Dreamwidth - anyone else thinking about jumping ship?

[strangetomato]

I've been checking out Dreamwidth a little lately, and I'm really considering moving over there once it opens up to the public (April 30). Some major pluses are the "reading page" instead of the "friends" list, which has always been reminiscent of grade five girl gangs at best (even just the new name is far better, but it also separates "friends only" access and the things you want to follow into two distinct things- THANK YOU!) and this amazing diversity statement. It seems to take everything that's good about livejournal and fix everything that sucks. As it looks right now, I'll be switching.

Is anyone else considering this?

Comments

[aledstrange.livejournal.com]

It took me a while to get to use to LJ at first, so don't think I would be moving now that I finally did lol, but its always good to know about other alternatives specially if they offer new/different features about Friends/reading pages.

Thing is, the word "friends" as used here doesn't bother me at all, because I simply take it as an *nice* way to name a Acquaintances/contacts/interest/reading (or what ever) list, but I do agree the adding system has its flaws (specially on locked posts, imo only *mutual friend* should see those, but guess nothing's perfect)and could be interesting to have other options to handle "Friends" to separate more personal things and/or avoid unnecessary/unwanted spam.

But still, it'll depend on how that site will work, and grow over time. I like the diversity here. :)

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not completely sure either. They don't have a whole lot of layout options right now, so it would have to add some more to make it completely appealing to me (or maybe I'll finally learn to do the custom designing a little better). The overall effect is good, though. I love that it's Open Source. I'll always try to support that option if I have a choice.

"Friends" is a bit of a loaded word to me, though I'm sure everyone interprets it differently in the case of livejournal. When you're talking about content sharing (which is mostly what we do as simmers, especially the storytellers), it makes more sense to call it subscribing than checking your friend list. The terminology goes back to a personal journal sort of setup, like diary.com (remember that?). "Reading list" is more like a blog, and I think it's a good distinction.

I'm going to wait and see too, but I wanted to know what people were thinking about it. It's becoming pretty huge in the fandom communities as a whole (but not so much simming as of yet).

[aledstrange.livejournal.com]

Well, I've never used any other journal-type site before (or blog for that matter) so I'm no really familiarized with general terminology on that aspect, neither do I see much difference on how it called, but on how it works.

I wish LJ for example would allow me, as poster, to create entries for something like a 'custom group' but *not* necessarily private/locked.

I don't see the point on locking a post about a movie for example, but I do understand that it could be unwanted for those 'friends' who added me interested in other topics. But in the other hand a journal is, after all, to be used (and abused) whatever the user wants to, so its hard to keep a balance. (sometime I even get added by users from other fandoms, but quickly un-added coz for them obviously sim-talk is unwanted spam! lol)

Basically that's the only thing that really bugs me here *shrugs* (The only way around seems to be having a completely thematic journal, or several journals for each topic you may want to post about)