Dreamwidth vs. LiveJournal

[cos]

Differences between Dreamwidth and LiveJournal seem to fall into three buckets:

1. Some differences in features.

2. Perceived trustworthiness.

3. Who's there - who can you interact with on each one.

Originally DW started from LJ's code, but both they and LJ have independently made changes, so although the two are still quite similar, each has features (or misfeatures, in some cases) that the other doesn't. Overall, the impression I get is that DW is a little better on the feature front, for people who prefer staying closer to the spirit of what LJ was like. However, I hardly ever hear anyone say that that's why they switched from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth, or using that as the reason to urge others to switch. Almost universally, people allude to #2.

What it boils down to is that LiveJournal was originally well trusted, but then it sold to less trusted owners. Dreamwidth's founders, as far as I can tell, aren't seen as better than original LiveJournal; some people are just more comfortable with them than with LJ's current owners. But the very same thing could happen to Dreamwidth: they, too, could sell to less trusted owners.

So it it worth the time and disruption of switching over to something that may be as good as what LJ used to be, but could later become what LJ is now? Which brings us to #3 - LiveJournal is still where most of the people are. Which means that, on balance, LiveJournal remains the superior service. Feature differences aren't that huge, so they don't outweigh the fact that far more of the people I want to interact with are here compared to there.

Originally, Dreamwidth made a big deal of their founding documents as supposedly a basis for trusting that Dreamwidth won't sell out in the future like LiveJournal did. It makes a lot of sense for them to have done that, because that would've been the main reason for founding a LiveJournal alternative. But I think they botched it: I read those documents, and as far as I could tell, the key difference was that LiveJournal had been subject to one person's whim to sell, while Dreamwidth is subject to two people. I guess that's a bit better, but it's no security.

Worse, when I went to the Dreamwidth IRC channel back when the project was first announced, to try to confirm my interpretation of the document... wow, were people there nasty and mean-spirited and defensive to the extreme. By asking some factual questions in several different ways, I did eventually succeed in confirming that I'd interpreted the document correctly, but people involved in the project seeme to universally view such questioning as personal attacks in the intentions of Dreamwidth's founders, and responded with hostility and insults. That experience left a bitter taste, and a gut impression on my part that Dreamwidth is actually less to be trusted than LiveJournal.

I've got an account there in case there's ever a mass migration from LJ to DW, to make it easier for me to follow my friends there should it become necessary. But if you're curious why I'm not at all interested in supporting or instigating such a thing so far, now you know.

Comments

[feuervogel]

For me, it's "trust that they won't delete my journal because of some bullshit childporn allegations." And also "trust that they won't bring in bullshit 'features' like crossposting to facebook and infinite scrolling and forced site default comment page reading."

[ron_newman]

Is crossposting from LJ to facebook a bad thing? You don't have to sign up for it if you don't want to. I like cross-posting most of my davis_square posts over there, as it brings in some additional readers.

[feuervogel]

It is a "feature" I have negative use for. I do not want to link my LJ to my real identity.

[ron_newman]

But it's an entirely optional feature. Unless you explicitly sign up for it, it's not even there.

[feuervogel]

They could be expending the effort instead on fixing the interface, fixing the random outages and 503 errors, and doing actually useful things, as opposed to turning LJ into a facebook clone and forcing everyone to use site-default comment feeds (unless you know the magic settings to force style=mine permanently).

The only reason I still use LJ at all is because the bulk of my flist hasn't made the switch. Otherwise I'd drop it like the crap-filled hot potato it is.

[ron_newman]

What are site-default comment feeds? I'm not familiar with this.

[feuervogel]

In release 88, they made all comment pages use the glaring white site scheme. Also they took away subject lines in comments. Many many users complained about it: eyestrain, migraines, too much whitespace, horrid aesthetics. Only people using S2 styles can force style=mine.

http://news.livejournal.com/140511.html
http://moragmacpherson.livejournal.com/78695.html
http://dr-phil-physics.livejournal.com/355526.html

[elusiveat.livejournal.com]

I don't necessarily think LJ or DW are more likely to delete my stuff, but I like the redundancy of automated cross-posting from DW.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

AFAICT, dreamwidth exists primarily to provide a home for harry potter erotic fanfic communities that grew disenchanted with LJ. This is win-win: the HPEFCs get a more congenial home, and livejournal gets less HPEFC drama.

I crosspost what little I post there, because why not. But I don't ever expect for there to be any sort of mass migration -- the concerns that drove DW's userbase there from LJ are by and large not the concerns of LJ's primarily-Russian userbase.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

The mass-migration doesn't have to include any of the Russians to be relevant to usfolk. I only have one Russian on my friendslist and she's actually in Boston.

(note: personally not planning to migrate)

[ron_newman]

If LJ ever appears to be actually abandoning its English-langauge users to become an all-Russian service, that would definitely cause a mass migration (probably to DW).

