so you wanna move to dreamwidth?

[such_heights]

I've been planning to make this post for ages - given that LJ's being somewhat robust today, now seems like a good time!

A note before I begin: this is not a post that wishes to convince the reluctant. Instead, its target audience is people who are dissatisfied with LJ, who've thought about moving, who've thought about setting up crossposting or centralising comments or whatnot, but aren't sure. I am going to tell you why I am super happy that I moved to Dreamwidth, but if you're perfectly content on LJ, this may not be of interest to you!

I came over to Dreamwidth in the first wave because it was new and shiny and exciting. Initially, I was a little concerned that it would turn out to be a bit of a fad, that participation would dwindle over time. While I think there are a lot of users who got accounts at the beginning have drifted away, overall quantity of content here is going up and up, and it's now not uncommon for there be more entries coming up on my DW reading list than my LJ one (especially in the mornings, for some reason!).

I thought it was a pretty cool site initially, but I've moved from that to wanting to draw little sparkly hearts around it. In a nutshell, by moving to Dreamwidth I've cut out most of the things that drive me crazy about LJ, whilst not having to feel like I've drifted away from LJ-based fandoms and friends.

These are a few of my favourite things about Dreamwidth:

Ideology - Dreamwidth actually cares about the stuff I care about, and they're accommodating to other people who do, too. They're open to privilege checks and try really, really hard to get it right. I trust them.

Awesome site owners - denise and mark stand up for their users, and whilst they were without a payment processor for a few months, happily renewed their users' paid accounts - I've had three months of free time as a result. Needless to say, now payments are being accepted again, they have my money. I was very impressed by that whole episode.

Design - Dreamwidth is pretty - this is personal taste as much as anything, but I just like the way it looks. There are a lot of really gorgeous styles to choose from, and the main site is much more intuitively organised than LJ - at least to me. By rethinking everything from the ground up, it's all rather streamlined and wonderful. Plus, with new features being introduced all the time, it gets better and better as a site pretty much every month. <3

Community - It's very easy to interact with LJ! Cross-posting and OpenID and edits being carried over and all kinds of other features make it very easy to manage both accounts from Dreamwidth whether you have comments enabled on both sites or just the one. There's also a great sense of community here, with all kinds of interesting communities and users posting original content here. The division of subscriptions and access has made me feel much less nervous about adding new people, and I've made a lot of friends here.

Lack of fuckery - No adverts, no malware, no profiteering, no unscheduled extended bits of downtime, no strikethrough, no -- well, you know the list.

With regards to disabling/not disabling comments over on LJ, which I know is a thing people often feel undecided about - I'm really glad I have consolidated them. I like having everything in one place, and I like that place being Dreamwidth. I am sure that there are people who are less likely to comment because it's over here, which, well, is probably inevitable no matter how easy you make it. However, as a general thing I really haven't found that I get less response now I'm here, whether on fanwork posts, meta, or anything else.

I have four invite codes, if there's anyone around who still hasn't got them. Here they are, under the cut, you don't have to email me or anything. I'll strike through any that get used.

ZDBG4FYS23PDDAAABRAL
W8JWRQQNW5YRJAAADGU7
AK5V33SD56CZGAAADGU8
5VVSXDQMPZ7ADAAADYPF

eta: I'm all out, but zvi has 91 more here.

Comments

[such_heights]

Hi, you! I am in favour of anything that means we get to see you around a bit more. :D

Hmm, I think they are working on community import, maybe? I feel like I've read that somewhere.

[auroraprimavera]

Hmm, I think they are working on community import, maybe? I feel like I've read that somewhere.

They are. There's not a set date for when it would be implemented, but eventually it will be. The biggest hurdle they have to go through is getting the OpenIDs to work so that members can edit the posts they made to the community before the import.

I can't wait for this either!

[tea]

Oooh. Just commented back with what I thought was the hurdle - I hope this works, although I def. can see a lot of people getting pissed the eff off over it, so I hope they make it easy for people to do something about it if they don't want their posts moved.

[sofiaviolet]

The OpenID post management thing has been fixed and some comms have been imported already (scans_daily is one), but it's still a manual process at the moment, requiring mark and/or denise to do Stuff for each comm.

So what they're working on now is automated community import, that doesn't require the direct involvement of site owners.

[auroraprimavera]

That's right! I'd forgotten about that - thanks for clearing it up. :)

[tea]

When I talked to them last year, community import was an ethical problem, rather than a practical one, since in theory if you import a community most of the posts won't actually be YOURS, and editing/deleting issues extend to not just comments (which bothered enough people, though I think that's a bit of entitlement/ignorance, since if you post your comment on someone's locked journal, they can always do whatever to that post after the fact, not to mention you don't control their flist) but the posts. Which makes sense, but I am the only one who posted at my communtiy, so I'd love if there was some way I could import MY posts out of a community and into another, which would help people of smaller communities migrate. (Like, that would work for TWH, if everyone was willing to migrate their own posts.)