Why DW is a better fandom platform than LJ in my estimation

[cimorene]

Well, I haven't actually been planning to make an Announcement about My Personal Reasons for Moving to Dreamwidth. Frankly, even the new divide of the flist into two parts or the new longer post- and comment word limits would be enough to get me to move, because I see that as a significant step forward in functionality. But those aren't the only reasons.

I've been waiting for a better alternative to LJ to come around for years, since the summer of 2002, when LJ started its policy of immediately deleting all the RSS feeds people tried to make of fandom_wank even though the community itself had already moved to Blurty.

That better alternative has never come along before - Greatestjournal wasn't a better alternative, even at first, because it lacked cross-platform compatibility - when it opened, it didn't have OpenID, even though it did have like 10 times as many icon slots. Insanejournal was never a better alternative because, although it had OpenID, it still lacked sufficient cross-platform compatibility and was ad-supported - these are simply practical concerns, and Dreamwidth has solved them. That's what's different this time around, for the people who didn't get it and were personally upset that everyone else didn't follow them to IJ.

As I explained to my bff hollsh yesterday, when I look at LJ as a fandom platform - which is what I use it for - I find it wanting. I now put the number of major, giant fandom communities deleted by LJ at three: fandom_wank, pornish_pixies, and scans_daily (and this latest loss brought a whole extra element of male vs female fannishness into the mix). In addition, almost the entirety of Harry Potter slash fandom has decamped to insanejournal, which is an annoyance to me frequently, as every time I read HP fiction I'm besieged by ads.

To borrow the catchphrase of the Organisation for Transformative Works - We want to own the servers. We don't actually own the servers at DW, but at least we can vote with our wallets, and there's a good chance that fandom users could be a majority of DW's customer base. There was never that chance at LJ. Some people in fandom have always had a hard time comprehending this, but the hard statistics exist: fandom never has been more than a small subset of LJ users. Also, it doesn't hurt that denise is at least a member of fandom, even if she did once upon a time belong to the villified LJ Abuse team (which, to clarify, I do not hold responsible as a whole and especially not as individuals for any of LJ's policy decisions, because that would not make any sense). Of course, bad things could happen in the future with DW just like they can at any business: the owners could change their ideals and sell to SixApart or get butthurt and delete renne's account for trash-talking them in a protected post. If so, I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come ot it.

Comments

Here via <user name="idlerat">

[blnchflr]

almost the entirety of Harry Potter slash fandom has decamped to insanejournal
No, just a small fraction, actually :o)

Re: Here via <user name="idlerat">

[cimorene]

You're right - I spoke imprecisely, using "HP slash fandom" in the sense I generally apply it to mean "networked, previously LJ-based HP slash fandom", and I meant to pick out (with the comment about reading) that it was specifically the fic communities which have mostly relocated.

(here from metafandom)

[valentinite]

In the vein of voting with our wallets -- take a look at the current top-subscribed feeds list.

http://www.dreamwidth.org/syn/list.bml

As of posting this comment, fandom-wank is #2, OTW news is #3, and Henry Jenkins is #16. And there are a lot of other fannish and fan-related ones in there. Those just stood out to me.

Re: (here from metafandom)

[cimorene]

Yeah, the invite system has definitely insured that the first few influxes have been fandom-heavy. Of course, word of mouth can still cause the news to spread outside of fandom too. We'll have to see what happens in time.

Re: (here from metafandom)

[valentinite]

Yeah, I knew as a gut-feeling that I thought it was fandom-heavy, but I wasn't sure if there was any concrete proof. Which was why seeing the feedlist made such an impact -- it was hard numbers of a sort.

[renne]

I sure hope they don't delete my account. Or, y'know, do anything that would warrant a trash-talking that would get my account deleted after promising no one would be deleted!

[cimorene]

Yeah, that would be an epic disappointment after all this...

...but at least it would also pretty much never stop being funny?