I have had a number of requests for Dreamwidth invite codes from people who (so far as I can tell) I've never spoken to or interacted with in any way before. I'm not annoyed with people for asking, as (1) generally asking questions isn't wrong and (2) at no point (until now) did I ever say 'only people who already know me', but I have decided that for the next period of time, until Dreamwidth beds itself down within my various social circles, I want to keep invite codes for friends/acquaintances/friends-of-friends. I currently have two invite codes. I am intending a relatively low barrier of 'know me' ie. have LJ account I may have seen commenting on other people's journals/have left me LJ comments etc rather than anything stronger but basically not anonymous/people I've never heard of before.
Dreamwidth have convincing reasons for the decision to use invite codes as a means to control site growth, however, the invite-or-pay-$3-to-get-an-account thing is something that is reminiscient of occasions when I've been the one excluded from a social group. Here I feel like I'm on the wrong side of the equation - I'm welcome here and other people are being sort-of-excluded* and while I accept the geek social fallacy that excluding people isn't always wrong, I think there's a way to go before the site will have grown enough that there will usually be people about with invite codes and most people will know someone able to invite them. For that reason, I do feel somewhat uneasy with deciding to prioritise friends/acquaintances over strangers, because I think getting people here who wouldn't otherwise be invited is a good thing. On the other hand, I don't think deciding to prioritise friends/acquaintances is illogical or in and of itself a bad thing. Of course my primary loyalty is to people I already know.
I will stop in passing to mention
![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_codesharing where people with spare invite codes are offering them and there's a place for people who want invite codes to ask for them.
*I say sort-of-excluded because there's a social difference between a friend saying 'hi, come and join me doing x' and 'I'm doing x, if you pay $3, or go and comment in
dw_codesharing you can come and do it too' - the access is there, but the social aspect of being explicitly invited to join in and welcomed isn't. [another note in passing - $3 probably is a barrier to entry for some people]. For people who have experienced a lot of exclusion in other settings, the internet is often a place where they find themselves usually welcomed and further experiences of being left out are unlikely to go down well, whether intended in this fashion or not.
