up-- and keeping tabs on discussions like this to see how things are going ;).

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.

But if you feel strongly about One Site to Rule Them, you might want to check out elsejournal, which seems to have unanimously decided they want to be a customer cooperative or non-profit, if only for the example. There's more ways to do it than a simple business.

In any event, the LJdist project is just getting started, and is looking for coders (perl, MySQL), and elsejournal is looking for sysadmins and anybody really. Feel free to pass it on.

And at some point we are up and running with code and thinking about new features, I'll be back to pick your brains about how fic writers like their archives organized.

[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.