6 Year LJversary: Hello, Dreamwidth!
Six years (and two days) ago, I bought an LJ account, because of a post by wickedthought. (It's locked now, or I'd share it with you.) It wasn't a deep-and-meaningful post; it was sharp and funny. But I'd been looking for him since his website vanished, and I had a few friends who were active on LJ, and it seemed like the right time to join this game. Besides, it had NO ADS. This was rare in user-content-based websites, and I treasured it, and wanted to support the idea.
I was active at A Witches' Thicket at the time, and asked one of my friends there to make me an LJ userpic. I'm still using it. I had much fun here. I made some great friends. And then LJ was sold to SixApart, and then ads crept in, and then they grew to new areas. And 6A's policies were not "geeks welcome; post anything legal and we're fine with that." Nipplegate was one of their more ridiculous decisions. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time here. I wrote some fic. A few essays. Joined religious debate communities and snark communities, and was metaquotes'd a couple of times. And then Strikethrough07 happened, and I bought an InsaneJournal, and joined the OTW, and lamented the loss of the LJ I'd come to love.
But I knew IJ wouldn't be fandom's long-term home, wouldn't be my long-term home. The name bothers a lot of people, the code is an older version and occasionally glitchy, and there are ads. (IJ, unlike LJ, never promised there wouldn't be.) So I waited, caught between two journals, crossposting for a while, looking for the site that would be based on the principles I loved about LJ-that-was.
It's here! (Okay, it's not here. It'll be here at the end of the month.) dreamwidth is being put together by former LJ coders, who asked themselves, "what would we fix about LJ, if we had free access to all the code?" (The site itself is in closed beta right now, and up-and-down at various times.) Here's what they came up with: easy import of LJ, including with comments, splitting the f'list into "I'm watching these" and "I want these to have access to my locked posts," better interface, no ads, invite codes. Paid accounts that start at $3 for one month, for those who don't have a code but want to try it out. Better OpenID features--OpenID accounts get 6 userpics and a profile and can subscribe to a watchlist; they just can't make posts.
I plan on buying one of the 400 seed accounts, if I can get one. And over time, I'll shift from LJ and IJ to DW.
I was active at A Witches' Thicket at the time, and asked one of my friends there to make me an LJ userpic. I'm still using it. I had much fun here. I made some great friends. And then LJ was sold to SixApart, and then ads crept in, and then they grew to new areas. And 6A's policies were not "geeks welcome; post anything legal and we're fine with that." Nipplegate was one of their more ridiculous decisions. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time here. I wrote some fic. A few essays. Joined religious debate communities and snark communities, and was metaquotes'd a couple of times. And then Strikethrough07 happened, and I bought an InsaneJournal, and joined the OTW, and lamented the loss of the LJ I'd come to love.
But I knew IJ wouldn't be fandom's long-term home, wouldn't be my long-term home. The name bothers a lot of people, the code is an older version and occasionally glitchy, and there are ads. (IJ, unlike LJ, never promised there wouldn't be.) So I waited, caught between two journals, crossposting for a while, looking for the site that would be based on the principles I loved about LJ-that-was.
It's here! (Okay, it's not here. It'll be here at the end of the month.) dreamwidth is being put together by former LJ coders, who asked themselves, "what would we fix about LJ, if we had free access to all the code?" (The site itself is in closed beta right now, and up-and-down at various times.) Here's what they came up with: easy import of LJ, including with comments, splitting the f'list into "I'm watching these" and "I want these to have access to my locked posts," better interface, no ads, invite codes. Paid accounts that start at $3 for one month, for those who don't have a code but want to try it out. Better OpenID features--OpenID accounts get 6 userpics and a profile and can subscribe to a watchlist; they just can't make posts.
I plan on buying one of the 400 seed accounts, if I can get one. And over time, I'll shift from LJ and IJ to DW.