Good Things Come Out Of JF too!

[melannen]

Every time somebody posts on dreamchasers that they have "won the open id lottery", my brain translates that as "I wrote/found some really hot and shameless smut! And it was easy!" And then I'm disappointed.

Anyway, as most of you probably know by now, for the past two years I have been journaling almost entirely on journalfen.net rather than on livejournal. This gives me a really upside-down perspective about all of the hand-wringing going on about the TRAUMA of moving to Dreamwidth, let me tell you. So, as one of the couple dozen people who blog primarily on Journalfen, I want to share my perspective on migration.

This is why it was a no-brainer for me to move to DW:

1. It's fan-friendly, personal, fairly small, and not fixated on financial growth, which are the things that make me like Journalfen. To the people who don't like that denise was once LJ Abuse, or that it's for-profit, or elitist, or that the site isn't fan-friendly enough: man, you poor frail flowers would not survive two days on a service administrated by zorrorojo and robin_serrano. Which is entirely fannish, completely volunteer, and highly responsive to user complaints. If by that you mean they frequently descend into profanity and are quite willing to publically demonstrate that they have nothing but contempt for their users and wish the site would die. (I greatly admire Robin and Zorro, btw. I have spent enough time on JF, and in fandom, to realize that hating your users and wishing the site would die is the *inevitable result* of trying to deal with the people on a fannish journal site. It's just that unlike a proper business, they have no particular motivation to exercise tact about what annoying, whiny brats we all are.)

2. The software at DW works. And when it doesn't work, they fix it. And if they don't fix it, they'll teach you how to fix it yourself. As opposed to LJ, which just adds more useless broken bits on top, and JF, which is currently running on a frankensteinian monstrosity of LJ code circa 2001 under a barely-functional half-install of LJ as of 2007. DW is committed to real open source and open development and to *teaching* about open source and development. They're committed to portability and interoperability and accessibility. They've stripped out all the useless cruft in LJ, and they're have an actual plan for what they're putting in instead, and they're being carefully realistic about use of resources. They want to make software that is actually good software, and they're letting anybody who wants to take it and make it better, so they've committed to keeping it better, in a way LJ, with its half-closed code, can never be. And even fairly early into closed beta, when many of the changes weren't made or are broken, DW just feels smooth and functional in a way the other sites don't. This is not easy to do. Just ask Robin and Zorro. (Denise has been careful to mention that they're planning to make it easy for "sites running the most recent version of LJ code" to update to DW. We were attempting to speculate earlier on what would happen if JF tried to do it over their current LJ install. I believe the phrase "shambling horror" may have been used.)

3. I like the people here. And the people here like me. LJ is so large and impersonal, and people's ways of using it can shift so much over time, that I often feel like I'm drowning in unfamiliar waters there. JF is small and close-knit and we all speak the same language, but it can get kind of quiet. And kind of incestuous. DW is a lot larger - there's a lot of diversity, and a lot of conversations going on, and it will keep getting larger, but it will never grow too fast, and invite codes will keep it connected. DW is not just for fans, (and the people who think it's just fannish should come look at my DW flist already), but all the same, DW people are my people. Because the site is devoted, above all, to diversity, inclusivity, accessibility, and freedom of expression, principles that are also dear to my heart. And so I know that anyone on Dreamwidth is also somebody who is comfortable in a space where those things are important, and so I can be comfortable, too. (That this segment of people greatly overlaps some of my favorite bits of fandom is nice, of course. And says some encouraging things about what fandom is becoming.)

If there's one important thing I learned from migrating, it's that when everybody is done moving and settling, you will still have a community. It will be different than before. It will be better. Regardless of which service you wind up on: You'll lose readers. You'll drop people who you read. What you post about will change, and the way it effects the network will change. But each service has benefits that attract different people, and you will settle in to the one that suits you best, and the other people on that service will be people who agree with you about it being the best, and this is a good basis for making new friends. You'll get new readers. You'll find new journals to read. The people who really matter will stick around one way or another, because if it really matters, you'll make it work. And the rest of it isn't the end of the world.

Anyway, I loved it at JF, and I'm not leaving, but I'm glad a lot of the JF people are here on Dreamwidth, too. The people who tough it out and blog on Journalfen are an amazing bunch of people, with a wide diversity of interests. Let me introduce you to some of the JF people who've been posting interesting stuff on DW:

ashenmote has made the best commentary yet on redirecting comments in crossposts.
cyprinella will make you want a bog of your own.
ionized just posted a gay marriage round-up that is possibly the funniest thing I have read all week.
trouble has been running history and thinking about disability.

You'll note that none of those journals really scream "fandom" at first glance. Yeah - here's a secret: Journalfen is supposedly a service just for fans, but most of the people who blog there aren't really mostly about fandom. In fact, a lot of the most interesting things going on at JF aren't just about media fandom; if you've never gone beyond the fandom_ communities you've been missing the best part! By far, the most awesome thing on JF is the hot_daily community, run by puipui, which posts a picture every day of a hot person. What makes the community so much fun is that "hot' is an infinitely variable description - people of every size, gender, age, race, and shape come through, and they are all hot.

