Words are inadequate

siderea observes that it may be time to consider leaving Livejournal (ironically, post is only avaible on LJ, at least right now). Short form: LJ is now based entirely in Russia, not just owned by Russians, and there appear to be political purges of journals already going on.

I wholeheartedly recommend Dreamwidth as an alternative. I find it to be like LJ but less deliberately frustrating. rebelsheart offers a guide to leaving LJ for DW.

For now at least, I'll continue to live primarily at DW and crosspost to LJ. We shall see what, if anything, changes in the next few months.

cleolinda explains just what the heck is going on with LJ and Facebook and Twitter: basically, LJ's owners figure the number of people coming onboard LJ through Facebook and Twitter will outweigh the number of people fleeing to other sites such as Dreamwidth. And the fleeing users were the ones who were disabling all the useful (for advertising) privacy-invasive features anyway, so they won't be much missed.

(There's also a side trip through the creepiness of Facebook's new "Stalk this person" feature. Which just ick no. I anticipate that by this time next year I'll have done what I can to purge my Facebook account as well.)

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Still tired. Still writing up Key West (it was awesome). Likely to go home and faceplant for eight hours and wake up around two in the morning. Sleeping on planes works better when you can lean back in your seat, and when the guy next to you doesn't insist on trying to ram his elbow into your ribs, and when the flight doesn't arrive 45 minutes early thus shorting you out of three-quarters of an hour of uneasy but still much missed sleep. Bleh.

(Lessons learned: first, stay the hell away from Airtran. Second, with transit costs BWI may not actually be all that much cheaper than National. Third, do not rely on transit to get home from BWI.)

Dear LJ,

Why in gord's name would you find it at all appropriate to allow-- to encourage-- people to repost LJ comments on Facebook and Twitter? Especially comments made in response to locked posts? And why would you not allow users to disable this "feature" for their journals?

("But it doesn't repost the content of the entry!" That's very slim consolation when the comment consists of "I'm so sorry to hear you and Chris are having problems!")

("But people could always do this!" Yes, but now it's far easier, with a casual disregard for privacy that I usually only expect to see from Facebook or Google.)

No love,

jazzfish

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Seriously, LJ. WHAT THE HELL. I'm pretty casual about the connection between my LJ and my realspace identity, because I put everything I don't want coworkers or family to see behind a lock.

I'd prefer that you not repost any comments you make to locked entries in my LJ to FB or Twitter, in the same way that I'd prefer you not publicise anything I put in a locked entry. It's not, quite, a bannable/defriendable offense for me, but it's close.

Note that, as a fun side effect, this breaks the tab order in comments! Which means that if you've been commenting on entries for TEN YEARS and using a reflexive "comment, tab, enter" to post your comments, now you have to learn to add in another tab or three.

ObDWplug, and comment or email if you'd like an invite code.

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.