On the feasibility of moving to all-DW, all-the-time

[melannen]

On the off-chance you haven't heard yet, lj continues to find new ways of being skeevy.

Mind you, I wouldn't have noticed this one, because about a month ago I had to remove lj's javascript access completely in order to be able to log in to my account. On the upside, I am also no longer getting virus warnings every few days! And pages load a disturbing amount faster! On the downside, wow, there's a lot of stuff I can't do on lj anymore. Including bookmark fic on delicious/diigo, so I have even been trying to find as much fic as possible other places.

So, here's why I still read my LJ friendslist despite all that:

1) A small group of people I value as people, mostly RL friends and people I met though fandom who aren't very fannish any more, who have no interest in crossposting to DW (and probably never will unless LJ completely stops functioning - a couple of them still post to deadjournal, too.) I will still be reading LJ for them as long as DW doesn't have locked post syndication, but I am considering trimming my LJ friendslist down to just those people. (And seriously thinking about cutting some of them who I rarely trade comments with, even though I still enjoy following them - they probably don't remember I exist, since I don't post to my journal anymore.)

2) An even smaller group of fannish people who will never join DW, ever, because they have bad blood with some of the more vocal DW supporters. ...there are several of them I would miss if I dropped them, and I don't want to get on their bad sides but I honestly doubt any of them would miss me much if I stopped hanging around.

3) An even tinier set of journals I think of as blogs rather than journals, that is, I don't care if I ever interact with them, I just love the content they post (actually, right now that's just urbpan, who is a zookeeper, photographer, former 'zine publisher and urban naturalist in Boston; and ursulav, who draws pictures cute and/or disturbing animals; I should just syndicate ursulav_feed's journal, but urbpan posts some of his best stuff under lock; he should probably move up to category 1.)

4) Communities. I've never really joined that many LJ communities, and I've dropped a lot of them since I started transitioning off, and haven't joined many new ones, but the ones I still read I don't want to leave without finding replacements. :/ So here's the list of LJ communities I really don't want to say goodbye to - anybody want to help me re-create them here?

• tmi_chix: I have learned *so much* from this community - not necessarily good medical advice, because hah, but "no, that's normal, a lot of women experience that, there is no shame it in" type learnings, and I still learn from it, and don't want to say goodbye.
  
  DW has tmi and too_much_info, neither of which have ever updated, and girlybits, which looks at least semi-active but is really locked down, and is somewhat more focused than I'm looking for. There are very, very good reasons to make a community like that a guarded safe space, but a community where things are a bit more open & casual gets a different feel (fewer serious business posts and more "I popped a zit" ones, to start), and there are good reasons someone might want to be able to post about bodily grossness *without* sending in an application form, too - one of the services the lj tmi communities provide is a place for people who aren't comfortable with tmi stuff to start to *get* comfortable without having to commit to anything.
  
  Anyone interested in getting folks together to start or revive an open-membership, all-genders-welcome TMI community on DW?


• urban_nature: This is basically the community version of urbpan's journal, for people to learn and share about the nature & science that's right around them everyday, whether it's a weed in a sidewalk or a heron in a suburban pond or even a cat eating a cricket or a slice of moldy bread. Sort of Big Backyard for grown-ups. Usually photo-heavy.
  
  DW doesn't have anything like this that's active at all: the closest it comes is wtf_nature, which is really not the same. Anybody want to try to start one? (Honestly, the LJ community hasn't been very active either, lately; if I wasn't trying to leave LJ I would have made an effort to perk it up, though.)


• little_details: Where you post about that one detail you need for a story that you *just can't find*, and people who (probably) know what you're talking about tell you to find it. I CANNOT LIVE without this community, folks. Even if I never do actually post the stories I ask about on it, answering questions is at least as much fun. (And being able to answer someone's question on l_d has occasionally been the one thing that managed to pull me out of a spiral of self-loathing, so, the life-saving thing is only a *slight* exaggeration.)
  
  DW has writerstorm, which is quiet and doesn't really have the membership growth to be too effective (and also tends to be more brainstorming than research-help questions), worldbuilding which is even quieter, and an empty emergency mirror for little_details, plus a few more specialized communities.
  
  Anybody interesting in starting or renovating a general factbuilding and factfinding community on LJ modeled on little_details? The key there is to get a critical mass of members such that questions actually get answered...


