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

[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.