The exodus approaches...

[sholio]

First, before I type anything else - I just realized that I never thanked the people who nominated me for Stargate fan awards. So ... THANK YOU, wonderful people! I'm so sorry it took me so long to say so! *bows in your general direction*

Anyway, moving on ... Dreamwidth (new fandom-friendly journaling platform) has announced their open beta dates (accounts will be available April 30).

[Poll #1374680]

I've been watching my f'list abuzz with this, and feeling ... mildly conflicted.

Since 1995, a significant amount of my social life has been online. In that time, I can think of three different online "places" off the top of my head (a mailing list, a message board, and LJ) that I've thought of as "home" at the time. In all three cases, I spent years there, made enduring friendships and business contacts, shared major developments in my life ... and (except for LJ, yet) eventually moved on, as the group splintered and scattered.

I've also participated in, and sometimes run, dozens of mailing lists, message boards and blogs; I've had at least a half-dozen different message boards and blogs on my own webspace (none of which really took off, though some were pretty active for a short while).

So the thought never occurred to me that LJ would be permanent, any more than I expect the house I live in now to be the house I live in until I die. At the same time, though, I don't particularly want to move. I'm comfy, I have everything set up the way I like it, and most of my currently active online social circle is here. But I can feel the winds of change blowing; whether I stay or go or straddle both sites, I suspect that fandom (at least the corner of fandom where I "live") is about to split and reshape itself again. I've certainly been around long enough to know that this is normal and inevitable; fandom changes and reshapes all the time. I was kinda behind the curve on LJ fandom; I didn't really get active here until it was already going full-bore, so there was a (deceptive) sense of permanence to LJ fandom for me -- in Internet terms, it was ancient and rock-solid when I first jumped in, not to mention that I got in on the new, hot fandom (SGA) while it was on a popularity upswing. Compared to the Internet at large, it seemed monumentally stable and permanent. There were very few dead links, and lots of lively, active journals and discussions -- it felt like you could link to a story on an LJ journal and expect to still be there several years later, which is a sort of permanence that didn't really exist back in the days of personal Geocities homepages and mailing list archives.

Now I'm starting to notice growing numbers of blogs that are struckthrough in older comment threads; dead links leading to posts that have been privatized and journals that no longer exist; communities with tons of posts in their archives but not much activity now. I don't really get the feeling that LJ fandom is winding down, exactly, but it's starting to feel ... impermanent, in a way that it didn't before.

So ... I'm conflicted. Right now I'm leaning towards some combination of "maintain a Dreamwidth journal for reading purposes" and "let's see where fandom goes". I'm pretty much in it for the social life; all I really want is a journaling platform that'll basically leave me alone to do my thing -- and I know that LJ isn't perfect, but my own experiences with it have been good, despite some of the stories I've heard. I don't mind leaving -- like I said, I'm not wedded to the place -- but I'm in no great hurry to leave, either. I basically just want to be where the interesting discussions and the people I care about can be found.

Comments

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

You're right that friendship transcends fandom -- or blogging platform! I suppose one of the big things that's making me dither right now is that if fandom *does* end up migrating en masse to DW, I will probably want to follow, and I'll want to take my journal with me (apparently they have a nice LJ-import tool). But that precludes using my DW journal for much of anything unless I want to blow it all away when/if I move the LJ. It's the whole "syncronizing the laptop with the desktop" problem (currently driving me crazy; I still haven't found a good way to do it, and one of these days I know I'm going to screw up and overwrite the wrong version of a file...).

I also keep thinking about a couple of unsuccessful attempts that I've seen in the past to move a community from one platform to another -- the inevitable result in both cases was that the part of the community that survived the move was only a fraction of the original, and much less active. I'm not sure if that'll happen with DW -- there's a lot of enthusiasm about it in fannish circles -- but I don't really want to repeat the experience I've had in the past of following what I *thought* was the herd, only to find that the herd had scattered along the way.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

You could always make 2 DW accounts? Cross-post to "friendshipper" on lj & dw, and then start a new dw account if you want to do something different with it? At least for me, I might just cross-post to lj and dw...(at least when it comes to fic posting, I'm pretty shameless about putting it out anywhere I can get readers, lj, ff.net, AOOO, whichever!)

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

See developer's comment below yours -- I had just been assuming that it blew away existing content, but it actually does not; new entries shuffle in with existing ones. And you can import multiple times. :D

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Oooooh, I didn't realize synecdochic was one of the dev's - that makes me feel more comfortable with dw already! it's always nice to recognize names in these things (it's one of the reasons AOOO excited me from the get-go; I know how serious many of the OTW folks are.)

[rydra_wong]

synecdochic is one of the founders! *g*

You can read about the whole project pretty much from its inception here:

http://synecdochic.livejournal.com/tag/dreamwidth

[synecdochic]

The importer will not replace the contents of your account -- it'll just shuffle the entries in alongside any ones you've already made, so you can safely and comfortably import as many times as you want and not worry about losing things. (You can also import multiple accounts into the same Dreamwidth account.)

(here via pingback_bot)

[rydra_wong]

*is dead from niftiness*

[synecdochic]

Well, correction, a bug means you shouldn't import multiple accounts into the same account yet. But we're fixing that. :)

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

oooooooooooo! Thank you so much! That sounds *ever* so much better and more useful than what I had been imagining. :D

(And thank you very much for all of your hard work on this!)