My tl;dr on Dreamwidth
I don't get what all the fuss over Dreamwidth's invite system is about. Is it mostly because people feel special if they get an invite? A "look at me I'm so cool I know the BNFs" kind of thing? I mean, I'm excited about DW too. I think that there's a good concept behind it, it looks pretty (although a little overly pink for my tastes) and clean, and it has the potential to be a really good creative space. Just not anytime in the near future.
I mean, really, there's not a whole lot to do on DW right now. Unless you're really into western media fandom (and sci-fi in particular) or all your friends have migrated, there's no point in having a DW account RIGHT THIS MINUTE. From what I can tell most people aren't going to be using DW exclusively but instead cross-posting to both LJ and DW. If not, I'm pretty sure that you can (will be able to?) make an RSS feed and have it show up on your LJ flist. Plus there's always commenting with OpenID.
Part of the reason JF and IJ didn't lead to a huge fandom exodus was because the people that moved were the kinds of people that only hung out with a close circle of friends and got sick of LJ drama and/or used it for RPing*. Hopefully the invite system will get around this by letting the early DW users (yes, I'm sure a lot of them are BNFs, but then they're usually BNFs for a reason) create the content that will draw others in.
So for all those people who are all "INVITE CODE NOW!", just be patient. I don't see why you'd NEED one quite this early (it IS still just going to be in open beta, people), when there's not a whole lot of content. And for people who think that it's elitist, well yes it kind of is, but it's not without some reasoning. There's no way to tell if that reasoning will benefit DW in the long run, but I'm hoping it will.
*TBH I only namesquat on IJ and only go to JF for fandom_wank, so I don't know if this is entirely correct, it just seems that way from what I've seen
I mean, really, there's not a whole lot to do on DW right now. Unless you're really into western media fandom (and sci-fi in particular) or all your friends have migrated, there's no point in having a DW account RIGHT THIS MINUTE. From what I can tell most people aren't going to be using DW exclusively but instead cross-posting to both LJ and DW. If not, I'm pretty sure that you can (will be able to?) make an RSS feed and have it show up on your LJ flist. Plus there's always commenting with OpenID.
Part of the reason JF and IJ didn't lead to a huge fandom exodus was because the people that moved were the kinds of people that only hung out with a close circle of friends and got sick of LJ drama and/or used it for RPing*. Hopefully the invite system will get around this by letting the early DW users (yes, I'm sure a lot of them are BNFs, but then they're usually BNFs for a reason) create the content that will draw others in.
So for all those people who are all "INVITE CODE NOW!", just be patient. I don't see why you'd NEED one quite this early (it IS still just going to be in open beta, people), when there's not a whole lot of content. And for people who think that it's elitist, well yes it kind of is, but it's not without some reasoning. There's no way to tell if that reasoning will benefit DW in the long run, but I'm hoping it will.
*TBH I only namesquat on IJ and only go to JF for fandom_wank, so I don't know if this is entirely correct, it just seems that way from what I've seen