I've got a dreamwidth account!

[sraun]

Your email address came up on today's "invite a user from our OpenID users who have set and validated their email address" random draw!

Yay! Please come over and say hi!

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Same name?

[sraun]

Yep! The only place I'm not sraun is gmail, because they have a six-character minimum. :-( I'm fyreopal there, but practically never check it.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

I've asked elsewhere, and I've looked at Dreamwidth's website, but haven't figured out what the deal is. Is Dreamwidth just another LJ? Or am I missing something here?

Thanks!

[sraun]

Dreamwidth is an LJ clone with a business plan somewhat similar to Craigslist - the owners want to be making enough to support them and a possibly a small staff, and are trying to be explicitly fanfic friendly. And they have no plans to go public, rather plans to never go public, so they will be avoiding some of the hassles that LJ went through with the user-base because they needed to look good for potential investors.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Ah. Thanks. So do you think most folks will be migrating altogether, then? Can one migrate one's entry archive, or how will that work?

I guess this will be an interesting experience. Hopefully not in the Chinese sense [g].

[sraun]

Well, I'm not going to be leaving LJ completely any time soon - I've got a permanent account. ;-) Not to mention the fact that Dreamwidth is blocked by my corporate firewall, but LJ isn't.

That aside - yes, it looks like a fair number of people are going to go there. The fanfic and role-playing communities look like the groups that are going to go over soonest - past that, it's a matter of who's been most ticked off by LJ Corporate recently. If it gets big/popular enough, it might serve as a check on some of the more egregious bits of LJ Corporate - if there really is a viable alternative to jump ship to en masse, that should ... discourage them being too autocratic.

There's an import feature that will pull all your LJ entries and their comments! over. It's supposed to preserve security - I'm not certain how that's going to work. It preserves attribution based on the LJ OpenID account.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

I just hope it's really user-friendly, and that the streamlining/whatever doesn't make it less so than LJ. I know most people don't think LJ is hard to use, but there was a bit of a learning curve for me (it took me forever to take advantage of the html like cuts and so forth, and to imbed pictures, and use icons), and there's still a lot of it that I don't use.

I guess I'll just wait and see. Since I don't have an account over there yet, there's not much else I can do [g].

[sraun]

I think most (if not all) of what you already about cuts & html & such will transfer directly.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Whew [g].

BTW, thanks for being so patient and explaining stuff. I appreciate it.

[sraun]

Oh, and they've split "friend" up into 'trust to read my postings' and 'want to read their postings'.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Now that's a good idea.

[sraun]

Yeah!

Oh, yeah - another thing I missed mentioning. They're implementing cross-posting, and I believe they're going to be trying to preserve security there too. I'm assuming that it will be my responsibility to make certain that I have identically named groups on LJ & Dreamwidth to make that work.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Identically-named groups? You mean above and beyond your personal account?

I don't have any of those, so that won't be an issue for me.

[sraun]

Given what you said above, you may not be using this at all.

LJ has four levels of security - Public, Friends-Only, Custom, and Private. I'm going to assume that you know Public, Friends-Only and Private - they transfer easily anyway.

The 'takes set-up' is going to be Custom.

Go to your profile. Across the top menu, select Friends, then select Manage Customer Friends Groups. In here, you can create a Custom Group, with some sub-set of your friends. One that many people make is "Local", and then they put the people who live close to them (for whatever value of close works for you). Then, when you post an entry, under Custom Security, you'll see a list of all your Customer Friends Groups - you can select one or more of them to see the post.

I'm assuming these Custom Friends Groups will have to be duplicated by name between LJ & Dreamwidth if you want to use that security.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Ohhh... Yes, I use all four of those already. Never mind [g]. I thought you meant communities.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Hmm... might be interested in getting an account over there if you find yourself with any spare codes - it looks to me like Bujoldia is emigrating there at a great rate.

[sraun]

I'll keep you in mind. If you know fairestcat, she's got a list going at http://fairestcat.dreamwidth.org/498093.html of people looking for invite codes.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Aha! Thank you, I couldn't remember who was doing that.