Dreamwidth moves...
I know several of the people on my friends list are planning to move, or have already moved their journals over to Dreamwidth. I'm not going to put down a list of links giving more information on DW, because there are plenty of them out there that have already been done, better than I could have done them. I'd like to focus on the actual communication of the move, chiefly, the changing of usernames and the way in which people are choosing to announce (or hide) their moves.
On Username Changes:
I just got an invite code (my thanks to the lovely turloughishere) and am trying to figure out what to do about my username. For as long as I've used the internet on a semiregular basis I've used the name rilee16 (and not just on livejournal), been involved in over 30 fandoms (from plain old lurking to consistently posting, R&Ring, and moderating a message board) for about 9 years now. At 24 I've seen numerous instances of wank, had to deal with and watch others being hacked (both my own private work/school accounts and fandom accounts, thanks to a now former-gf and whatever troll decided to target lj users last). I've seen friendships grow, be nurtured, and implode. I've banned others and I'm sure I've been banned, to my knowledge, once (although in my defense, this person has banned every single person who dared to question her, not just trolls).
There's a part of me that just is rilee16; I didn't creat my username based on a song lyric I was really into and whose fandom I fell out of. Rilee is my actual nickname, the name I chose for myself when I was a teenager; it is the name my close friends use for me (in fact, a friend of almost 10 years only found out it wasn't my legal name last year). I actually do think of my self as rilee, more than I think of myself as ::insertRLnamehere::
But if I were to change my name in RL I wouldn't change it to Rilee, I'd change it to a different name I've already picked out, for many reasons, the chiefest if which is that it gives me a first name I like to use for business, while preserving the use of the name Rilee for my closest friends.
Rilee is a very loaded name for me; it basically encapsulates every major change in my life up until now (and believe me, everything that could have changed, has changed, and it isn't some hyperbolized statement to try to seem wiser or to make people take Me! As A Young Adult! more seriously, or something stupid like that), and at this point I'm starting to get leery of using it as a journal name. A part of me almost wants some distance, and a fresh start, and also yes, a cool name. Yes, a name I'd be willing to use if I were to start a shitty little punk rock band. A name that describes me and my experience in a very different way.
But of course there's the fact that, when people on your friends list change their journal names, there's always that chance you'll never remember who that person is and why the hell they're watching and commenting on your journal. I think that may be part of the reason so many of us lose track of people we genuinely care about over the years; they change their journal name for a fresh start, we forget which of our friends is attached to the new name, we lose track of their lives, stop commenting at their journal, or we accidentally defriend them because we don't know who they are and and they think we just don't care anymore, feel shitty, and write us off.
I don't know, thoughts on that?
On Announcements Of Our DW Move Status:
And on to announcement of our moves (or lack thereof). When I first started hearing about Dreamwidth and people got involved with the beta, I noticed that they might announce it in their LJs but, between my friends and my fic-following, my Friends List is so large that within just a couple of days I would have completely forgotten which people had announced their new DW journal name. I was completely unable to find their announcement posts, because almost no one was tagging their announcements, and no one was putting it in their LJ profiles. Now I'm not in any way accusing everyone of trying to be ~~~sneaksy or anything; I really do think that, for the most part, it's just a matter of a lot of us being really fucking excited and not thinking about the logistics other than Make DW Journal>Set Up Filters>Back Up LJ>Import LJ Posts To DW>Announce In Journal>Do RL Things.
