I *can* has Dreamwidth!

[scruloose]

I was working on a post explaining why I think Dreamwidth is worth getting excited about, but it's turning into a long rant about what sucks about LiveJournal (their code is awful, slow, and lacking key functionality--and management went from being completely amateur to completely indifferent about the good of the users... in a nutshell). I may or may not actually finish that post.

But in the meantime, I'm kind of excited about Dreamwidth...

It's a fork of the LiveJournal codebase that seems fundamentally different from LJ itself and all the LJ-alikes that have come before in that:

• They took the time to get a business plan and some serious coding done before launching
• They know how to launch a site, with stages of beta testing to ease the system into place
• Where LiveJournal's feature improvements seem to have stalled at snap.com previews that give my ad-blocker one more thing to filter out, Dreamwidth's improvements include things like splitting "friending" someone into the separate operations of subscribing to read them and granting them access to your locked posts, and writing a style system that actually works and supports flexible CSS layouts
• They seem to actually have (wait for it) a business plan! No, really. Like, a long-term strategy for how to balance the numbers of paid accounts with free accounts and not have to spam the users with ads to make ends meet.
• There seems to be a starting assumption that freedom of expression matters, which is a refreshing change. I wasn't caught in LJ's "Strikethrough 2007", but using the dragnet of keyword-matching to mass-delete all accounts that list Lolita as an interest (to pick an example) is abusive and shows a fundamental disregard for the best interest of the users. The fact that those who opposed the move were met with a wall of "Oh, it's just the Harry Potter pedophiles whining because big bad LJ took their kiddy-porn away" didn't exactly help with earning respect or trust.

Anyway, thanks to my lovely and awesome wife, I got an invite code and now have a Dreamwidth account of my own. Same username as here. There's already an option to cross-post to LJ from DW, and I think I heard that you can add LJ journals to your DW reading list too. If all of that is true, I won't need to be haranguing my LJ f-list to switch. Of course, if Dreamwidth comes anywhere near living up to the potential it seems to be showing, you want to get in on it.

Comments

[haruhiko.livejournal.com]

... Not gonna lie, you got me interested in Dreamwidth with this post. XD;;;

I still think LJ is orders of magnitude better than Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/Blogger, and I was so underwhelmed with Tumblr, but I will have to check DW out once it goes "live."

[bunnyhero.livejournal.com]

yep! this is the one lj fork that seems to have put actual, serious thought into everything.

[kawaiiayu.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you made this post because until know all i saw was 'DW is better than LJ!" and no explination, and I'm like ok.. whats the big deal? This makes at least a little more sense.

I'm kinda glad this is happening, because I am still in no way interested in keeping my LJ or getting a DW or online journalling whatsoever anymore. So I'm kinda glad that this is coming through so that my LJ friends have something to move forward to while I am moving forward away from it all. But we're all moving forward :D

And if DW is even half as cool as it says, it will incorporate RSS feeds? Thats one thing I cant stand, that I cant have my friends page on RSS unless I pay for it or something else stupid (I never did figure it out). But mostly, that would ruin the point of me leaving LJ and journalling (to stop wasting time, I'm still wasting the time if I'm still reading them). I just need to pull out 100%

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the little informative post. I got myself an OpenID which is now my own account there :D

Only a few more weeks! :D