(no subject)

[altariel]

Dreamwidth! For the love of god, stop marketing at me!

By which I mean two invite codes have landed in my inbox, available to anyone who wants them.

Comments

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

I'm sufficiently curious that I'd quite like one please. :)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Have messaged you with one :-)

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

The abundance of invite codes says to me that they aren't getting the traction they'd hoped for.

I see no meaningful difference yet between DW and LJ, and no one has been able to tell me that such a difference really exists.

Still, I have an account there, and yes, two additional invite codes.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I see no meaningful difference yet between DW and LJ, and no one has been able to tell me that such a difference really exists.

This is what I think. Perhaps I've watched the life-cycle of too many online environments to be excited. Perhaps I just fear change.

[uitlander]

I find LJ perfectly stable and satisfactory. DW is yet another Emperor's new clothes. Being 'open source' does not make it any better or worse than LJ. I'm quite happy sitting here.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Having had a cursory look round, I'm not moved to move either. I've got a lot of history here at LJ.

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

The big differences I've found so far:

(In LJ's favor): Dreamwidth doesn't have a Scrapbook yet.

(In Dreamwidth's favor): NO ONE has to look at ads, not even visitors and free users. Which makes it a nice place to host fanfic and artwork, since you know exactly what your journal's visitors will see when they stop by your site.

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

So much for people whining they can't sign up because they don't have an invite code! It's not like they're exactly hard to get, what with all of us giving ours away.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

Excellent points. As I don't use the scrapbook function of LJ (in fact, I'm not even sure what it is), and I plan to use my DW account to host fic, you have made a compelling case. Thanks!

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

You're welcome!

I have the opposite problem: I use the LJ Scrapbook (which is a place to store images) all the time, which is why my personal journal is going to stay here for now. Just the thought of having to reupload all those pictures to another photo-hosting site like Flickr and then recoding all the links in my six years' worth of journal entries to point to the new Flickr account gives me a headache!

But my fanfiction Ive hosted on a Geocites website, for which I paid Yahoo a small sum to keep the ads off. Now that Yahoo is going to close Geocities, I needed another ad-free spot for my stories, and Dreamwidth is just perfect for that.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

I learned about the closure of Geocities from the OTW, where I believe they're looking for ways to save some of the abandoned fanfic content. Fascinating what those people are trying to accomplish!

I'm very interested in their An Archive Of Our Own project for a couple of reasons: one, it will be a more or less permanent, searchable, multi-fandom archive that doesn't depend on my keeping a particular account somewhere to keep my fic online, and two, it will let me post long works (which I'm kind of prone to) in a single piece, a great advantage to people who read fic on portable devices offline.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Every other post on my friends list yesterday seemed to be offering codes. I still have one left.

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

So do I. Maybe I'll end up making a personal journal over there just to use it up!

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

I hope the OTW come up with a way to salvage 'abandoned' fanfic Geocities sites. We're going to lose a lot of good (not to mention historically important) material when Geocities closes for good. I have a few links to abandoned sites in my current Dreamwidth fanfiction account, and I'm going to hate to have to delete them. At least those people also have their stuff up on ff.net, though, so it won't be totally gone. That's not true for some of the other fanfic authors who hosted their work with Geocities.