dee-dub (and medialog)

[jazzfish]

I just went over to Dreamwidth to see if something that's always irritated me about LJ (having to wade through communities and feeds when I'm setting up custom friends groups) was a problem there as well, or if they'd solved it.

It turns out that as part of the utterly reasonable change from "friends" to "subscriptions" and "access," they've also split filters into "reading filters" and "access filters." And, naturally, only actual users show up in the "access filters" section.

I love it when problems solve themselves.

Anyway. Between DW's introduction of tag merging, the full-text journal search, and the automatic cut expander (truly a thing of beauty: in DW, cut tags now have a little arrow next to them, and you can click the arrow to display the cut content without navigating away from your reading page), and LJ's trashing of their home page, I'm even more of a fan of DW. I've already moved imported the contents of jazzfish_media into DW, and gone through and tagged them all as well. That was a remarkably painless process. From now on I'll be cross-posting medialog entries at DW and here, behind a cut so that they aren't inflicted on the people who chose not to follow the medialog. This will make for a good trial run for crossposting in general.

At this point, I'm waiting on three things before completely jumping ship: the ability to read flocked LJ posts from DW (required); photo hosting (just barely shy of required); and a client for the Device (optional). There's a strong possibility that all three of these things will be available by the end of summer.

jadelennox has put together a great post on why DW isn't all or nothing. Of particular interest: it's trivially easy for LJ users to log in to their OpenID accounts on DW, and I plan on recreating my existing flist and security groups using everyone's OpenID anyway. (Which may automatically set up OpenID accounts for you all anyway; I'm not quite clear on how that will work.) I've also got a handful of invite codes available should you want to create your own DW account. (In theory, someday there will be the option to merge comments made under your OpenID with your DW account.)

ETA: jadelennox also linked to coffeeandink's How to move from LJ to DW in six easy steps, which I should really include here since seeing that link go by was one of the several things that prompted me to make this post.

I plan to keep DW as my main journal, and use LJ to stay in contact with the large number of non-DW readers. So I'll be cross-posting to LJ. I'd prefer to keep all comments on DW; I expect the additional hassle of having to log in over there (and lose your userpics) will cut down even further on comments. What I can do is crosspost entries, leave comments active on the LJ side, and regularly import the comments from LJ. This, of course, means more work for me, so I'd rather not do it. Hence, a poll!

[Poll #1588628]

Comments

[salzara-tirwen.livejournal.com]

I haven't done much over there, but mostly because all my peoples are here. I'm thirzadragon on DW.

[jazzfish]

Awesome. Cheers!

[desfido.livejournal.com]

jazzfish and pictsy, why don't you like ticky boxen? All of the other current poll participants, being right-thinking folk, like them.

Also, um, if you feel the need to waste one of your invite codes on me, I wouldn't object.

[jazzfish]

My love of ticky-boxen is made plain by my including them in the poll. I love all my poll response choices equally. Except for that weird 'text field' one. That's what comments are for.

It turns out I don't have your email address (I could text you an invite code but therein lies disaster, and also mistyping), so email me (at softhome.net) and I'll send one along.

[jude.livejournal.com]

you didn't add mine because i don't use it much. or really at all, at this point. (not that i've been eljaying so much either. Gahd, at this point the list of journal prompts is so monstrously huge i don't even know where to begin. But you know something about all that. ;) )

anyway, it's sarahk over there. (someone stole jude before i could have it. :( )

[jazzfish]

heh. Just a bit. :)

ETA: it's jazzfish on DW, because most places there's only one of me. (Stupid GMail.)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Um... if anyone else I know is on DW, then I'm not aware of it, although I keep hearing other people talk about all their friends jumping ship. I'm a little skeptical about open ID-- I've been doing enough deciding not to bother commenting on things recently that I feel like having to log in to something else to do so would be a serious deterrent.

Admittedly, your talk of "full text journal search" intrigues me. Is there (hypothetically) any way of exporting lj history into a new account? (since you mention joined comment exporting...)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

also, I sort of want to request a code, since it seems my username isn't taken over there yet... [what was that smiley for rolling one's eyes at oneself?]

here, have a code

[jadelennox]

https://www.dreamwidth.org/create?from=jadelennox&code=57E6N5QASSJHVAAAAFT8


Also, you can absolutely copy over your LiveJournal history, including all of your old entries and (optionally) the comments in them. The comments come over with the OpenID names of the users who originally made them, so they can always log in to dreamwidth in order to edit or delete the comments if they want to. coffeeandink wrote about how to do this in "moving to dreamwidth in six easy steps".

Re: here, have a code

[jazzfish]

I totally meant to link to 'six easy steps,' too, because seeing that was one of the things that prompted me to get around to making this post/poll. Hazards of writing a post piecemeal over the course of several hours. Thanks!

While I'm here: being stumbled across by you however many years ago has been one of the more awesome things to have happened to me on the internet. Just so's you know that.

Re: here, have a code

[jadelennox]

You know, I don't even know what to say to that, except periodically I have one of those moments where I am all "How do I even know Tucker? Oh well, it doesn't matter, because thank goodness I do."

