Friends of mine, my awesome flist and others:
The recent debacle with the subject line in comments and the way LJ is treating its userbase has left me with a sour, sour taste in my mouth. I've had a DW account for a while, and have used it primarily to back up my journal here on LJ. But I think its going to be time to make the permanent switch.
It's not going to be easy (and nothing worthwhile ever is). Firstly, there are some annoying problems with my user template on DW.
In one version, the Reading Pane (their version of the Friends Page) doesn't display user names below user icons. In another version (the one that matched the one I use here), the Reading Pane overruns the screen. I've opened a help ticket and hopefully will get that fixed soon. ETA:
I posted my problem about 40 minutes ago on one of the refugee communities on DW and got pointed to a solution that fixed both problems. So my lovely, LOVELY template now correctly displays everything I need it to. DW peeps, like LJ peeps (and I don't mean the freak-ass coders) rise to the occasion!I also need to rebuild my masterlist linking to the entries in DW, not LJ. I curse my prolific-ness. That's more than 350 stories to relink, a pretty serious amount of work. I have needed to do this before, but it's an imperative now. However, I have been spending a lot ot quality time lately with LJ's fucking nightmare of a tag management system and was thinking about how much I HATE LJ (DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE).
What does migrating mean?
1. I will post directly from DW, but will always allow comments and feedback on entries reposted here and will always respond to comments here.
2. My template (S2, flexible squares based) still allows subject lines in comments, which means that I will run my promptfests from my LJ account unless my writing friends want to do it on DW.
3. I love my flist here, I think you are all awesome and I want to keep your friendship. Please take advantage of the open signup on DW and join me there. My username is the same.
Besides the obvious, there are advantages to posting on DW.
Firstly - It's not going to be subject to politically motivated DDOS attacks.
Secondly - DW is strictly member supported. You don't get ads if you don't pay for an account. It's member-coded - which means that shit like what LJ has just done won't happen.
Thirdly - there are higher post and comment sizes. This means that longer stories don't need to get split up. Of course, if I want to post on successive days, I will - but this gives me an option I wouldn't otherwise have.
The biggest downside to DW is the current inability to
import communities. To quote DW:
"Because the owner/moderator of a community owns the community itself, but doesn't (usually) own the community's content (which is created by others and so is owned by the people who post it), Dreamwidth won't allow the import of communities from other services at this time. While Mark and Denise, the Dreamwidth site owners, aren't against community importing "forever and ever", it's not going to happen soon, and there's no timetable for when it will happen. There are a lot of copyright and ownership issues to be resolved in a non-evil way before community importing can happen."I mod a number of comms and co-mod others. I will strongly consider setting up duplicate sites on DW and pushing participation there.
ETA:
I have been advised by my dearest ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hoosierbitch that DW very soon (as in maybe today) DW will be allowing community imports.
Evidence of such:
This is the game changer. When this feature goes live, I predict a mass migration. Hopefully it will leave this place full of the sound of nothing but chirping crickets.To sum up, for me, completely migration to DW will take some time, but it WILL HAPPEN. It also starts with posting directly to DW and crossposting here. I have a number of other posts to make today, and I will be doing them directly from DW.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