[pir.livejournal.com]

The fact that LJ was taken down frequently for a while by DoS attacks that seemed to be related to the heavily Russian userbase was concerning me but mostly it seemed to push people onto different types of social media (farcebook, twatter, etc) rather than onto different journalling sites.

The attention span in my extended social circles for longer writing seems to have faded or perhaps other things have just become more convenient, like posting pictures of their dinner with hipster camera effects.

[antimony.livejournal.com]

There was another mass migration of roleplaying communities, based more on LJ functionality changes that broke features roleplayers depended on. Which are pretty large in terms of financial draw since icons are used in a lot of special ways as well as the various tracking features.

As an RPer, it made me start using the personal DW accounts I'd just been sort of sitting on. (At least one of them; I got sort of tired of dealing with a fandom/nonfandom journal split about the same time and haven't been using the fandom one.)

[blimix.livejournal.com]

So it it worth the time and disruption of switching over to something that may be as good as what LJ used to be, but could later become what LJ is now?

I don't think that your post really addressed this question. "Could" is not the same as "will". We don't have much clue what the probability is. The time and disruption were negligible, in my experience. And crossposting makes it easy to reach users on both sites. (It takes a few extra seconds if I want the privacy of the post to be different from my default settings on LJ.) So yes, I think it's worth it.

Sure, I still have to read LJ to keep current on people's lives, but being present on DW means that I won't be an impediment to reaching critical mass for a migration.

[lindseykuper]

Another way they're different is in ease of contributing back to the platform. LiveJournal is only open source in the sense that the code is available, which is necessary but not sufficient for being a good open source citizen. It's poorly documented, hard to get a dev environment going on your own, hard to understand the code enough to be able to modify it, and there's not much of a community around it to help you. Dreamwidth, on the other hand, has invested heavily in all of those things. Forking LJ and starting over with a new userbase also offered an opportunity to throw out some legacy cruft. All of this makes it much easier for new people to get started with the code.

Regarding trust, it's true that the owners of DW could sell to less trusted owners. But part of the reason people trust the current owners is that, unlike Brad, who didn't know when he started LJ that it would accidentally became popular, Mark and Denise knew, as much as anyone could know, what they were getting into when they started DW (because they were LJ veterans). They actually set out to run a business, unlike Brad with LJ, and therefore they had things like a business plan from a start. So they're arguably on a more sustainable path than LJ was.

[cos]

You're the first person I've seen bring up its better opensourceyness as a reason to move there. Valid, but apparently not much of a thing among LJ users eyeing Dreamwidth.

Mark and Denise knew, as much as anyone could know, what they were getting into when they started DW (because they were LJ veterans). They actually set out to run a business, unlike Brad with LJ, and therefore they had things like a business plan from a start. So they're arguably on a more sustainable path than LJ was.

That's why I find it so disappointing that they left it similarly vulnerable. One of the things they knew, that Brad may not have, was the possibility of selling later on and then having it end up in someone else's hands, with different priorities and loyalties. Because they knew this, they projected a pretense of having set up Dreamwidth to be resistant to this... but they didn't actually do so! Because of that, I have a lot of doubt about their having actually learned the lessons of LJ. All I know is that they claim to, but I don't take that at face value because the one piece of it I actually looked into turned out to be empty.

[lindseykuper]

Hm; I guess I see things differently.

I don't presume to know why Brad decided to sell LJ, but I suspect that at least part of the reason he sold it because he was burned out on running this site and wanted to hack on new things. (This post was an April Fool's joke, but I think there's a grain of truth to it.) From their experience with LJ, I imagine Denise and Mark gained a deep understanding of how someone can get burned out on such a project. So, not only are there two of them instead of one, but, I'd argue that, having seen this sort of thing before, they are better equipped to anticipate burnout and correct course to avoid it.

I would also argue that when it comes to avoiding burnout, having two founders is more than a bit better than having one. As cliché as it may be to link to a Paul Graham article, I think it's telling that he puts "single founder" first on his list of mistakes startups make. He writes, "The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks "I can't let my friends down." This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it's missing when there's just one founder."

I also think there's another way in which DW is more sustainable than LJ, and it has to do with the "good open source citizen" stuff. If Denise and Mark decided to stop running DW tomorrow (or if they both got hit by buses, heaven forbid), there are a number of people who are capable of stepping in to run it, or launch a clone of it. In fact, Mark has gradually cut back on his day-to-day involvement, and my understanding is that the rest of the team, paid and unpaid, have been filling in. The fact that this has happened is evidence of Denise and Mark's investment in documentation and training paying off.

Having said all this, no, DW is not a perfect project, and it really sucks that people on IRC were being super-defensive when you asked them factual questions. Perhaps the way they were reacting to your healthy DW skepticism was a post-traumatic stress response to LJ's bad behavior at the time; I don't know.

(edit: typos)

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

Few and far between are people who can recognize that the worst enemy of their well-laid plans is their future self. I'm not sure I could adequately prepare for such an eventuality, even knowing that fact.