Should I stay on Dreamwidth?

[barondave]

Hi. A post for Dreamwidth and not LJ.

I have a paid subscription, which will run out in a week or so. The question is... should I continue on Dreamwidth? If I just let the sub lapse, I'll still have an account, but none of the perks of a paid membership, whatever they are.

This is the first time I've logged into DW in months. It is, at best, redundant with LJ, and I've seen no posts that weren't also there. I have far fewer DW Friends than LJ (which looks even worse compared to FB), so some of this is simply my lack of interest in expanding my participation here.

So... all you die-hard DWers: Has it been worth it? Do you think it might be worth it for me? What have you uniquely gotten from DW?

And if you only read DW posts on LJ and don't see this, that counts as a disrecommendation.

Comments

[gamerchick]

I think that I support Dreamwidth more philosophically than I do realistically. I like the fact that it's run by very principled people, and that it does exist as an LJ alternative. The crossposting capacity is really nice, and the universal reading list will be really cool as well, once it gets working. But honestly I am on LJ more - my community is still there, though more of it is migrating day by day.

For me I would say it has been worth it, if only to get in on the ground floor of this community. I think that for fandom stuff in particular, DW is going to continue to grow where LJ shrinks - but it will be a long time in coming. I'm just trying to be ready for that.

It's kind of funny that I saw this at all - I just checked my DW reading list today for the first time in ages, because a friend of mine just announced her intentions to go DW-only. So I think my activity over here may be greater than it has been in the past.

I hope this is helpful!

[barondave]

Yes, it was helpful, thanks. I don't really see DW as philosophically better than LJ. At some point, it's a matter of economics and DW will be forced to make similar decisions (depending on just what you are talking about).

I'm going to leave my account valid, but won't re-up the paid membership.

[aedifica]

I can't tell you whether it's worth it for you, but it definitely is for me. The short version, since I didn't have much time today to write and I don't want to forget to reply:

The biggest thing for me is that Dreamwidth's owners are principled and have their users' benefit in mind. I can no longer say that's true of LiveJournal--my opinion isn't based on who bought it, but on their actions since the purchase. (For example, did you hear about the Amazon affiliate link brouhaha? Here's a summary of the first implementation and the current revised implementation (I found an LJ post on it to make sure it didn't come across as a DW-only complaint about LiveJournal, but people have been talking about it on both sites).)

Tied in to that, I love the way dw_suggestions works. Anybody can come up with an idea for a way to make Dreamwidth better, make the idea into a suggestion, and then other people get to chime in with ways to make the idea even better, or reasons why it wouldn't be as good as the suggester thought, or whatever. The ideas that people like get added to the list of planned improvements that any DW developer can pick up and make happen.

I also like how Dreamwidth goes out of its way to be compatible with other sites--you already know about crossposting and how OpenID is allowed for commenting, and in addition there are two more things in the works (that I know of, maybe more) that will make DW even more other-site-friendly: the ability to add one's LJ reading list to one's DW reading list, so it can all be read from Dreamwidth if one desires; and improvements to OpenID login, since it's currently such a source of confusion for a lot of people.

Those are the big ones for me. I won't stop reading LJ as long as I have friends who post there, but I don't plan to post any unlocked content there again, even stuff that's unlocked here on Dreamwidth (like most of my posts are these days)--you may have noticed I do crosspost everything to LJ, but I friends-lock every post there.

[barondave]

Thanks for the detailed reply. Frankly, none of the things you like about DW mean very much to me. Facebook is compatible with other sites (via links) and I don't mind that LJ is it's own universe. Indeed, I think one of the major weaknesses of DW is the lack of differentiation from LJ. Given a choice between the real thing and a smaller, less popular version, I'll stick with the full product.

I understand that some people like cozier neighborhoods.

As I said above, I'm going to leave my account valid, but won't re-up the paid membership.

[onyxlynx]

Dave! I didn't know you had an account! Hi! Wow!

Actually, I pay because I have more than the minimal number of icons and sometimes need to check back a couple weeks in comments; also, the principles of the founders are more in line with my own. You do know that it's OK to drop the payment and go back to being a free account here and you still won't get ads? As a non-LJ person, the ad before one gets to recent entries is annoying, and I close that puppy fast enough to avoid seeing it.

Facebook has too many issues for me to want to have anything whatsoever to do with it.

Nice to see you!