the obligatory Dreamwidth post
Which is mostly me thinking aloud, or whatever the equivalent is in written form.
As some of you have already figured out, I have a DW account: http://isis.dreamwidth.org/. You are welcome to subscribe/allow me there (or not); I will most likely not be posting there until DW is out of closed beta. What's gonna happen after that? I don't know.
The level of excitement among a certain segment of my fandom friends is pretty high; this feels like it's going to actually be the Big Migration. But it's impossible to tell at this stage. Remember the flight to InsaneJournal? The people I knew who left were pretty much just HP fans, a fandom which I was mostly out of by that point, but there was a small handful of people who I'd become real friends with, who I didn't want to lose track of. I made an IJ and dutifully went over there a couple times a week to read my tiny flist. But then...one person disappeared off the face of the earth, some people lost interest in me (and so, ditto), and pretty much everybody else save skuf decided they were either going to return to LJ or crosspost. So it made most sense to me to simply create skuf_ij and read that from here, and quit logging into IJ unless I wanted to comment to Skuf or to some other IJ post.
And that works okay, although the feed isn't not optimal because it doesn't handle locked content well. But I think ultimately, the only reason (for me; I have a permanent account and am generally happy with LJ) to actually use another journal/social media service is if a big hunk of my social network migrates and doesn't crosspost. That is: why bother logging into DW to read your journals, if I can read them here? And why have you friended in multiple places, if it just means I'm reading the same thing multiple times?
The crossposting thing is a little problematic as well because of discussion in comments. Splitting a discussion into two separate groups of discussers makes it a lot less interesting. zvi_likes_tv, who has been at the forefront of explaining DW to everyone else, is handling it by crossposting but disallowing comments on LJ and pointing to the DW version; that seems reasonable to me. But if I were planning to crosspost indefinitely (as opposed to ultimately migrating altogether; again, I don't know what I'm going to do!) it would make more sense for me to disallow DW comments and point people to LJ, since the bulk of my social network is already on LJ. At least, that makes sense until the bulk of my social network moves to DW. Will they? I dunno!
And that's leaving aside the question of changing social networks. My fandom interests have shifted over the years, and I am sure that many of you (although if this applies to you, you probably didn't click the cut tag :-) are looking for an excuse to stop reading my nattering about Fandoms What You Don't Care About. I am looking for an excuse to meet people in the Fandoms What I Am Suddenly Entranced By. But on the other hand: the excited chatter about DW is mostly coming from people I care about personally, but (maybe) don't share fandoms with any more. (But I still love them and want to keep reading what they write!) Most of the people in my shiny new fandoms don't seem to know or care about DW. And there is this weird starting-over mentality I have noticed, where people are getting DW accounts and refusing to identify who they were on LJ. This points to a whole different and parallel social network starting up there, and frankly, I am not sure I can handle more than one.
One of the "attractions" of DW is the ability to import a journal from LJ or IJ (and possibly also from other services, too; I know melannen_jf has been their JournalFen guinea pig), but me, I don't quite get it, and I don't plan to import this journal over there. As I explained to ignazwisdom, I don't see the point in importing this journal to DW:
My journal at LJ is a record of my time at LJ, and I have all sorts of links to my posts there; for example, my stories on my website link to the LJ announcements/versions for comments, and I don't even code up things shorter than 1000 words, I just point to the LJ post. Even if I were to go through and s/isiscolo.livejournal.com/isis.dreamwidth.org/ my whole website, there are still recs and other pointer places which would point to the old ones. I'd rather keep the comments in one place.
If I decide to migrate totally, it seems reasonably transparent for me to say, "for earlier entries see isiscolo".
Okay, and here's another issue. I'm composing this post in Semagic, which has all these handy-dandy little buttons to do what I want: username a user, blockquote a quote, boldface and italicize and link. I want to be able to keep this! I rely on LJaddons for so many things, most especially formatting comments, and that's not going to get ported (although I understand that DW is looking into creating something with some of its functionality). There's no reading filter capability yet, although I assume that's coming - this is important to me, because I like to separate my reading list into groups. I've got a permanent account here. So - there are a lot of reasons why it is just easier for me to (primarily) stay here.
Then again, I am isis at DreamWidth! (And there, I don't have to do the complicated coding I just did here to make a username link to another site...) This is a strong incentive to switch, oh, yes.
(I am not planning to move my RL journal, for those of you who read it.)
The upshot is - I dunno. I will probably friend and defriend, follow and stop following, twist in the wind and change my mind a whole lot. I am not going to start posting at DW until they're out of closed beta and anyone who wants an account can obtain one. I am not sure whether I am going to crosspost or just swap over entirely, or stay here but maintain a reading list there. I don't know. All I know is: I was around when fandom made the shift from Yahoo mailing lists to LiveJournal, and it was a sea change. Maybe this is another one. We'll see.
