Moving -- Some Practical Questions

[angiepen]

I have to admit that I'm still hoping things will get better right here on LJ. :/ I know, that hope is becoming more and more forlorn and less and less realistic. Not only does LJ not seem to be capable of verbalizing (or textualizing) its actual policies in a clear and unambiguous manner, it also seems to be doing a bit of thrashing when it

Comments

[lilithilien]

I don't have an invite to journalfen so that wasn't an option for me. Instead, I got a GJ and IJ account. After trying both of them, I'm extremely happy at IJ and wholly underwhelmed by GJ. (GJ's also been banning artists so I don't think it's the answer.)

I've found the community at IJ to be active, lively, and bright. Yes, it's small, which means that we're able to take what we've learned here at LJ and rebuild in better ways over there. I don't think this is possible at GJ, where a certain mode of interaction has already been established. The owner is very pro-fandom, and has assured us that we're more important than advertisers.

I concur about the "insanity" theme. In a recent poll over there, other people commented saying the same thing. I'm going to put a suggestion in their "Ideas" page to see if it might be changed. I can't say that it will do any good. However, the site owner is incredibly responsive to requests. For instance, just a few days after people complained about a 100-friends limit on free accounts, he upped it

[angiepen]

I'm hearing some good things about IJ's owner, but my point is that he might not be able to upgrade enough to support several thousand active users moving over there. Does he have the money for upgrades? (And if he keeps selling permanent accounts for thirty or forty dollars he's going to dig himself into a huge hole with an eventually-massive horde of users demanding perpetual service but no income to support them.) Is he willing to make this his full-time day job, assuming it's not already

[lilithilien]

I don't have the numbers, but I think I know where I can get them. I will check and get back to you.

I do know this is the owner's full-time job and stewardess said that he has eight tech staff working for him. And if he's taking the money and reinvesting it into the business, I think he'll be able to make this work.

Truthfully, I think the biggest problem is going to be moving entire communities to another location. So far the trusted migration programs only work for personal accounts. However, there's a new program in beta that claims to be able to deal with that. If that works, I think we'll see several comms (especially the HP ones) leaving en masse.

[angiepen]

I do know this is the owner's full-time job and stewardess said that he has eight tech staff working for him.

I hadn't heard that before but it's excellent news.

And yes, the thought of moving entire communities full of fic -- years worth of fic, or art or whatever -- is rather daunting. :/ It makes me very happy I don't mod any communities.

Angie

[phantomminuet]

Well, I'll still be here, reading your stories. :-)

[angiepen]

Well, good. :) Even if I do eventually migrate to a different home base, I'll still post my fiction here, unless LJ gets a lot more insane than it is now.

Angie

[lothy]

Short of the entire lot of every fandom I'm in skipping LJ and going somewhere else (and frankly, I think the chances of that happening have a whole lot of 0s after the decimal point), I'm not going anywhere. At the very *most* I might get forced into getting another account elsewhere in order to keep up with my friends, but I'm really hoping that won't happen

[angiepen]

About number one, the whole problem is that it's not about the chan. Of the two artists whose journals were banned -- gone, deleted, no appeal -- one of the pictures was an illustration for a story where the characters were very clearly stated to be of legal age. It was a post-Hogwarts story and there should have been no question of "underage" having anything whatsoever to do with that piece of art. LJ apparently didn't investigate enough to know that and didn't care. The other was more ambiguous about ages, but the style was very anime and if you're familiar with that sort of art you know that the characters can pass for fourteen until they're around forty or so. So, what, they're going to ban all anime-style art rated higher than PG-13, just in case

[lothy]

Well, that's bad, certainly. But I still don't think there's sufficient reason for mass panic. The way some people have been posting, you'd think LJ had gone round deleting every fandom journal they could find, and that's just not true. LJ aren't targeting "fandom" - after all, if they did they'd lose a significant portion of their customers. And yet, I've actually seen people say that they are.

Not that I'm in anyway implying that you're panicking to that extent, of course. But some people are, and it's just getting a little ridiculous IMO.

[angiepen]

There's definitely been exaggeration, yes, and extrapolation way beyond the current data. But since 6A bought LJ things have gotten pretty steadily worse and never any better. It's not a huge, steep plunge into suckitude -- the descent has been pretty shallow up until a couple of months ago. But there's no actual evidence that things will improve and quite a lot of evidence is piling up that things will keep deteriorating and that promises of improvement or clarification will be broken or sidestepped

[tarnished_raven]

And altho we both know I'm no deep thinker [:P] it's peeving me immensely to see other people on LJ smugly saying, "Well, it's only fandom, who gives a shit if they go under."

What everyone keeps forgetting, including fandom, is that this isn't about morals or porn or pedophiles, it's about the bottom line, profit and advertisers. And when it's about making money, the only question anyone should be asking is, "Who is next?"

[angiepen]

Exactly. The larger issue is rules and standards and extremely uneven enforcement of same. As many people have said elsewhere, if they'd state clearly what the rules are and how they'll be enforced, most people would be happy to follow along. It's the chaotic application -- notice/no-notice, warnings/no-warnings, suspending/deleting/obliterating, pedophilia/ambiguous/anything-icky -- that has people up in arms. The idiocies posted by various employes are just icing; I'd be willing to overlook those and assume they're being smacked in private by their managers if management as a whole seemed to have any firm grip on what it was doing and how. :(

Angie

[tarnished_raven]

Yup, and I look at all the smug so and so's in comms like 'wtf inc' and see their icons of drink cans poppping out of some chick's butthole and I think, "Wait til it's you.'

:D

[angiepen]

No kidding. [eyeroll] The idiots who are doing things just as objectionable but are sneering at all the "pervs" who are getting upset just make me want to get out my baseball bat. Idiots.

Angie

[amygirl]

I quite frankly am staying put right here. I don't have time to join a hundred different journals to keep track of everyone. I personally won't be leaving unless I'm all by my lonesome or I'm directly effected otherwise I just don't see a point. *shrug* Maybe I'm just being too lazy it with it but at the moment I seriously can't even get myself to care all that much... *shrug

[angiepen]

It's not just HP fandom; there are cross-fandom projects going on for both moving and putting together journaling (and archiving, etc.) systems which would be run by fans and as impervious to the sort of pressure WfI is bringing to bear, as well as the sheer stupidity LJ is showing, as anything can be.

If you haven't seen much concern on your Flist, I think that has more to do with the isolationist nature of LOTRiPS than any lack of activity, in all seriousness. LOTRiPS fans don't generally pay much attention to what's going on beyond their own backyard fence. We don't even have a fandom newsletter to spread information inside our fandom, as pretty much every other fandom does, which for a fandom our size is pretty boggling. One of the reasons I started following metafandom is that I find it frustrating to be cut off from the rest of the fannish world. It's out there all right; we just don't see it in here

[amygirl]

Thanks for assuming that I'm only involved in LOTRips...I'm involved in a wide variety of things and not all of them are on my Flist. I'm not involved in the joint-fandom communitites so I can only go by what I see on my journeys and I think I have a fair cross-section of fandoms, and non-fandoms to go by. I know it's not just the HP fandom being affected and not only them thinking about moving but on a whole I haven't seen any mass panic from any quarters. If there has been then I'm thankful I've missed it because I'd rather listen to level headed people discuss the issues than people freaking out and saying nasty things

[angiepen]

If I misunderstood then I apologize. :/ I think we both agree that there are issues but that there are also people who are exaggerating the immediate danger, and beyond that it's mainly a matter of individual interpretation. I'm sorry for rambling at you; I tend to get too intense myself at times. [sigh]

Angie