WTF is...

[seawasp]

... "Dreamwidth" and what makes it different than whatever its likely competitors/parallels/predecessors are?

Comments

[shana.livejournal.com]

Dreamwidth is a blog/journal system.

As I understand it, the people setting it up used to work for livejournal, and they are setting it up to keep all of what they consider the good parts of lj, and adding stuff that they wanted and getting rid of stuff that didn't work.

http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Dreamwidth.org:_FAQ

[meril.livejournal.com]

It's a Open Source code fork of LJ (and a hosting service currently beta-testing said code fork.) Heck, LJ could use the fork for its own service eventually...not that they would, but a few other services currently using LJ code like InsaneJournal and Inksome may switch to the fork after it gets out of beta.

[deor.livejournal.com]

No, no, no. In the spirit of the seaon, you must phrase it thusly:

How is this blog different from all other blogs?

[seawasp]

I am at a loss as to how the above is the spirit of the season. (or, for that matter, what season you mean. Spring?)

[seawasp]

Ok, but why would people move from LJ to DWidth?

[shana.livejournal.com]

It's part of the traditional Passover seder 'Why is this night different from all other nights?'

[boogieshoes.livejournal.com]

it's closely associated with fanac. strikethru 2007 (?) spurred a number of things; one of those was spurring the DW coders to get a move on their code, so that fans would have a safe place to post fannish stuff, which *can* get quite racy. a lot of people are uncomfortable with the LJ TOS, which reserves the right to delete pornographic and offensive material, but doesn't define it well, if at all. also, one of the things that came out of that episode was that one fanfic author had a long back-and-forth with one of the LJ personnel about what kinds of fanfic might be counted as 'pornographic' - given that the elements discussed can apply to a number of genres in a number of fandoms in a number of ways (from really gen to really disturbing) - the answers, though appreciated, were not well received.

and no one likes the 'case by case' basis thing, because it's difficult to nail that kind of thing down.

there may be other reasons to move - usability, features, iconage, etc - but that's what the main fuss in fandom is about.

-bs

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

Quote from a non-Jewish friend:

"Because it's about ten times as long!"

[seawasp]

I wonder if their TOS applies in that area to locked communities (i.e., my beta list). Though I haven't posted anything likely to raise eyebrows (in the pr0n sense) on beta, AFAIK. If I had posted my Saint Seiya fics, yeah, THERE you'd have some issues.

[seawasp]

And thus we see the gap in my education where the word "religion" sits...

[shana.livejournal.com]

Well, that's why I wouldn't have expected you to know that.

[boogieshoes.livejournal.com]

sfaik, and i'm by no means an expert, so take with appropriate grain of salt, yes. you'd have to do some digging to find a lot of the details of what came out of that, and if you decide to, i recommend the metafandom comm as a place to start - it'll have links to a hundred conversations as well as some summary posts that have links to other posts, etc.

-bs

[meril.livejournal.com]

Unless you're that sort of fannish as described above and really want to scoot the heck out of LJ, there's no reason to move over there right now. It's still in closed beta. I have a test account over there (which I haven't linked to at my LJ because I am not moving--I'm just betatesting the crud out of Dreamwidth because I need something to do while watching baseball) and it's in no way ready for prime time yet. It's not even ready for late night.