Dreamwidth

[marcmagus]

I've joined the small horde of people who are sufficiently interested in Dreamwidth to go take a look and open an account. This post is being posted to Dreamwidth, and should be automatically crossposted to LiveJournal as well.

Having read through a lot of their documentation, I find the Dreamwidth project promising because it reads to me as though they have learned a lot of lessons from both the mistakes and successes of LiveJournal. Their [meh, this sounds like an advertisement...oh well] commitment to openness, sustainability, and community is something I appreciate. The tools they've already put in place seem like a good demonstration that they mean it and are competent to deliver.

Unless something goes wrong, I expect to post like this from now on. At some point, it's possible I will disable comments on the LiveJournal crosspost (I'm still thinking about this...not giving comment counts and requiring an extra click for LJ users is annoying, but fractured comments are also annoying, and at least DW's OpenID support seems solid.). I probably won't turn off the crossposting entirely.

The biggest feature which encourages me to move to Dreamwidth is their decision to separate the concepts of "Subscribe" and "Access" [jumbled together on LiveJournal under the unfortunate name of "friends"]. This is something I've been quietly complaining about for as long as I can remember here on LJ, and it gives me hope that DW gets it.

[P.S. I'm hoping to post a little more frequently, health permitting. Hopefully I can do so and be interesting about it.]

[Edit: fixed failure to use Markdown correctly]

[Edit: it turns out crossposting via client isn't supported yet; you either have to post through the website or edit the post once it hits DW and tell it to crosspost manually. Irritating; I might look into configuring JLJ to double-post or something.]

Comments

[miintikwa]

For the record, I really hate the 'disabled comments' on crossposted LJ entries, and I've already started removing people from my LJ-reading-list for doing that. (I do read some of them over here on DW, but... It irks me. And I don't know that I'm going to be reading DW consistently, so...)

Anyway. You posting more often would be nice. :)

[marcmagus]

Noted. Is it the need to "click through", the frequent need to register on the other site to post a comment, or the inability to know whether there are any comments/how many comments there are which annoys you?

I find them kind of annoying too, but I also find fractured community (such as two separate discussions on one post) annoying....will think about it for a while, I think.

[miintikwa]

It's the click-through thing. When I read Lj, if I want to make a comment, I open a tab using the comment link. In order to comment via a click-through, it requires at least two, in some cases three extra steps (three being if DW has logged me out, which has happened at least once).

I'm going to test and see how many people comment via each, and take a wait and see attitude.

[marcmagus]

Well, that just gave me a good idea. I put in a support request for a feature which adds a direct comment link to the footer which links back to the home post at Dreamwidth. Would that make a significant difference for you?

[miintikwa]

It would! It would be much easier just to open a tab and make a comment (provided I can get DW to not log me out-- which it hasn't, fingers crossed!).