dreaming wide

[jazzfish]

One of the more unexpected WisCon panels I attended was on Dreamwidth. The panel consisted of four or five people talking about why they used DW. The comment that really drove it home for me came from (I think) the moderator: "I use Dreamwidth because there's a Preview Comment button in DW. (laughter) I know, right? It's such a trivial thing. But it's also something that's been a requested feature in LJ for literally years now, so much so that it was implemented in DW like a day and a half after the release. DW is highly responsive to user feedback, especially since a lot of the bugfixing and feature work is done by users. Meanwhile LJ is busy giving out little snowflake cookies."

I was reminded of this when I got home last night and tried to catch up on LJ, and couldn't figure out why the links on my Friends page that I'd helpfully labeled "previous twenty" were only taking me back ten entries at a time. Finally I found it, buried in a news post next to an electric purple ONTD header image: "we changed everyone's default entries per page from 20 to 10 to improve performance! here's a link to fix it, if you really want to."

This is an annoyance to me; it's something I can easily fix. If I'd made a special script based on the number of default entries, I'd have to tweak that script. If I'd created that script for accessibility reasons, and was simply too exhausted to fix the script, and too exhausted to try to read LJ without it. . . suffice to say that I can see where jadelennox is coming from.

I created a Dreamwidth beta account last April, and bought a seed account (which I've yet to activate) once they went on sale, because DW seems like a really good place to be: responsive to user requests, open to people fixing stupid things about the code, generally Not Evil and (so far at least) Not Stupid. (Anyone else remember when one day Brad went in and decided to put an arbitrary limit on the number of posts you could make per day, without telling anyone? Good times, and shades of things to come.) For the past year and change I've been considering switching over. I've watched friends make the jump, pretty seamlessly it looked like. Mostly I've been resisting having to keep a reading list in two places.

Another thing mentioned at the panel was that DW has a plan for how to read locked LJ entries from DW. I'm pretty sure that that would mean I'd no longer have any good reasons not to use DW. (Bad ones, yeah: photos, redoing my journal style again, all the normal hassle associated with moving to a new platform for anything.) If and when bug 710 gets resolved, I expect I'll be spending some time setting up crossposting and crossreading and all that good stuff. (I have no intention of abandoning my LJ-using friends! I like you non-gender-specific guys!)

I've had an LJ account for nearly ten years now (missed 'early adopter' by *that* much. I blame shadowsong). It's been my online home for twice as long as any given physical residence. It makes me a little nostalgic to think about giving it up. But, sometimes it's just time.

Comments

[selki.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking about switching over to DW, the next time I'm job-free and likely to make the time to deal with it. Until then, I follow some cross-posters and occasionally comment via OpenID.

[jazzfish]

I'm happy to provide an invite code if you'd like to comment occasionally with a real DW account instead of OpenID. :)