A verbose entry trying to explain Dreamwidth to people who have never used LJ.

[yati]

Here's one thing you probably didn't know about me (especially if you don't know me in RL): I don't react very fast or very well to surprises. This makes me bad in most of the following: phone calls from people I don't know, IM convos with people I don't usually chat with, IRC, interviews, lunches, people singing birthday songs on my birthday even though I knew it was going to happen, and conversations.

I was trying to explain to a few people why I'm on Dreamwidth (or LiveJournal) and not somewhere else, and didn't succeed very well. This comes as no surprise! As compensation, I shall write about it here. (Hello there, some people from work. The cape sort of gave away the secret identity, I guess.)

This entry is mainly for some friends who are used to other blogging platforms that are not LiveJournal or Dreamwidth. Most, if not all, things here are already familiar to LJ users, so usual readers can ignore this entry. XD

But first! If you have a journal or blog elsewhere, let me direct you to the awesome renay's post on OpenID. With it you can comment on Dreamwidth and do a whole lot of other things, most of them very useful.



. . . Let's start over.

Hullo! My name is Yati and I will attempt to explain to you why I chose to have a journal on Dreamwidth (and LiveJournal) instead on any other blogging platform.

Qualifications: I have a LiveJournal (I'm cyrnelle over there), I've been on Blogger since 2002 (sorry, no active blogs for you to browse though), I (used to?) maintain a book blog using WordPress (this one's installed on my own webspace, though I experimented with WordPress.com as well), I was once a user on Diaryland (I swear that was ages and ages and ages ago).

You might be wondering why I seem to be using LiveJournal and Dreamwidth interchangeably when I write. (No, it's not senility.) Dreamwidth is forked from the open source LiveJournal code and updated and made better, and run by people I like and admire. So most of the features in LJ are in DW, and I've been using LJ for a while and DW has only been in open beta since 30 April, so most of my experience is with LJ.

But I'm at Dreamwidth to stay -- it's as simple as that. :)



Why Dreamwidth and not somewhere else? Here goes:

1. Threaded comments

It's the best thing since sliced bread! Maybe even before! Comments were integrated in LJ since way back when. Does anyone remember Blogger from the time when it didn't have the feature for readers to leave comments? I do. You had to use a third party add-on thing to make comments work. It was tedious. It was absurd. The fact that LJ had a comments page built in it made it very attractive to me.

And then I discovered threaded comments and fell in love.

When your comments are threaded, they look like in this entry. renay there is replying to the entry "Why I shouldn't lend books to people, part one" at 8:28 am UTC (I think the comment timestamp is in the timezones of logged in users; otherwise it's in UTC). yati (that's me) replies to her at 8:30 -- it's indented a bit to indicate this. Then renay replies to my comment to her at 8:41. It's a conversation! It's easy to follow!

After that there's a comment from OpenID user cyrnelle.livejournal.com (hmm sounds familiar) posted at 12:48. That person is commenting to the entry itself, and is not part of the thread that's going on between me and renay. See! As easy as that.

So even though commenting is pretty simple now at Blogger and WordPress, it's still nothing like threaded comments. I kid you not. Comment #32 at Blogger might be something like "I totally agree with what he said", and you have no idea what it's referring to. And you will have to resort to @PosterA sort of notations to reply to comments.

On a more serious side, discussion is important to me. Coherent discussion even more so, and that's why I love this feature.

Here's the whole DW FAQ on comments.

2. Comment notifications

Which is like very tasty jam on the sliced bread. Mmmm.

Continuing with the example above, when renay replies to my entry, I get an email notification from DW saying that there's a new comment on that post. Sweet, eh? But it gets even better. When I reply to renay, she gets a notification as well. It doesn't matter where you comment on DW, if someone replies to your comment, you'll be notified. (If you want to test your OpenID or new DW account, please don't spam Renay by replying to the comments she left. She might retract her promise to read The Game of Kings then and I will be sad and will maybe cry. You may, however, leave as many comments you like to my posts or my comments, and you may also leave many, many replies to the comment left by OpenID user cyrnelle.livejournal.com. I'm sure she won't mind.) This notification is based on your settings -- you can choose not to receive them.

There are also other forms of notifications, which are also awesome. See the relevant notification FAQ.

3. The Reading Page and privacy settings

For me, it would be this page: http://yati.dreamwidth.org/read/. On this page I see updates from the journals/communities on DW that I subscribe to. It's like an RSS reader, almost.

This is closely related to your Circle. Journals you subscribe to will appear on your Reading Page. Journals that subscribe to you will see you on their Reading Page when you update. Journals that you grant access to will be able to see your content that you've set to be viewable to your "Access List only", and journals that grant access to you will allow you to view their "Access List only" entries.

So if you subscribe to a journal but it doesn't grant you access, you'll still be able to read its Public entries.

Let's use this for an example (this doesn't actually reflect my Circle):


(Apologies for the blurry image. This is what comes from using some other computer because your own Just Died.)

I give access to and but don't subscribe to chichiri, so when I post an entry that's for my Access List only, she'll be able to read it. I won't see any of her updates on my Reading Page because I'm not subscribed to her.

I subscribe to denise but she doesn't grant me access to her protected entries, so only her public entries will appear on my Reading Page.

And so on. The table makes it easy, really. It is made of pure win. LJ does things a little differently though.

You can also post entries that are restricted to a subset of your access list using access filters so only journals on that filter will be able to read those posts. (What. Did you think I talked about books all the time?)

Um. A bit confusing, I guess. Poke me if you need more information. Here's the FAQ on relationships.

4. Awesome Support and people

Support on Dreamwidth is done almost entirely by volunteers. (I've never done Support work before. Mostly because of my very slow reaction times mentioned above.) I think Support is awesome.

Support isn't the only thing that's done by volunteers. There are volunteers doing documentation, maintaining the Wiki, testing and trying to break stuff (still in open beta, after all) and reporting bugs, fixing bugs *_* (when I grow up I want to be just like them), making sure spammers die in a fire (or something just as painful),run and/or host working/testing environments for other volunteers, help new volunteers out, and a whole lot of other things that I can't recall and possibly don't even know about!

Also, denise and mark are pretty damn awesome.

5. Other prevailing reasons

Open source. Transparent. Listens to user base. (This FAQ covers that.) Working back with LJ on code fixes!

All the good things on LJ. No ads! Journal customisation. S2 Core v2. Userpics (with descriptions). Privacy settings. Proposed reading filters. Proposed revamp to memories feature. Improved profile page. Useful navigation strip!
(None of these features make much sense to you guys not coming from LJ, I guess. Ask, and I shall try to explain!)

. . . I'll get back to you if I think of more.





A Note: Dreamwidth is still in open beta, so there might be glitches here and there. Report them to Support, if it's a bug it'll go to Bugzilla where someone will pick it up and fix it. In time. (Maybe one day I'll be able to fix something! I am working towards that! Do not mock my fixation with code!)

You'll need either an invite code or to purchase a paid account to create a Dreamwidth account. (I used to have codes, but I've given them out. You can try dw_codesharing to see if anyone has extras.)

That is all.


The end!

Comments

[From: (Anonymous)]

What happens when you comment anonymously?

[From: yati]

It depends on whether the user allows anonymous comments. I do, and I force anons to fill out that captcha thing (as you have no doubt noticed). Dreamwidth's default (I think) is to turn anonymous commenting off, which I think is a smart move to deter spammers.

Most users have IP logging turned on, so your IP is captured even when you post anonymously.

You won't get notifications if someone replies to your comment if you post anonymously. And people (ie me) get suspicious of you! Ha ha.