At the beginning of every month there's a special giant picspam post, the topic of which is selected by popular vote. This month's poll is almost over, and it's a write-in poll! Muppets are currently tied for first place. If you have a JF account, you should totally go to the hot_daily poll and vote for muppets.

(Why, yes, I did just write this entire meta post just so I could tell you to vote for muppets. ;) Because it's *that important*.)

Comments

[smilingslightly]

I wanted for JF to be the place for fandom for so long. I like zorro and robin a lot and they've been nothing but good to me. OTOH, I understood why most people wouldn't leave LJ for it — I think you covered the reasons pretty well in your post. (I always kinda enjoyed the sysadmin smackdowns, actually.) JF is obviously just way too much work with way too little rewards for such a small cadre of unpaid workers who weren't set up to make use of additional volunteers. Most of my flist there just stopped posting and then, eventually, so did I. (And I never was into wank.)

But I did not know about hot_daily! I see that the poll has a delightful array of pretty in the comments, too. :D

[copracat]

ashenmote's prank is very funny. Thanks for the link.

[morineko]

I ran a specialized web directory back in the early days of the WWW. The topic was quasi-fannish and thus the site's users and the webmasters of the listed sites had, um, some previously thought to be uniquely fannish behaviors. I quit running it for various reasons, but the primary one was that I was not making enough off the site to make up for the aggravation. (And also I discovered that my attitude about the users was somewhere between Basil Fawlty and the BOFH.)

So, yeah, I don't blame the JF people one bit for being hostile to (some) users.

[melannen]

And yet, I note that you did not vote for muppets! :D

(They actually did Hot Bald People last month! It is worth gazing upon.)

[melannen]

Yeah, one of the things that makes me most optimistic about DW is that denise has already proved that she can survive years of handling users, and come out (mostly) sane on the other side, and they're starting DW *knowing* what they're going to be dealing with, and making plans to work with it.

The JF people keep the site up as a place for a few controversial communities that wouldn't have any home otherwise, which is more than I would probably bother doing in their circumstances, because it's basically just a drag on their energy and finances. (Another reason why I'm glad DW is doing the make-it-a-profitable-business thing, and doing all the planning and resource-building they've done.)

[melannen]

It needed to be shared more widely!

[smilingslightly]

And yet, I note that you did not vote for muppets!

Busted!

I saw that in the suggestions people were making and I may have a thing* there but now that you have pointed out that theme was already done (and thank you for that!) I am off to change my vote Muppet-ward! :D (And, oh wow, the bald people is a big meme/wank thingy — that I was totally unaware of — and therefore is to be avoided.)

* Links in that entry are broken all to hell, so it's mostly just a kink time-stamp. The missing pic is, of course, of Yul Brynner. ;)

[melannen]

It's not really a serious wank thingy - at least not that I know of - it's just that sepiamagpie/crantz, who is f_w mod, really, really likes them, and so the hot_daily April Fools prank involved a long-running, good-natured bait&switch as to whether they were actually getting posted for April or not. :D (I did mention that jf gets a bit incestuous at times...)

[morineko]

I'm not as hostile to fandom as I sound, really. Really. That's what I keep telling myself....

I'm encouraged about DW's survival for those very reasons. Running a large site for what is essentially, even if it's aggravating, hobbyist purposes only without much of a reward--well, I've seen too many of those projects just flame out and die.

[azurelunatic]

I've found myself doing the "there there, it's perfectly natural, just scream in here so you'll be feeling better once you go back out there" more than once to some of the people who haven't done tech support of any kind before.

[lady_ganesh]

My only regret was that I couldn't comment to tell her how funny it was!

[trouble]

Thanks for pointing me out. There are now more cool people for me to read. :)!

[melannen]

more cool people=yay.

[copracat]

Isn't it weird how we get kind of directed into the comment link? After I read your comment I PMed ashenmote using the send a message link on her profile, because I could!

[stellar_dust]

THAT WAS YOUR SECOND EARLY BIRTHDAY PRESENT OKAY. And I think that's all you get, alas.

(YOU WILL HAVE JOB IN SIX MONTHS, Y/Y??)

[stellar_dust]

heeeeyyyyyy logging in as a new user from comments totally works now! AWESOMENESS.

[melannen]

OMG PAID ACCOUNT YAY! THANK YOU!

[cypher]

If there's one important thing I learned from migrating, it's that when everybody is done moving and settling, you will still have a community. It will be different than before. It will be better.

THIS. I almost quoted the whole paragraph, but you know what you wrote. ^^;
I moved from LJ to IJ two years ago in the wankpocalypse after they started suspending people, and it cost me probably 3/4 of the readers I had in the short term (though eventually more people showed up), and there were people that I used to follow who didn't move, and I definitely missed some of them! But it still felt like the right decision for me. Sure, it was different, and I used my IJ differently than I had my LJ, but ultimately it felt like I was doing better after the move. And I have every hope that DW will be another ultimately positive shake-up. It already feels pretty cool to be here. ^^

[melannen]

Yeah! I probably lost at least the same proportion of people, but I just felt a lot more at home there afterward. And I feel at home here, too! I think it is going to be very cool.