• topgearslash & affiliates: Shame, shame, yes, I know, but *90% of the fic in the fandom* is locked to this one LJ community. :/ Some of the members are posting on AO3 now, which helps, and I know a few of them are on DW, but all the fandom activity is pretty much under LJ flock, so I can't even use my normal method of stalking recs list and del.icio.us tags. And since I do almost nothing but lurk there, I can't even really speak up.
  
  The solution here is pretty obv. actually: actually finish some Top Gear fic already; crosspost it to topgearslash and topgearslash on DW; and then slowly and deviously lure the LJ people to the DW community by posting less and less on the lj one. But I'd have to actually finish some Top Gear fic first. Um.


• best_enemies: This is a Doctor/Master Doctor Who community, but the reason I don't want to just drop it like I did nearly all my other fandom LJ communities is that it's a *community*; the mods work really hard to keep it active as a place where people interact and bond beyond just posting fanworks, and they do a really good job of it, and I'd would miss the *interaction*, and the *injokes*, and the *people*. (I'm not terribly active there either, but I'm more active than I am in any other lj-style community anywhere, which says something.)
  
  There are a few D(octor)W(ho) communities on D(ream)W(idth) - dwfiction and doctor_who - but what I get out of best_enemies is a *community*, not just a place where people post stuff. :/ I need to see if anybody I know only from the community has an active DW journal I can subscribe to, to start, I guess.

Here is why I still have everybody friended on LJ, even the ones I only read here, or who don't post anymore anyway: because there are some dead people I care about on my lj flist, and defriending them feels, I don't know, I don't want to do it, okay? But I don't want to leave them there all alone, either. :/ And somehow I suspect they will never move to DW.

Here is why I still have content on LJ: I hate broken links on a deep moral and aesthetic level. And I don't think DW has a built-in tool that will strip your entries out of LJ and automatically replace them with a link to the imported DW copy (though if anyone knows of a tool that will do this, plz, let me know!)


Now, I am going to go write some posts for already-existing DW communities, in the spirit of that meme a few weeks ago about getting more activity here. :D

Comments

[finch]

I would absolutely join an all-genders version of tmi_chix, and I would love to see little_details over here as well.

there are some dead people I care about on my lj flist
It pains me to think about the fact that I had a good friend on IJ who died, and eventually her journal there will probably be purged for inactivity, so I can't argue with you at all on that count.

There are a few comms I read on LJ, mostly poly and trans comms, since those haven't really perked up here yet. I should probably do something about that myself.

[melannen]

Yay!

The difficulty is that, short of really lucking out, getting a community going and active requires a pretty large and long-term time & energy commitment from somebody. Which I am not good at. (As I gaze in despair at the poor DW community I'm supposedly modding which hasn't had a post in almost six months.)

[sarken]

tmi_chix and little_details join fakenews_fanfic and ontd_political on the list of reasons I'm still reluctant to totally leave LJ. I've never posted at tmi_chix, but I might if there were a new version at DW.

(Oh. I guess I should put maddow_kicks on the list of reasons I'm staying, too, considering I'm the mod.)

[melannen]

I have decided that maddow_kicks and punditfic supply my needs in that fandom - they aren't really active yet, but they both have awesome mods who are trying to get them active, which is excellent. (I was never very active in a community sense on either of the lj ones though - mostly just lurking - so I don't really have people to miss, except the people whose DW journals I already follow.)

[bessemerprocess]

Topgearslash needs to happen (both written by you and a comm here).

[melannen]

The topgearslash here does exist - there's even a few people crossposting already, they just, er, aren't people whose stories I'm terribly excited about. The mod's a lot faster about granting membership than the mods on LJ are, too. :D

(More topgearslash written by you should happen also! Or you could at least crosspost the stuff you've already got...

I have no slash, but I do have ten thousand words of epic Doctor Who crossover featuring, among other things, Bessie, Oliver, K9, Top Gear Dog, Jeremy vs. ATMOS, Harold Saxon's lap time, the significance of sudden celery-liking, Stig/Luke, and a certain Fiat Panda that's actually a TARDIS. It just needs ~30,000 more words and a lot of revisions before it's a complete story. :D

[elspethdixon]

*nods* I have numerous people on my flist, both whom I actually interact with and whom I just follow, who are not on DW, and honestly? Almost all the comms for nearly every fandom I read or lurk in are more active on LJ (LJ's Watchmen comms, for example, get much more traffic) with the exception of Age of Sail. And cap_ironman and most of the other comics communities have no mirror at all. And when most of the people on my flist make mirror posts in both places, the LJ version of the post almost always gets more comments, unless it's social justice-related meta (that's actually one qualm I have with metafandom - they'll sometimes link to meta posts on DW with almost no comments, when the LJ version of the post has large amounts of discussion going on, and I know that the discussion on LJ sometimes occurs after the link to the "no responses" DW post was posted, but still...)