I do however think that for some people the quiet/lack of announcement is being done for the purpose of making a clean break with a minimum of fuss; DW has Granted Access and Subscribe features, the contents of which, to my knowledge, are public. A lot of people like to be able to friend/defriend at will without saying anything to the person on the other end of things (I actually don't like doing it at all, makes me feel like I'm not willing to stand up and say "Your hatred of this character is unfounded and misogynistic, and not because she's a horribly written character, and I can't deal with hearing you spew nastiness about her every week," or that "If you're going to make judgments about the psychological fitness of others, you should actually go out and learn something about the field and not base your judgments on stereotypes popularized by the popular media; if I could do it, then it isn't that difficult" (Granted, I start out much more politely than that with no intention of defriending, and escalate if the OP acts like a gigantic floral-scented douche). I know I don't appreciate being on the other end of a random defriending, because it's happened before with someone I believed myself to be reasonably close to; we'd known each other through a certain fandom, we commented on each others journals, I cooed over her new nephew she was bonkers for, I supported her decision and refused to talk smack when she married fairly early in her relationship and genuinely hoped and expressed that I wanted them to be happy together. To have it happen suddenly, with no notice, made me wonder what exactly I did wrong, whether she just wasn't as invested as I was, if I had offended her and she decided she needed to cut her ties, or whether LJ burped or something and defriended some of her Friends list (this has happened on my journal) and she didn't notice; this all happened at a point where I wasn't posting much at all, so the last option was feasible.
So if we are making up our DW journals, and we do want as much of our friends list as possible friended over there eventually, and we do want our friends to take an interest in, and move or crosspost to, DW, why aren't many of us announcing it better? A lot of the people who are announcing are people who use tags on almost every journal entry, and aren't using "Dreamwidth," "DW," "Move Announcement," etc. to tag their entry. If they mention it on a post with a recipe, the recipe is tagged, but the announcement is not. If they mention it with a fic roundup, the fic roundup is tagged, but the announcement is not. It's incredibly frustrating, it makes me feel kind of shitty, and it's confusing.
Thoughts? Comments?
What I Am Going To Do:
Personally, when I figure out what username I'm going to be using, I'm going to be doing the following:
a) announcing it here in my LJ,
b) tagging the entry,
c) placing the name of my DW journal in my profile so my friends can find me there.|
d) if I choose to change my username, put my other LJ usernames in the profile and/or Friends Only post on my Dreamwidth account, so people know who they've just been friended by and don't think I'm some random creeper.
I'll make sure to remove the identifying info from my profile here, just enough to ensure my RL identity and my online identity stay pretty separate (my relatives and coworkers don't need to be able to find out about any porn I do or do not read, thanks ever so), but not make it so difficult that fannishly-inclined people completely lose track of me.
On Username Changes:
I just got an invite code (my thanks to the lovely turloughishere) and am trying to figure out what to do about my username. For as long as I've used the internet on a semiregular basis I've used the name rilee16 (and not just on livejournal), been involved in over 30 fandoms (from plain old lurking to consistently posting, R&Ring, and moderating a message board) for about 9 years now. At 24 I've seen numerous instances of wank, had to deal with and watch others being hacked (both my own private work/school accounts and fandom accounts, thanks to a now former-gf and whatever troll decided to target lj users last). I've seen friendships grow, be nurtured, and implode. I've banned others and I'm sure I've been banned, to my knowledge, once (although in my defense, this person has banned every single person who dared to question her, not just trolls).
There's a part of me that just is rilee16; I didn't creat my username based on a song lyric I was really into and whose fandom I fell out of. Rilee is my actual nickname, the name I chose for myself when I was a teenager; it is the name my close friends use for me (in fact, a friend of almost 10 years only found out it wasn't my legal name last year). I actually do think of my self as rilee, more than I think of myself as ::insertRLnamehere::
But if I were to change my name in RL I wouldn't change it to Rilee, I'd change it to a different name I've already picked out, for many reasons, the chiefest if which is that it gives me a first name I like to use for business, while preserving the use of the name Rilee for my closest friends.
Rilee is a very loaded name for me; it basically encapsulates every major change in my life up until now (and believe me, everything that could have changed, has changed, and it isn't some hyperbolized statement to try to seem wiser or to make people take Me! As A Young Adult! more seriously, or something stupid like that), and at this point I'm starting to get leery of using it as a journal name. A part of me almost wants some distance, and a fresh start, and also yes, a cool name. Yes, a name I'd be willing to use if I were to start a shitty little punk rock band. A name that describes me and my experience in a very different way.
