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

[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* :-)