The Old DW/LJ Issue, From The Other Side
Apr. 5th, 2020 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penpusherIn 2017, I talked about how nobody is actually using Dreamwidth for their blogs, HERE, one of my entries in that year's LJ Idol, back when I tried to get people to leave the Russian owned LiveJournal for more American pastures.
Of course, everyone was completely resistant to the concept. It is hard getting folks to change their habits, especially when the audience I was playing to mostly consisted of people participating in a competition that celebrated the platform on which we were located! Not to mention I had an LJ permanent account, or, in the Яussian method of description: "Account with Permanent package of service" (which I can't help but hear in my head in a broken English style stereotypical Muscovite accent). Here, I'm just a second class nobody, with more than half of my icons and tags unavailable to me because I'm not a paid subscriber.
I'm not going to bother to make the case to leave the old El Jay again, even here at my new blog home, but I do have some observations on being a Daily DW user, with a mostly LJ reading page.
If the people you read on DW are actually writing from LJ, there are two big problems that occur.
The first is that LJ writers mirroring their journal on DW won't see any comment you make on their post until they come to DW directly and either see it in their "inbox" or find it on their entry.
To that, I say DW needs to institute email alerts, as LJ has had from the start, so folks can know when someone has responded to their entries as it happens. That's a major reason why it's more like a ghost town over here.
Conversely, LJ writers already have a community that is writing and responding to them, there. So, tramping over to DW to see the five, two, one(?!) other people, or person you may want to read is, in fact, a chore.
And it's a somewhat thankless chore. Because what if you check in every day? And days go by and there's nothing? The negative reinforcement will likely drop that down to once or twice a week, once a month or eventually, to whenever you think of it, which could be, never.
But today, I noticed on my DW reading page, a bunch of new entries... Well, new to me, but they were dated with dates from last week.
That means that either the interface from LJ to DW is slow to load - the entries that are being forwarded from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth aren't getting there fast enough. OR, more likely, it's that entries that are mirrored have a slower time populating on your reading list and instead of posting there as they come through, they show up in your feed... When they do.
That's a problem because I may miss days of posts, then get flooded by entries I simply didn't see until long after they were written.
And that contributes to the downward spiral. I check my reading page, comment where appropriate, receive no comments on my entries because no one is here reading them, check my reading page and find nothing new, but then, a day or two later, I see a bunch of entries all at once and feel compelled to answer them all, even though it might be days before anyone knows I did.
So DW needs to fix the reading page feed to make sure these mirrored entries get listed in a timely manner. At least that would help the feeling of isolation here.
Of course, everyone was completely resistant to the concept. It is hard getting folks to change their habits, especially when the audience I was playing to mostly consisted of people participating in a competition that celebrated the platform on which we were located! Not to mention I had an LJ permanent account, or, in the Яussian method of description: "Account with Permanent package of service" (which I can't help but hear in my head in a broken English style stereotypical Muscovite accent). Here, I'm just a second class nobody, with more than half of my icons and tags unavailable to me because I'm not a paid subscriber.
I'm not going to bother to make the case to leave the old El Jay again, even here at my new blog home, but I do have some observations on being a Daily DW user, with a mostly LJ reading page.
If the people you read on DW are actually writing from LJ, there are two big problems that occur.
The first is that LJ writers mirroring their journal on DW won't see any comment you make on their post until they come to DW directly and either see it in their "inbox" or find it on their entry.
To that, I say DW needs to institute email alerts, as LJ has had from the start, so folks can know when someone has responded to their entries as it happens. That's a major reason why it's more like a ghost town over here.
Conversely, LJ writers already have a community that is writing and responding to them, there. So, tramping over to DW to see the five, two, one(?!) other people, or person you may want to read is, in fact, a chore.
And it's a somewhat thankless chore. Because what if you check in every day? And days go by and there's nothing? The negative reinforcement will likely drop that down to once or twice a week, once a month or eventually, to whenever you think of it, which could be, never.
But today, I noticed on my DW reading page, a bunch of new entries... Well, new to me, but they were dated with dates from last week.
That means that either the interface from LJ to DW is slow to load - the entries that are being forwarded from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth aren't getting there fast enough. OR, more likely, it's that entries that are mirrored have a slower time populating on your reading list and instead of posting there as they come through, they show up in your feed... When they do.
That's a problem because I may miss days of posts, then get flooded by entries I simply didn't see until long after they were written.
And that contributes to the downward spiral. I check my reading page, comment where appropriate, receive no comments on my entries because no one is here reading them, check my reading page and find nothing new, but then, a day or two later, I see a bunch of entries all at once and feel compelled to answer them all, even though it might be days before anyone knows I did.
So DW needs to fix the reading page feed to make sure these mirrored entries get listed in a timely manner. At least that would help the feeling of isolation here.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-12 01:31 pm (UTC)It's been exceedingly difficult for me to construct such these past few seasons. The deadline might be HERE, but if I'm working multiple nights THERE which includes the deadline, and I only have a precious couple of hours to myself in the morning where my own needs are secondary...
The whole process gets to be a treadmill the longer you play. There are some Idolers like
My fear is a different one from LJ. There, I thought the Russians could use the site for whatever their plans called for. That could be propaganda, surveillance, or possibly even shutting down the site, maybe without warning. Here, it's that lack of a safety net and the cost prohibitive pricing for paid accounts. Obviously part of that is because so few people are here.
If they are using it for those plans, they're being very stealth because there is no indication anywhere AFAIK that they are using for political or other purposes. They already scared off the majority, if not all, of the Russian users so we're basically all that's left. I presume there are some bots still out there so I lock everything down. But I've always done that anyway.
I'm more apt to believe DW will fold before LJ at this point just from a monetary perspective.
I deliberately keep political stuff of most of my social media including here, but, um, yeah.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-12 06:51 pm (UTC)Dreamwidth, on the other hand, what's the actual story? Do they own the servers? What is their maintenance cost? Are they meeting expenses? The fact that a government owns one and a couple of blogger fans are controlling the other sums it up.
I mentioned my concerns about Russia using LJ surreptitiously because there was an early story about them squelching a Ukraine protest rally by finding the organizers on LJ. And if they can do it once, why wouldn't they use it for other, similar purposes, like trying to influence the election or learning as much as they can about the people of a country they despise and hope will crash and burn.
It's interesting how LITTLE we have heard both from and about Russia during all this, but guess what? The president talked with Putin three separate times last week. What's going on? Yeah. What's going on?
And admittedly if your job takes you away from writing, it requires that much more effort to get back to it. I have been fortunate to have time and motivation. Not everyone does, and I sometimes forget that.