vague sort-of update
Hey everyone.
Been a while, hasn't it? Yeah. There isn't much of an update, I don't think, and I'm not sure what to say. I remain of the opinion that LJ isn't really the best home for fandom. The issue, though, is that there aren't a lot of options. People (myself included) aren't going to leave LJ for greener pastures unless the pastures are quite shiny (in terms of awesome features and ease of transition) and their friends are there. A fannish journaling site has the potential to be amazing, but it would definitely not be easy or cheap or smooth sailing. It requires a lot of resources and knowledge and skills that I don't personally have, and I don't know if I could find them. I'm working on it, in a fills-the-empty-spaces-of-my-time sort of way, but there aren't a lot of those.
I still think about it, though, all the time; for a while I was thinking maybe it could live on the Google App Engine, but there's a no-porn policy, so that idea died within about five minutes of inception. It was attractive, though, because it took all the infrastructure issues away. Alas.
So, yeah, I don't know. I'm still thinking and talking and recruiting and brainstorming and occasionally hacking and coming up with insane ideas. Maybe the thing could be distributed, maybe the porn could be encrypted on the server and decrypted by the browser, maybe the thing could be on a pre-existing platform so all we'd need to do is write a few plugins and package everything together, etc. The leaving LJ idea isn't dead, but I'm not as optimistic as I once was that it can happen soon (obviously). So I feel like right now the thing to do is try to make the best of the situation here.
To that end, please vote in the LJ Advisory Board elections. Others have discussed it at length in more eloquent terms than I have time for right now, but the point is that if we want a fannish representative on the board, we need to make our voices heard. There's more information at fandom_votes, so please check it out and vote if you haven't already done so. You've got till Thursday, 9pm PDT.
ETA: There are some comments coming in regarding the status of other projects, so I figured I should link them.
Been a while, hasn't it? Yeah. There isn't much of an update, I don't think, and I'm not sure what to say. I remain of the opinion that LJ isn't really the best home for fandom. The issue, though, is that there aren't a lot of options. People (myself included) aren't going to leave LJ for greener pastures unless the pastures are quite shiny (in terms of awesome features and ease of transition) and their friends are there. A fannish journaling site has the potential to be amazing, but it would definitely not be easy or cheap or smooth sailing. It requires a lot of resources and knowledge and skills that I don't personally have, and I don't know if I could find them. I'm working on it, in a fills-the-empty-spaces-of-my-time sort of way, but there aren't a lot of those.
I still think about it, though, all the time; for a while I was thinking maybe it could live on the Google App Engine, but there's a no-porn policy, so that idea died within about five minutes of inception. It was attractive, though, because it took all the infrastructure issues away. Alas.
So, yeah, I don't know. I'm still thinking and talking and recruiting and brainstorming and occasionally hacking and coming up with insane ideas. Maybe the thing could be distributed, maybe the porn could be encrypted on the server and decrypted by the browser, maybe the thing could be on a pre-existing platform so all we'd need to do is write a few plugins and package everything together, etc. The leaving LJ idea isn't dead, but I'm not as optimistic as I once was that it can happen soon (obviously). So I feel like right now the thing to do is try to make the best of the situation here.
To that end, please vote in the LJ Advisory Board elections. Others have discussed it at length in more eloquent terms than I have time for right now, but the point is that if we want a fannish representative on the board, we need to make our voices heard. There's more information at fandom_votes, so please check it out and vote if you haven't already done so. You've got till Thursday, 9pm PDT.
ETA: There are some comments coming in regarding the status of other projects, so I figured I should link them.
- Scribblit Inksome is live and there's more information at tsfkas
- synecdochic posted a totally hypothetical poll about forking the LJ code a while back
- Someone who very probably has an LJ is discussing something similar and asking for people to join the project's the google group