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Below are the 16 most recent journal entries recorded in
the great fandom migration's InsaneJournal:
ScribblitInksome is live and there's more information at
tsfkas
synecdochic posted a totally hypothetical poll about forking the LJ code a while back- Someone who very probably has an LJ is discussing something similar and asking for people to join the project's the google group
- Pros and cons of Blurty - submitted by sweetfacedlion
- Newish scribblit comm for updates and information. - submitted by warriorssoul121
- Scribblit's servers will be in Canada. Further discussion here. - submitted by sciencegeek
- The Basics of RSS and LiveJournal (and the LJ clones). There's been a lot of stuff flying around lately about RSS feeds -- what they are, how they work, etc. -- and vichan has written a tutorial about them and their potential to help fandom stay connected, even if we all end up at 14 different blogging sites. - submitted by vichan
- pay_no_more. If you've decided to stop giving money to LJ/6A, this is the place to make it known. - submitted by waset
- The owner of Squidge is hosting an IRC chat to discuss new features, service improvements, etc. It's this coming Tuesday at 7.30 PST. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make it, so I'll be expecting y'all to keep me informed. - submitted by calime33 and greensage
- I agree with the many people who are against having the word "fan" in the name, because we don't want to alienate non-fen.
- If, however, we're intent on something with that f-a-n letter combo, we should look for something where it's subtle, already part of a larger word (e.g., "fanfare," suggested here (with others) by copinggoggles).
- I also don't think we want to be all INTRNETZ IZ SRS BIZNEZ about it, so we should go for something with a hint of whimsy.
- tekanji makes a good suggestion here: "I would recommend combining two words that describe what kind of service you're offering (ala. Live Journal, Word Press, