Google Plus and Dreamwidth

[bobquasit]

Since Google announced their plans to shutter Google Plus, I've been part of a group there that's trying to find the best alternative. Here's something I'm posting there today:

I'd like to suggest considering a social media site that hasn't been talked about here, as far as I know: Dreamwidth.

Dreamwidth has been operating for eleven years now. It has circles, communities, tags, the ability to follow or be followed *without* "friending", and it has an active and generally friendly body of users. It's not swarmed with memes, or at least the parts that I see aren't. You can create different views that will allow you to see posts from specified groups of friends or communities. Privacy controls are outstanding, and the service as a whole is *very* easy to use.

It's ad-free. There are free accounts, and there is no posting limit. There are also paid accounts; they get the additional option of searching their posts internally.

They keep out spammers quite effectively. Their policies on free speech are enlightened; when the Russian government started enforcing restrictive and homophobic policies on LiveJournal, many users migrated to Dreamwidth.

The code is a fork of LiveJournal code. It was set up by ex-LiveJournal staffers, and they have continued to update and improve it. Journals can be imported to other LJ-code-based sites, and posts can be automatically copied elsewhere at your option. You the option of logging in via OpenID.

It's not perfect. There's a mobile app for LJ-type sites, but it doesn't work very well. I use the browser on my Android to post there instead, but that's not ideal.

As far as I know, there's no way to download your data - although you can mirror your posts on LJ-based sites.

Here's my Dreamwidth journal, although most of the posts are private and won't show; I've had a couple of stalkers over the years, although as far as I know neither was actually a Dreamwidth user.

https://bobquasit.dreamwidth.org/

And here's the Wikipedia entry about the site. I do think it's worth considering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamwidth

Comments

[blissmorgan]

I, too, have been recommending Dreamwidth to the folks on Plus who are looking for places to disperse to. Most of them have been oddly resistant, because they think that, somehow, the site is too much like blogging.

If they would just come use it, I think a lot of my friends would end up really digging it. The fine granularity of filtering alone is something people have been yearning for for years!

[bobquasit]

Actually, the more I look through Dreamwidth's features, the more surprised I am - on features alone, it's more like G+ than any other alternative I've looked at. But it seems as if most people are jumping straight to MeWe.

I find that concerning, because MeWe is a walled garden; posts there are invisible to the rest of the web. They can't be shared, linked, or bookmarked. Search engines can't see them. It's a recipe for irrelevance! It's almost impossible to grow your social circles when you're stuck in a ghetto.

I'd hate to see the G+ community swallowed up and disappeared that way. But I have the feeling that the owner of MeWe has been making a big push to be the choice of G+ expatriates. And it seems to be working.

[blissmorgan]

A couple days ago I asked my Plussers to respond not with location suggestions but, instead, the features that they want to retain from G+ in moving to another place or ones that the Plus does not have that they have been wanting.

Almost 100% of the responses are all covered by Dreamwidth and its featureset, and all on free accounts, not even paid. The one thing that a lot of people have been saying that they want, and that seems to be a dealbreaker for folks, is a dedicated app.

I get that. Having a dedicated app for a site like G+/DW/FB/etc. is really handy. However, since I started using this place on the daily, I've been splitting my time between the desktop site and using it on mobile (iOS device) and I am, frankly, very impressed with the utility of it simply through my mobile browser.

I share your concerns about MeWe, and I think that you have managed to express it in a way that I haven't been able to. Right now it feels very interconnecty and new, because there's a rush of new folks all working deliberately to find each other and stay connected as they swap over from G+. But after that initial rush is over, finding new people is going to be hamstrung by the necessity of having people already in common and stumbling over each other in post comments. It's going to be incredibly difficult to connect with people with whom you don't already have a secondary or tertiary connection.

This is not to say that quantity trumps quality, in terms of building connections and social circles... but I made quite a lot of connections with folks on G+ not because we had people in common at the outset but, rather, because we had interests in common that were publicly stated in sharable or searchable ways.

I think if folks tried out DW and discovered the beauty of folks' self-selected Interests tagging, they'd have paroxysms of delight.

I'm going to keep encouraging my friends to join me here, and we'll see how it goes. I'm still logging into MeWe... and struggling to find anything I want to do there. Ultimately I think I am going to miss the people who choose it for their prime post-Plus location. :-/

[dlkeur]

Here checking this out from G+. I love the interface. I'll pay for premium if it works out. So far, so good.

[silkensteel]

I was a looong time LJ user, tapered off when most of my folk switched to G+, dumped LJ after transferring everything to DW when the new Russian TOS came on board, and I think using this more isn't a bad idea. If there was a way to transfer G+ posts to here I'd probably just go to Pluspora to stay caught up with maybe a half dozen I am close friends with, and do most of my stuff here, probably posting links to pluspora just to keep interested parties up to date.