InsaneJournal

Willow Has Words
Y'know, I had my beef with livejournal. I was angry and bitter and needed time to step back and heal. And I had arguments with zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com because she was tired of hearing my anger about LJ and ended up saying something about it and we had it out.

But today I found myself with a whole lot to read about DW and how much people are afraid of it, don't like it because of who created it (and I have to admit to having a personal bias there cause Denise kicked on iJay and will forever have me giving her cut eye over that) and people also don't believe there will be 'The Great Fannish Migration' - so they're not even going to bother... blah blah blah.

Today was apparently 'Air Your Cynicism Day'.

Truthfully I do not believe in a Great Fannish Migration. Y'all are lazy asses. Those who aren't lazy asses moved back in 2007. That's my belief and you're not going to shake it from me. However, I do believe in good code and usability and I do believe in community.



iJay is small and cosy and I seriously love it. I moved from a big city to a small city in real life when I ended up in the city where I currently reside. And I did the same online, moving from LJ to iJay. There are small city / big town things I love about my environments. Not the least of which is the chance to get to know people I otherwise might not have noticed.

That said, there are a whole bunch of people who just got deleted off iJay for not having been active with their accounts for a year or more. More than a couple of them now either want or already have DeeWee accounts. Which means the account I have over there in order to interact with Zvi, now has people I haven't been able to read casually and comment casually to in over two years. *

Moreover, I've become so used to not being part of communities over here on iJay and having to log in in some form or fashion to participate in communities over on LJ that I've forgotten what it's like to have communities as interests. This fact hit me last night when I discovered a new community created April 10th and realized that it was on a topic that I searched the broader internet for and never once did I ponder - well there's got to be a community for it somewhere on the journaling systems I use. I want to be involved in community again and I think DeeWee may be able to provide that.

As for the good code, I like being able to import comments. And as I commented to someone today; the level of control over comments stays exactly the same when imported to DeeWee. So someone needs to explain to me why this isn't simply a case of 'But it's never been done! OMG! It shouldn't be done! Don't mix the streams!!!!' Because flocks and comments disabled prevents commenters from accessing their comments. And it doesn't hurt to login via OpenID in order to have more control over one's comments (to screen or delete) 'Cause yeah anonymous comments? They're practically orphaned works. Only the OP can touch them. So why the hubub? All this because you don't want to validate your email?

Other good code are the little grace notes I've observed all over DeeWee that I can't even all go into. But which I think show that people are thinking.

Lastly though, the whole 'People won't stop going on and on about Dreamwidth and it's all such hype and blah blah blah'. Good gravy - are your fingers broken or is that laziness too that you just can't scroll past? People put up with us badmouthing LJ. They put up with us trying to coax them to iJay. Now they have something to be happy about and there needs to be rain on their parade? Seriously? The servers and code are already more robust than Journalfen but DeeWee is exactly like Journalfen? Are you for real?

Various people on the internet will not find out about and be drawn to DeeWee just because Livejournal already exists? Have you forgotten some little things called Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad?

DeeWee is totally for fans because the bulk of people currently getting invites are fans? I seriously roll my eyes at that one because apparently no one making that complaint seems to realize they're recognizing fans because they know these people as fans and they are likely discounting the names they don't know or just assuming they're fans. But DeeWee has a whole bunch of mailing lists and people who've been drawn by the code and people who never heard of Livejournal except from Venture Brothers and who're local to DeeWee's headquarters and are now journaling and learning programming.

Not everyone involved in DeeWee is white and not everyone involved is a fan. Put that in your pipe and smoke on it a while.

Journalfen is Journalfen (I was never involved enough to comment more than that). GreatestJournal was highly successful, differentiating itself from Livejournal in a very practical way. But the owner had no business plan, never updated the servers and there was no group of employees on the back end. It crumpled from over use and stagnation, not from unpopularity. DreamWidth also isn't Inksome, which started as Scribblit and had a business plan - but was majorly shouldered by one person who didn't code and who then lost interest and handed it over to the person she'd found who was a programmer and didn't want to see all his hard work go down the drain. But he had to start from scratch, because he couldn't use the name she'd chosen and her legalese wouldn't be his legalese and the hosting company she chose had to do with her goals and not what he'd want as both the new owner and a programmer etc. And given that he hadn't set aside time to become a journal system owner - it's something that fits in around the edges of his life. There are aspects of the code still giving problems. Basic aspects.

No matter how I personally feel about DeeWee, it's a partnership between two individuals, one of whom has business savvy the other of whom has programming savvy. They've actively recruited volunteers and employees. They've actually spent time looking at the code and making adjustments and throwing out things that don't work. They've crunched numbers, put in initial capital/investment, they've got their legalese down, they're actually putting the site through both CLOSED and OPEN BETA, so that when they open officially they'll have had their shake down cruise and hit some of the serious kink and complications out of the way (unlike Inksome).

Yeah this got a little tl:dr. Some of you may not read it. It's not actually a great big 'Hurrah For DreamWidth'. But it is 'WTF people, you're not even giving them a CHANCE!'. I like to think the people reading this are intelligent enough to take the reminders contained therein that point out the differences between DreamWidth and Danga Interactive Clone Sites. I'd also like to think they're not spoiling from two years of bitterness over their social circles (fans or not fans) not moving when they moved and are upset that it takes something shinier than iJay to get people to lift their metaphorical lard asses.

DeeWee is shiny. Yes. But it's shiny in the way that LJ hasn't been in a couple of years. It's shiny on the back end.

Try it or don't try it. But really, you've got no ground to open your mouth if you haven't tried it / if you haven't read the updates / if you only have word of mouth.


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* If, and so far the things that DeeWee has promised, it has delivered on, there ends up being a way to read flocked posts via rss feeds on one's DeeWee reading list, it will make DeeWee accounts less likely to go inactive.
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PS: All y'all snarky ass bitches talking about the drama of fannish life and what will happen due to access or not access? You'd be finding something else to bitch about re: 'Teh Dramaz' and we all know it. People bring the drama, not just fans.

PPS: Having now had some confirmation that some folk haven't bothered following or reading me on iJay and it wasn't just they had nothing to say - thus lack of comments. I am cleaning house, both for my iJay and in who I'll grant access to on DW.