But of course there's the fact that, when people on your friends list change their journal names, there's always that chance you'll never remember who that person is and why the hell they're watching and commenting on your journal. I think that may be part of the reason so many of us lose track of people we genuinely care about over the years; they change their journal name for a fresh start, we forget which of our friends is attached to the new name, we lose track of their lives, stop commenting at their journal, or we accidentally defriend them because we don't know who they are and and they think we just don't care anymore, feel shitty, and write us off.
I don't know, thoughts on that?
On Announcements Of Our DW Move Status:
And on to announcement of our moves (or lack thereof). When I first started hearing about Dreamwidth and people got involved with the beta, I noticed that they might announce it in their LJs but, between my friends and my fic-following, my Friends List is so large that within just a couple of days I would have completely forgotten which people had announced their new DW journal name. I was completely unable to find their announcement posts, because almost no one was tagging their announcements, and no one was putting it in their LJ profiles. Now I'm not in any way accusing everyone of trying to be ~~~sneaksy or anything; I really do think that, for the most part, it's just a matter of a lot of us being really fucking excited and not thinking about the logistics other than Make DW Journal>Set Up Filters>Back Up LJ>Import LJ Posts To DW>Announce In Journal>Do RL Things.
I do however think that for some people the quiet/lack of announcement is being done for the purpose of making a clean break with a minimum of fuss; DW has Granted Access and Subscribe features, the contents of which, to my knowledge, are public. A lot of people like to be able to friend/defriend at will without saying anything to the person on the other end of things (I actually don't like doing it at all, makes me feel like I'm not willing to stand up and say "Your hatred of this character is unfounded and misogynistic, and not because she's a horribly written character, and I can't deal with hearing you spew nastiness about her every week," or that "If you're going to make judgments about the psychological fitness of others, you should actually go out and learn something about the field and not base your judgments on stereotypes popularized by the popular media; if I could do it, then it isn't that difficult" (Granted, I start out much more politely than that with no intention of defriending, and escalate if the OP acts like a gigantic floral-scented douche). I know I don't appreciate being on the other end of a random defriending, because it's happened before with someone I believed myself to be reasonably close to; we'd known each other through a certain fandom, we commented on each others journals, I cooed over her new nephew she was bonkers for, I supported her decision and refused to talk smack when she married fairly early in her relationship and genuinely hoped and expressed that I wanted them to be happy together. To have it happen suddenly, with no notice, made me wonder what exactly I did wrong, whether she just wasn't as invested as I was, if I had offended her and she decided she needed to cut her ties, or whether LJ burped or something and defriended some of her Friends list (this has happened on my journal) and she didn't notice; this all happened at a point where I wasn't posting much at all, so the last option was feasible.
So if we are making up our DW journals, and we do want as much of our friends list as possible friended over there eventually, and we do want our friends to take an interest in, and move or crosspost to, DW, why aren't many of us announcing it better? A lot of the people who are announcing are people who use tags on almost every journal entry, and aren't using "Dreamwidth," "DW," "Move Announcement," etc. to tag their entry. If they mention it on a post with a recipe, the recipe is tagged, but the announcement is not. If they mention it with a fic roundup, the fic roundup is tagged, but the announcement is not. It's incredibly frustrating, it makes me feel kind of shitty, and it's confusing.
Thoughts? Comments?
What I Am Going To Do:
Personally, when I figure out what username I'm going to be using, I'm going to be doing the following:
a) announcing it here in my LJ,
b) tagging the entry,
c) placing the name of my DW journal in my profile so my friends can find me there.|
d) if I choose to change my username, put my other LJ usernames in the profile and/or Friends Only post on my Dreamwidth account, so people know who they've just been friended by and don't think I'm some random creeper.
I'll make sure to remove the identifying info from my profile here, just enough to ensure my RL identity and my online identity stay pretty separate (my relatives and coworkers don't need to be able to find out about any porn I do or do not read, thanks ever so), but not make it so difficult that fannishly-inclined people completely lose track of me.