Hey what about Dreamwidth?!

[firecat]

So Facebook is targeting certain individuals for not using their legal names, and as a result a lot of folks, especially queer folks, are signing up for other social media sites, especially ello.co. And some of them are saying they're going to go back to Livejournal. I signed up at ello too because I feel compelled to stake out my preferred name everywhere, and because a lot of my friends have joined. But I am really sad and annoyed that no one seems to be considering Dreamwidth as an alternative social media site. I trust Dreamwidth a lot more than ello.co (nothing against them, but I don't know the people running it) and more than LiveJournal (although I'm still cross-posting to LiveJournal).

Comments

[deakat]

I've seen people mentioning Dreamwidth, and also that their cross-posts are now getting comments on DW, instead of just on LJ.

I'm also trying to respond to posts more often. Maybe eventually I'll even get around to posting again myself.

[firecat]

Good to know.

[drememynd]

For me, Dreamwidth feels a lot like LiveJournal. And LiveJournal didn't work for me as a primary social medium. Both sites actually feel more like journals or blogs to me, which is a fine thing to be, but isn't what I'm looking for most of the time. I'm not really sure what about the user experience shift it for me either.

[firecat]

Interesting. FB and LJ/DW all feel like journals to me, because of the hierarchical "post + comments" interface. Usenet felt different. Twitter and Tumblr feel different.

[jiawen]

I wish DW/LJ had some sort of "+1" / "thumbs up" / "upvote/downvote" system. Or, really, ideally, I'd like a bunch of smily faces along the bottom of a post so you can quickly click the "sympathy" face, the "laughing out loud" face, the "angry" face, etc. to express appropriate sympathy with what someone has said. I find that people (including me) often read posts, regardless of length, but don't have anything substantive to add, so they don't say anything... which adds to the "shouting loudly in an abandoned mine" feeling.

Beyond that, though, DW (and, to a lesser extent, LJ) have privacy settings that make them completely indispensable to me. FB is completely pointless to me, what with Mark Zuckerberg deciding whenever he feels like it to destroy people's privacy. G+'s circles seem slightly better, but not by much. For now, DW is my main social media platform, with LJ a close second and everything else a distant third.

[firecat]

You could go vote for this:

http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/404806.html

A comment to that post says if you click "more options" on a comment you're writing, you can add an icon such as the thumbs up I added to this comment. That means several clicks instead of just one for FB though.

[jiawen]

Just added a comment there. Thanks for pointing it out!

[thnidu]

Hey, I never noticed that. Thanks!

[firecat]

Unfortunately the icon does not show up in the email notification I got for this comment.

[thnidu]

I wasn't sure I'd see it on my mobile, but I do, just below the threading ID 2a1a2.

[firecat]

Good to know.

[metaphortunate]

Yeah, that'd be good. We've gotten used to that functionality other places, I think.

[emceeaich]

I used to be against that functionality, thinking it was "too damned Facebook" but yes, sometimes being able to just like a post is good.

[firecat]

o/\o

[bibliofile]

*1



;)

[hitchhiker]

agreed, both lj and dreamwidth are a lot higher-friction for casual posting and interaction than the new generation of sites like facebook and twitter are.

[flarenut]

Gotta go with the other people: DW is not FB because of the weight. You might be able to do it with a much lighter interface or a different set of display defaults, but when I read something here I assume that I'm going to give some time to it, and time to the comments. FB is mostly a series of drivebys with occasional deeper/longer discussions. Much closer to what I imagine twitter might be.

I've started using G+ for semi-professional stuff, but to do that I had to spawn an entire new browser instance with a separate profile...

But that does sorta make me think: what kind of default interface (abbreviated comment threads visible, smaller typefaces, blah blah) would it take to make DW seem more lightweight, so that people would just bat stuff back and forth, rather than making big statements only once and again? And would people want that?

[firecat]

*stifles urge to rant about Usenet* :-)

[jae]

I think dreamwidth looks and feels too 90s for the young'uns.

The biggest issue for me with ello is the fact that they don't have a way to post under lock. It won't ever be a Facebook substitute for me for that reason, and I already have a place to post public pseudonymous content that I want strangers to be able to read (dreamwidth). But I'll squat a name there to see if it takes off, anyway (assuming your invitation ever arrives--how did you send it?).

-J

[drememynd]

The people who run Ello are claiming that more privacy control was already planned for a future release. I hope so.

[jae]

They say they will eventually be offering "private accounts," like is already possible on Twitter, say. If ello is really going to be a substitute for Facebook for me, though, it has to have privacy settings that are like Facebook's (or dreamwidth's, for that matter), which allow you to control on a post-by-post basis who sees what, rather than deeming the whole account as either public or private.

-J

[sinanju]

And ideally NOT like Facebook in that they won't arbitrarily change the rules on you (warning optional). But then, as they say, if you're paying for the product you ARE the product, and concerns about privacy cut into their ability to sell you to advertisers.

[firecat]

I think dreamwidth looks and feels too 90s for the young'uns.

I don't know any young'uns! All the folks flocking to ello.co and ignoring DW are over 50.

[jesse_the_k]

Okay I'm really stuck in the 90s. How did you hear about Ello.co?

I want to encourage a tweet-is-as-good-as-a-blog community aesthetic in DW. God knows I need it. I feel restrained from posting unless I have at least 2000 characters.

Maybe we could come up with a game of sorts which would encourage brief answers?

[redbird]

I don't feel a need for at least 2000 characters over here; I am glad not to have to squeeze things into 140. Twitter has me cutting posts shorter than I would like, and using abbrevs and & and so on to squeeze stuff in, and not saying things because I can't find a way to be clear in 140 characters.

[firecat]

I heard about ello.co from some FB friends.

Yeah, I know what you mean, which is why I post linkspams now and not individual links.

Whatever happened to questionnaires and memes?

[selki]

I've been meaning to post a survey but have a cross-posting dilemma. If I post a questionnaire on LJ, folks on DW won't see it unless they click through (and I have to add extra text explaining it), and vice versa.

Besides my decision paralysis, more likely it's because they have mostly moved to FB, where it was easier to re-share than from LJ/DW for a while IIRC.

[emceeaich]

some tweaks to templates and posting forms would allow for some µ blogging like Twitter

[flarenut]

like.

[firecat]

o/\o

[sasha_feather]

Gosh, agreed.

[silveradept]

I think it's probably the same problem Diaspora* has, I'm that name recognition is often the way to getting the mass amounts of followers.

[firecat]

True. I keep forgetting how tiny this place is in the grand scheme of the Internet.

[supergee]

When I post on Facebook to offer alternatives, I always mention DW as well as LJ. Did it yesterday, in fact.

[firecat]

Cool! You're definitely not no one.

[stefanie_bean]

OK this is probably a dumb question, as I'm not a FB user, but how does FB even know if you're using a real name or not?

[firecat]

They don't, but if someone flags you as using a false name, they will turn off your account until you prove that it's a legal name.

[stefanie_bean]

OK, got it.

[bibliofile]

Oh, and sometimes they don't believe in your real name and demand a photocopy of ID. Author Owl Goingback was the most egregious example I heard of.

[stefanie_bean]

That's unconscionable. So if your name isn't WASP-y, it's not real. Got it.

[serene]

Not nobody.

[firecat]

Yay!

[piglet]

Your remark prompted me to start reading here again. I've been posting my rare long-form material over here. Mwah!

[firecat]

Yayyy!