Dreamwidth

[lauralaitaine]

You may have heard a lot of people talking about Dreamwidth recently. So what is it and why should you care?

Dreamwidth is an LJ fork. This is not the same as an LJ clone. Clone sites take the LJ code, put it on their own servers and run it; these are the IJs, GJs, JFs of this world. They don't do any active development. I have never had an

Comments

[lauralaitaine]

The granting thing seems to make things a lot more complicated. Controlling who can see which bits of your journal is what friend group are for. If the latter is still there, I really don't see the point of the granting thing.

As I understand it (and why I think what they've done is great) is that it divorces the set of journals that I want to read from the word "friend". Some of the people behind the journals that I read are friends, yes, but not all. And when I subscribe to a new journal, sometimes I am interested in getting to know the person better, but sometimes I just want to read their posts because they have interesting things to say. This is a way of making the distinction clear to them, as well as in my own personal and private friend groups.

There's also a list of people who you grant access to and a list of people who you just read in your profile. I can imagine that lots of people will want this kind of information to be confidential.

You can hide any and all of those things, just like you can for your LJ.

No one is forcing you to get an account with them if there are things you don't like. This was a this-is-why-I-am-excited-about-dreamwidth post. I simply wanted to raise awareness of what I think is a cool thing that's happening and I've done that. I've said my piece, I don't intend to badger people about it constantly or force them to get an account.

[avf_uk]

This is a way of making the distinction clear to them, as well as in my own personal and private friend groups.

So, they could have just added an “allow members of this friend group to see that they are in fact members of this friend group” feature. Seems like that would have made things more flexible.