[melannen]

I don't think the metafandom thing is intentional (though I do have a vague memory that they used to link to both versions of crossposts - or is that linkspam that does that? Not sure.) Anyway, I suspect it's that most of the metafandom mods are DW people at this point, so they link to the posts they see on their flists. And that they post via the DW crossposter, so unspecified user-name links automatically link to the DW user, which makes it easier all 'round.

I am definitely looking forward to one of the DW developers figuring out how to put links back to other crossposted entries on the DW entry, though, so I can easily get to the discussion on both sites.

[isis]

Speaking as a metafandom compiler: I generally link to whichever version I see, unless there are crosslinks, in which case I link to whichever has more comments (or comments enabled). This means that if I see it on my dw flist/network, I link there, unless the dw version has a crosslink to enable me to check out the lj version. It's too much effort to figure out if someone also has an lj, and go find that post, if there is no explicit crosslink.

I don't know what the other compilers do - I'm speaking just for myself.

[rodo]

Yeah, little_details was what made it difficult for me to leave LJ and I don't know how I did it, but it worked somehow. I still miss the community, though. It was always fun to see what other people could come up with. writerstorm seems to be less about the little details and more about the plot as a whole, which isn't bad at all and definitely interesting, but it doesn't seem to draw as many people.

[melannen]

A little-details type community on DW would be *so cool*, but what makes l_d work on lj is the thousands-strong membership list, and while I am totally of the opinion that there's plenty of people on DW, I don't think we could get that...

I dunno, though. Somebody with spare modding should start one anyway; judging by my readers, there's demand!

[starlady]

I do still have a substantial group of RL friends who aren't going to leave and with whom LJ is my primary means of keeping in touch. I also have a readership for my translations which is exclusively LJ-based, and I don't think stopping crossposting would be fair to them. But my experience on both sites improved immensely once I created feeds for all the communities I only browsed/non-mutually friended journals.

I would be up for joining a little_details clone.

[melannen]

Good to know!

Yep, I've got RL people who I know are never going to move unless LJ actually goes down, because they just aren't that invested in the internets. So I am there as long as they are.

I keep trimming down my lj list and adding to my DW one, slowly. I've been putting off making feeds in hopes that we'll get the automatic flist syndication, but maybe I should just do it anyway.

[delphinapterus]

I would also be put for the little_details comm here. The other comms I'd miss is fanficrants and canonrants. I'd start them but I've never been sure of the ediquette in starting a DW comm as an alternative to the LJ comm. I just realized that I didn't even know if a lot of the lj comms have DW equivalents; that's really terrible of me. I should get on that.
I've seriously been thinking of removing my LJ content and just leaving a link to the DW entry in the original LJ entry.

[melannen]

I don't actually know if there are DW equivalents of the rant comms, but there *is* fandom_rant at journalfen, which has 1500 members and gets a fair number of comments, if you're willing to spread yourself around even more sites...

And, yeah, the etiquette thing is part of what makes me hesitate about starting a new little-details type community (and about really advertising the DW tgs community, too) - even if the mods on LJ have shown no sign of wanting to leave, it still feels vaguely like I'd be trying to take something away from them. :/

[bork]

I have a paid LJ account that I renewed a couple of months ago. I'll still read LJ because the vast majority of the people on there aren't in any fandom at all, and they're not going to move to DW. And the ones that left LJ...went to Facebook. Which I just can't stand. So, I have to maintain a presence there if I want to continue to follow them.

However, just today I finally got around to sending in my money to make this account a paid one. I've wanted to support what they have been doing for a while now, and finally I got around to doing it.

[melannen]

Ew, facebook. :/ Facebook just offends me, for several very good reasons, but mostly for irrational emotional ones that I just go 'ick' every time I visit.

It is, though, I think, a bit to easy to assume that only fannish people will move to DW. There are non-fannish people here, and I have gotten a couple of my non-fannish friends to come to LJ (in fact, one of the people mentioned in this post who I thought would never consider moving ... just made a post talking about how she was considering moving.) The latest LJ screwup hit crafters, original writers and artists, and other non-fanfic hobby communities harder than it hit the fanfic/fanmeta crowd.

