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

[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!")

[sofiaviolet]

create_my_comm might be what you're looking for.

[melannen]

Excellent.

/me subscribes to create_my_comm.

There's a new comm for that...

[elke_tanzer]

(I found this on dw_community_promo recently)... create_my_comm is for listing communities we WISH someone would create here on Dreamwidth.

:-)

And again I have to note that community_promo and dw_community_promo are two different things; I always confuse that, too! ...the dw_ one with the swirly logo is official and much higher-traffic!

Re: There's a new comm for that...

[melannen]

Oh! I didn't realize they were two different things. Yes! One should post both places, then. (I unsubbed from them both back when they got flooded in open beta; maybe it's time to start watching again!) :D