firecat: damiel from wings of desire tasting blood on his fingers. text "i has a flavor!" (Default)
firecat (attention machine in need of calibration) ([personal profile] firecat) wrote2014-09-24 02:49 pm

Hey what about Dreamwidth?!

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).

[personal profile] flarenut 2014-09-26 05:39 pm (UTC)(link)
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?