bobquasit: (Default)
bobquasit ([personal profile] bobquasit) wrote2018-10-18 11:31 am
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Google Plus and Dreamwidth

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

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