Dreamwidth

[wayman]

Does Dreamwidth have a possible future which is not

Comments

[q10]

Dreamwidth's ideal future is not in particular in its having any great success as a hosting service - it's in it being just successful enough to push us out of a ‘we all have our social networking identities hosted by the same people’ paradigm and into a ‘i have my social networking identity hosted by my preferred service and you have yours hosted by your preferred service and we interface through OpenID so it's almost as seamless as in the good old days of LJ’. this in turn will let LJ become a slum of ad-funded accounts while people who don't want to deal with that institutional culture can live on a pay-only service, but everybody still gets to friend everybody else.

[wayman]

I think my perception of the internet is skewed from many peoples' because I have extremely effective ad filters set up in Firefox. I rarely see web ads now, and on odd occasions when I need to use Safari to test something it's as if I just beamed down into Times Square or something.

[q10]

i don't have a lot of ad filtering set up, but my permanent account with LJ shields me from LJ ads, the resulting being that whenever i view somebody's "plus" journal without logging in i have a similar experience to what you're describing.

[ccommack]

Also, the reason I went from "I'll camp my name just in case" to "I'll put it through its paces for a few months and see if it works" is that, while DW is a fork of LJ's codebase, DW is taking deliberate steps to mobilize its users into a software development community, while LJ doesn't seem interested in code anymore. It's already been noted many times elsewhere that DW has grown into one of the largest concentrations of women coders, in only a very short time, because of this recruitment drive.

Whether I stay as a beta tester (still an important role in FLOSS development) or actually move into some light coding depends mostly on my free time (looking like "none", unfortunately).

[sbeath]

I think that possible Dreamwidth evolution is less likely to be gradualism with a steady build over time, and more likely to be punctuated equilibrium with sudden influxes of people hopping on when lj does something that upsets them.

I don't think that's nearly as easy to extrapolate, because we're metaphorically standing around during the Jurassic era (I think it is) and saying "Do you see a way those small warm furry things could ever compete for food chain dominance when those roles are already filled by all those cold-blooded giants with sharp teeth?"