Matthew's DW journal

Anyone know what's up with LJ? The status page is hardly enlightening, and after it being down for nearly all of yesterday, I can read entries now, but can't post entries or comments (I just get blank returns from the update pages, no matter how often I hit refresh).

It's getting very annoying :(

I know I don't currently post here very much; I currently post at LJ, and don't have any immediate plans to change this. I guess if there were DW-only people who wanted to read my writings, I could start cross-posting, but there doesn't seem to be demand for that.

Anyway, I thought on the current DDoS on LJ. Given that DDoSes are bad, and things I don't want to encourage, I'd like to suggest people don't migrate to DW right now - that, to me, would be to be seen to be supporting the DDoSers.

Having got a DW account, I need to decide what (if anything) to use it for. After all, I have a permanent account on LJ, and have done for years (the account is over 8 years old, I can't remember when I permanentified it). Even if I wanted a permanent account here (they seem to call them seeds), I can't have one (I'm on holiday well away from the internet 24 April to 4th May, and I full expect the seed account options to have all gone by the time I get back); there don't appear to be any plans to sell more seed accounts in future. I really like having a permanent LJ account, so that's quite a downer before we even start! Maybe there could be a way to hold an option on one before the open beta...

The key advantages of DW seem to be twofold - firstly, it has more clear trust network functions (you can separate who you want to read from who you trust to read your protected entries), and secondly it is aiming to be "fluffier" than LJ. There are some more or less substantial other UI tweaks, but they seem to be aiming to fix some quirks in LJ that have never bothered me.

As a network analyst myself, the first feature is definitely sensible (and might even reduce some of the de-friending drama that drifts round LJ from time to time), and I'm interested to see what difference it'll make to peoples' social networks over time. There might even be a short research paper in it :-) The flip-side here is that LJ might reasonably decide that this feature is good, and incorporate it into their code-base; in fact, I'll be a bit surprised if they don't do so.

The second I'm less sure of; back when LJ was starting up, it felt fluffy and community-oriented. I really applaud the Dreamwidth founders for trying again, and for making commitments to being ad-free and suchlike. But; will things still be this good 8 years' hence? Will the be-nice business model succeed?

[I wonder how denise finds time to read users' entries!]

This is mostly a note to say I expect to spend most of my time still at emperor.livejournal.com, but I thought I'd see what Dreamwidth is like, and also grab a bit of namespace :-)