As some of you have already figured out, I have a DW account: http://isis.dreamwidth.org/. You are welcome to subscribe/allow me there (or not); I will most likely not be posting there until DW is out of closed beta. What's gonna happen after that? I don't know.
The level of excitement among a certain segment of my fandom friends is pretty high; this feels like it's going to actually be the Big Migration. But it's impossible to tell at this stage. Remember the flight to InsaneJournal? The people I knew who left were pretty much just HP fans, a fandom which I was mostly out of by that point, but there was a small handful of people who I'd become real friends with, who I didn't want to lose track of. I made an IJ and dutifully went over there a couple times a week to read my tiny flist. But then...one person disappeared off the face of the earth, some people lost interest in me (and so, ditto), and pretty much everybody else save skuf decided they were either going to return to LJ or crosspost. So it made most sense to me to simply create skuf_ij and read that from here, and quit logging into IJ unless I wanted to comment to Skuf or to some other IJ post.
And that works okay, although the feed isn't not optimal because it doesn't handle locked content well. But I think ultimately, the only reason (for me; I have a permanent account and am generally happy with LJ) to actually use another journal/social media service is if a big hunk of my social network migrates and doesn't crosspost. That is: why bother logging into DW to read your journals, if I can read them here? And why have you friended in multiple places, if it just means I'm reading the same thing multiple times?
The crossposting thing is a little problematic as well because of discussion in comments. Splitting a discussion into two separate groups of discussers makes it a lot less interesting. zvi_likes_tv, who has been at the forefront of explaining DW to everyone else, is handling it by crossposting but disallowing comments on LJ and pointing to the DW version; that seems reasonable to me. But if I were planning to crosspost indefinitely (as opposed to ultimately migrating altogether; again, I don't know what I'm going to do!) it would make more sense for me to disallow DW comments and point people to LJ, since the bulk of my social network is already on LJ. At least, that makes sense until the bulk of my social network moves to DW. Will they? I dunno!
And that's leaving aside the question of changing social networks. My fandom interests have shifted over the years, and I am sure that many of you (although if this applies to you, you probably didn't click the cut tag :-) are looking for an excuse to stop reading my nattering about Fandoms What You Don't Care About. I am looking for an excuse to meet people in the Fandoms What I Am Suddenly Entranced By. But on the other hand: the excited chatter about DW is mostly coming from people I care about personally, but (maybe) don't share fandoms with any more. (But I still love them and want to keep reading what they write!) Most of the people in my shiny new fandoms don't seem to know or care about DW. And there is this weird starting-over mentality I have noticed, where people are getting DW accounts and refusing to identify who they were on LJ. This points to a whole different and parallel social network starting up there, and frankly, I am not sure I can handle more than one.
One of the "attractions" of DW is the ability to import a journal from LJ or IJ (and possibly also from other services, too; I know melannen_jf has been their JournalFen guinea pig), but me, I don't quite get it, and I don't plan to import this journal over there. As I explained to ignazwisdom, I don't see the point in importing this journal to DW:
My journal at LJ is a record of my time at LJ, and I have all sorts of links to my posts there; for example, my stories on my website link to the LJ announcements/versions for comments, and I don't even code up things shorter than 1000 words, I just point to the LJ post. Even if I were to go through and s/isiscolo.livejournal.com/isis.dreamwidth.org/ my whole website, there are still recs and other pointer places which would point to the old ones. I'd rather keep the comments in one place.
If I decide to migrate totally, it seems reasonably transparent for me to say, "for earlier entries see isiscolo".
Okay, and here's another issue. I'm composing this post in Semagic, which has all these handy-dandy little buttons to do what I want: username a user, blockquote a quote, boldface and italicize and link. I want to be able to keep this! I rely on LJaddons for so many things, most especially formatting comments, and that's not going to get ported (although I understand that DW is looking into creating something with some of its functionality). There's no reading filter capability yet, although I assume that's coming - this is important to me, because I like to separate my reading list into groups. I've got a permanent account here. So - there are a lot of reasons why it is just easier for me to (primarily) stay here.
Then again, I am isis at DreamWidth! (And there, I don't have to do the complicated coding I just did here to make a username link to another site...) This is a strong incentive to switch, oh, yes.
(I am not planning to move my RL journal, for those of you who read it.)
The upshot is - I dunno. I will probably friend and defriend, follow and stop following, twist in the wind and change my mind a whole lot. I am not going to start posting at DW until they're out of closed beta and anyone who wants an account can obtain one. I am not sure whether I am going to crosspost or just swap over entirely, or stay here but maintain a reading list there. I don't know. All I know is: I was around when fandom made the shift from Yahoo mailing lists to LiveJournal, and it was a sea change. Maybe this is another one. We'll see.