I think it is harder to get non-fannish people to move, especially when they're on LJ for other communities. Which is why I think when we talk about getting DW more active, we need to be looking at non-fandom communities as well as fandom ones.

[egret]

I also miss urban_nature and would join it here on DW if it existed.

Willing to co-mod?

[elke_tanzer]

Hi... I was never a member of urban_nature but skimming it today I can see it's really nifty. I'm thinking I would like to create a similar comm on DW but it feels odd to just re-use the LJ-comm's name when the LJ-comm's mods/originators are not involved.

Would you be willing to co-mod something like urban_nature with me if we named it something like nature_in_the_city?

[melannen]

(would you like to co-mod too? I got confused about which comments I was replying to, I didn't mean to leave you out!)

here via metafandom

[mikes_grrl]

Thanks for this. Before I got insulted by cimorene's DW post (also linked via metafandom) I was going to answer it with pretty much the points you've made here: RL friends who don't give a rats ass about DW (or fandom), fandom friends who are just absolutely not interested in moving off LJ for any reason (until it dies), and communities. The main LJ community I can't leave is Lifein1973, the Life on Mars-UK comm, which is very much a community, active and interesting and fun. But yeah, littledetails too and also a couple of very small comms (for very small fandoms) which are just never going to move, ever.

I *DO* need to be proactive about posting at DW personally, because I want to support it and I'm doing a lousy job of that. But I don't see it becoming my main journal community for a long while, and even then, I'll still have ties to LJ. Until it dies.

I'm also thinking of starting a comm, and I mod a very stale comm that I could reboot over here, but the issues become: who would follow? The comm I want to start is specifically for a group of fellow fans in a specific fandom, and to my knowledge none of them have DW accounts. I'll ask, now that I've thought of it, but honestly I'm pretty sure I know what the response is going to be. :(

Re: here via metafandom

[melannen]

If you are interested in trying to get a small fandom to move here, denise is (or at least was at last check) quite willing to give community leaders large batches of invite codes so a whole group can shift at once.

(The reason I haven't tried it with any of my small fandoms is that I'm really not very active in them, so I would feel weird about it. But if you are, it might be worth a try?)

[gchick]

(a little late because I forgot I meant to reply to this until metafandom reminded me) - I'd love to see little_details pick up over here, and I'm not even a fic(tion) writer. I just love the glimpses into what people are thinking and researching, and the answers are as good as the questions. But I think you're write that without the tons and tons of people, it just doesn't work.

[melannen]

There is definitely a desire for little_details over here, but I don't think I am the one who ought to start it. (I wonder if community_promo accepts requests along the lines of "Someone else should start this community so I can join it!")

Nature stuff! Yay!

[elke_tanzer]

Thanks for this interesting post! :-)

I was never a member of urban_nature but skimming it today I can see it's really nifty. I'm thinking I would like to create a similar comm on DW but it feels odd to just re-use the LJ-comm's name when the LJ-comm's mods/originators are not involved.

Would you be willing to co-mod something like urban_nature with me if we named it something like nature_in_the_city?

Re: Nature stuff! Yay!

[melannen]

Excellent idea. *nod*. :D

[blktauna]

as the perpetrator of the Topgear slash com here I too need to get off my arse and finsih some stuff!

Thanks for joining in!

[melannen]

I was so happy to see the existence of topgearslash here! (Especially during the period when I couldn't log in to LJ to get a friendslocked content. I understand the need to keep certain people from going on the internet and finding things :D but it does mean there's no real way to get at the fandom except through LJ.)

I need to get going and finish some stuff too!

[onceamy]

(Here from metafandom!)

I don't know why topgearslash sticks with the locked content policy. I mean - fanfic is not something to be ashamed of! And yes, Jeremy probably would go "look at what I found on the internet", but really. It's one of the main reasons I'm still an LJer, since Top Gear is my beloved.

Though I do think we need to be more proactive in posting! We can make the communities here far more exciting with a bit of elbow grease.

*adds you as a fellow Top Gear fan*

[melannen]

*adds back*

Yes, I personally am of the opinion that if people go looking on the internet, they deserve what they find (and I suspect the Top Gear crew agree.) But I do sympathize with those who feel differently.

I need to finish some actual Top Gear stuff and post. (I still haven't managed to even catch up with s14 yet though, alas. I'm saving the Bolivia episode for a special occasion.)