Livejournal, you are reprieved - for now

[nwhyte]

Well, my resolution to shift to Dreamwidth has lasted less than a day. Several things changed my mind, of which the most important is that Livejournal seems to have started working again. But also Dreamwidth is really lacking in a number of the good features that LJ has built on in the last few years - there is no image hosting as far as I can see

Comments

[shereenb]

I've been backing my LJ up over on Dreamwidth off and on since the sale to a Russian company. I'm shereent over there. But I agree with you about the site's clunkiness. I have to keep relying on their LJ-DW terminology translation page in order to get anything done. I _think_ I've added you to my reading page over there.

[pseudohistorian]

While I can totally understand the concerns that people have been expressing this week, I have to admit that this development's immediate effect on me is minimal; all of my posts are public, so no corporation or government has access to any more of my writing here than a search engine or determined reader does.

My main concern is that LiveJournal continues on (including the more recent features you mentioned)--the last thing I want to have to do is migrate over to a version of this site with even fewer active anglophone users.

[matgb]

Image hosting exists but it's been in beta for ages (far too long in fact): some of DW's problems are Denise's fairly substantial health problems, I cannot imagine coding using a speech-to-text interface.

I will dig out better instructions but if you email posts in with attached images they're hosted, and there is (somewhere), a barebones interface for managing images.

Scheduled posting has been on their todo list of features since they launched, I was unaware it was available on LJ now, it wasn't last I looked, and yeah, embedding is a bit weird: some of it is the slightly perverse-but-understandable desire of some on the open source side of DWs team to only want to implement open standards compliant features and that dream of an interoperable web appears to have died a death.

I have wanted direct post notification for Twitter for ages, there was a feed based workaround and Andrewducker has a system in place that works but it should be native by now.

[nwhyte]

Image posting may as well not exist if it's that difficult to reach. I see that scheduled posting has been scheduled as the next improvement to make since 2009. As you say, a direct feed to twitter should have been native by now.

In general, I've been deeply unimpressed by the practical results achieved by open source evangelists. Maybe I have just been unlucky.