*mutual ♥*

Re: here, have a code

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[jazzfish]

jadelennox pretty much covered it, but, yeah, you can totally import existing LJ entries. The full-text search has been one of those "how on earth did i live without this?" things, and that was just for the eighty-odd medialog entries. And the cut-tag expander still makes me a little happy every time I use it. (Which isn't all /that/ often, I usually prefer to get both the full entry and the comments in a new tab, but it's still nice on those few occasions.)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Yeah-- I end up spending an hour or two looking for something I don't quite remember when I posted a few times a year. On the other hand, I'm going to have to play around with reading & privacy groups, since my current manner of lj use is a complex construct between friends lists & bookmarks in my browser and may not work with their unified reading list concept. We shall see.

(Import queue is still slow-- I told it to do the icons, test-wise, and it's been waiting an hour now. Maybe lots of people decided to switch over for the holiday weekend or something?)

[jazzfish]

Heh. Yay for ad-hoc workarounds for ill-designed things, which then get broken when the design improves.

DW-Mark said that the importer's back up and running, and it looks like your icons have gone through.

[rbandrews]

I bought a Dreamwidth account this morning, still waiting for everything to import. I'm not sure I want to abandon Livejournal, but it's worth $6 to play with it and see if I want to move.

[jazzfish]

Mark of DW mentioned that there was some slowdown on LJ's part late last week, and that was making the importer run sluggishly. They may have fixed that by now, though. Not like they've said anything, but comment emails are coming through again more or less on time.

Basically, if there weren't going to be a way to keep reading my LJ flist from there, and if there weren't a crossposter, I wouldn't even be considering switching. I've got too much socially invested in LJ and that's the stuff that's hard for me to replicate elsewhere. Everything else is, for me, nice-to-haves. Really nice nice-to-haves in some cases, but still.

(Also, the backend is perl, and they highly encourage new people to dig around in the code!)

[rbandrews]

My questions keep coming back to, if I'm going to crosspost things to LJ, and still follow my friends list on LJ, why not just use LJ? What does this buy me?

I'm sure there's something, because it seems like a lot of people are doing exactly this, and it's worth $6 to find out what that something is, so.

[marcmagus]

If enough of us switch, we'll get to start taking real advantage of nice things like the subscribe/access split which is how LJ should have been designed in the first place?

[rbandrews]

I just don't see that going anywhere but bad. People get bent out of shape enough already over who's friended who, this just gives them another way to feel rejected.

[marcmagus]

That's a point. I've always thought of the failure to split it and the choice to name it friends as the cause of a lot of the drama. This is of course an untestable hypothesis, and that name and synthesis may well be sufficiently ingrained that changing it now won't do any good.

It's emblematic to me of what jazzfish is talking about below, though. There's a lot of active development going on at DW, and a lot of it is of the nature of "this has been obviously broken for 5 years, we're fixing it".

[jazzfish]

I'm less whelmed by that than I thought I'd be, surprisingly. Possibly because I'm one of the few who reads everyone on their LJ flist anyhow, and doesn't object overmuch to nigh-strangers having access to some level of locked content. You know, having worked with the existing hackwork of a system for so long that it's become almost natural. I understand this happens to longtime [your OS of choice] users as well.

[marcmagus]

Fair enough. I get really angry at poor design decisions, and in recent years I've been trying to cultivate that anger and channel it into positive action, as the great Larry Wall advised.

So for me recognizing that something is obviously broken as designed is kind of a call to action, and I absolutely believe that the designers of products I use should feel similarly. The DreamWidth team pleases me by doing exactly that.

[jazzfish]

For me it's that, once I can follow my flist on DW, there's enough small things that Just Work Better over there that I'm willing to put up with the slight inconvenience of the switch. Full text journal search. Comment preview button, like I mentioned awhile ago. The expandy cut tags. The general lack of being a Business and being there to serve advertisers, and instead being a Project and there to serve the users.

[jazzfish]

Also, I dunno how often you're checking, but it looks like your import came through over there.

[rbandrews]

Yeah, I saw that this morning, but I haven't had a chance to play with it much yet.

[merseine0613.livejournal.com]

It's your journal - do with it as you wish. :)

I'm not on DW, don't plan to go to DW, never even really heard of DW before now. Not a huge deal... if I need to comment on something, I can always email you. :)

The question is: will you read LJ stuff any more? Bonus points if you can tell me where I got the icon from.

[jazzfish]

Oh, I plan to. This is mostly about not losing touch with the handful of people that /do/ comment. :)

And of course I'll read LJ stuff! I'm not willing to jump to Dreamwidth until they've got the full LJ reader up and running. (Your icon is clearly from a foreign Fluxx but I have no idea which one. Danish, perhaps?)

[merseine0613.livejournal.com]

Well spotted... and glad you're not totally jumping ship. :)

The brain above is from Japanese Fluxx. The TV here is from German Fluxx.

[plumbob78.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

This dreamwidth place sounds most sensible. But after I left here my journal kinda withered.

[jazzfish]

Ah, but if you go to DW you can use that as a kickstart to start posting again...

[idoru.livejournal.com]

Basically I have solved my OH NOES, PEOPLE A-SCATTERING problems by shoving individual blogs/journals into my google reader.

[jazzfish]

That mostly works. It falls apart for flocked LJ posts. Which is all uilos makes, so...

[vond.livejournal.com]

I missed getting "vond" in the DW land rush (actually I think someone snapped it up during the period when you had to have an invite and Jesse didn't get me one in time) and I am still bitter about that!

[jazzfish]

I have some sympathy, mostly because the Vond account is going basically unused. Jerk. On the other hand, f'n gmail.