Okay you guys, what's the big deal about Dreamwidth? Four or five of you have been posting about it, and it doesn't look all that different from the other LJ-based journaling services. Fill me in!
I have no idea. A bunch of my online friends are on it, too but I can't figure it out. It was supposed to go live April 20 - I think. Hopefully, someone can clarify (other than it's a way to get away from LJ which has its own problems).
Goes live on April 30th, actually. It's built from the existing LJ code but they've tweaked some things: gotten rid of that stupid 'nudge' feature; added an automatic cross-poster; separated LJ's idea of a 'friends' list into two levels of 'I want this person on my reading list' and 'I want to give this person access to my locked entries'....
A lot of people are eager about it because one of the two founders (synecdochic/rahaeli) is involved in fandom and has been for years. (I actually knew her, very slightly, on a fannish mailing list years ago.) It isn't billing itself entirely as a "for fans!!" site but the general hope is that since it's founded on different theoretical principles than LJ, they'll be a lot more accepting of the sort of stuff that fandom tends to spew out, in terms of both weirdness and potential copyright issues. Whether this'll be true or not remains to be seen, but...
I don't think it's going to be some Great Holy Promised Land of journaling sites, but I don't mind getting a foothold there while we all wait to see if LJ is going to crash and burn in a few years. If nothing else I'm encouraged by the fact that Dreamwidth has apparently taken site growth/server costs into account, so they aren't suddenly going to collapse due to financial difficulties like GreatestJournal.
(There's been a ton of entries about all this around LJ recently, which of course I didn't bother to keep track of, but metafandom has a Dreamwidth tag if you want to go browsing for others' thoughts.)
One of the other things I really like is they've made accessibility a priority. My father's legally blind, so he uses screenreaders, and while oh God I do not want my father reading my fanfic, I do find online accessibility becomes increasingly important.
Also, YOU CAN FIND THE TAG ORGANIZER THINGY JUST ABOUT INSTANTLY. It's a THRILL.
The two big things for me are the aforementioned involvement of D (we met in fandom many years ago as well, worked together on the abuse team, and she's one of very few people I trust to actually make a site like this work, because I know she knows what she's doing and that she means what she says about what she wants the site to be), and the cross-compatibility between DW and other sites. Which LJ should have added a long, long time ago, considering how basic the concept is, but they didn't. Since DW is doing it, I'm all for using them instead (since I know D's capable of running a nice, stable site rather than the mess that was GJ, for instance).
Basically it means that once the kinks are worked out, the next time fandom finds a LJ-based site to flee to because they have some irrational fear about LJ, I can stay right on DW and still watch everyone on their new and old journals without making yet another account somewhere else. ;) I got tired of seeing people run in a million different directions. LJ won't help me keep track of them. DW will.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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A lot of people are eager about it because one of the two founders (
I don't think it's going to be some Great Holy Promised Land of journaling sites, but I don't mind getting a foothold there while we all wait to see if LJ is going to crash and burn in a few years. If nothing else I'm encouraged by the fact that Dreamwidth has apparently taken site growth/server costs into account, so they aren't suddenly going to collapse due to financial difficulties like GreatestJournal.
(There's been a ton of entries about all this around LJ recently, which of course I didn't bother to keep track of, but
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Also, YOU CAN FIND THE TAG ORGANIZER THINGY JUST ABOUT INSTANTLY. It's a THRILL.
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Basically it means that once the kinks are worked out, the next time fandom finds a LJ-based site to flee to because they have some irrational fear about LJ, I can stay right on DW and still watch everyone on their new and old journals without making yet another account somewhere else. ;) I got tired of seeing people run in a million different directions. LJ won't help me keep track of them. DW will.