Dreamwidth
Apr. 19th, 2009 11:14 pmI've spent much of the weekend playing around with Dreamwidth, after a friend gave me an invite code on Friday and I am very impressed indeed with what I've seen so far. My journal. I never squee - it's just not how I respond to things, but with this project I've been sitting in IRC watching the conversation and finding myself really wanting to offer to help them out with something. I'm excited about it. I can see it working well and I'm now a little bit apprehensive that having got myself so excited about it, it might not work out the way I think it will.
I'd have signed up for a Dreamwidth account without much persuasion anyway, on the basis of it being new and shiny and wanting to know what it does to see if I like it and because one of the people running it is![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rahaeli who was in charge of LJ Support when I did some volunteering there and I trust that she knows what she's doing. What I didn't expect was to find myself pulled towards it so strongly, so quickly.
Dreamwidth is a code fork from LJ - they've taken the LJ code and modified bits of it to make it better and fix annoying things. One of the key changes is splitting what LJ calls 'friends' into 'subscriptions' (journals you read) and 'access list' (journals who can read your protected entries). Conceptually I think this is better - you can want to read without allowing someone access to protected entries and want to allow people access to protected entries without wanting to read what they post. As a matter of social engineering I'm not sure how Dreamwidth will develop a culture around subscribing/granting access and desubscribing/removing access - I'd bet a small quantity of money that within certain subsections of Dreamwidth users there will still be drama associated with desubscribing/removing access, because people are people and some people will be upset that others don't want to read their entries/allow them access to their posts.
They've removed the nudge feature LJ introduced and all ad support from the code:-)
They've created an 'importer' so you can easily import journals from LJ & IJ and are working on a cross poster (so you can post to Dreamwidth and LJ at the same time).
Once the cross poster is working I will probably start cross posting entries for a while and see what happens. I plan on using LJ and Dreamwidth in parallel, with each friends page having its own tab in Firefox.
If you have an OpenID account and you have set and validated an email address on Dreamwidth you will get an invite code when it goes into open beta on 30th April. Until then, they're sending out a certain number of invite codes to OpenID accounts each day, as they try to build up the site usage between now and 30th April.
I'd have signed up for a Dreamwidth account without much persuasion anyway, on the basis of it being new and shiny and wanting to know what it does to see if I like it and because one of the people running it is
rahaeli who was in charge of LJ Support when I did some volunteering there and I trust that she knows what she's doing. What I didn't expect was to find myself pulled towards it so strongly, so quickly. Dreamwidth is a code fork from LJ - they've taken the LJ code and modified bits of it to make it better and fix annoying things. One of the key changes is splitting what LJ calls 'friends' into 'subscriptions' (journals you read) and 'access list' (journals who can read your protected entries). Conceptually I think this is better - you can want to read without allowing someone access to protected entries and want to allow people access to protected entries without wanting to read what they post. As a matter of social engineering I'm not sure how Dreamwidth will develop a culture around subscribing/granting access and desubscribing/removing access - I'd bet a small quantity of money that within certain subsections of Dreamwidth users there will still be drama associated with desubscribing/removing access, because people are people and some people will be upset that others don't want to read their entries/allow them access to their posts.
They've removed the nudge feature LJ introduced and all ad support from the code:-)
They've created an 'importer' so you can easily import journals from LJ & IJ and are working on a cross poster (so you can post to Dreamwidth and LJ at the same time).
Once the cross poster is working I will probably start cross posting entries for a while and see what happens. I plan on using LJ and Dreamwidth in parallel, with each friends page having its own tab in Firefox.
If you have an OpenID account and you have set and validated an email address on Dreamwidth you will get an invite code when it goes into open beta on 30th April. Until then, they're sending out a certain number of invite codes to OpenID accounts each day, as they try to build up the site usage between now and 30th April.
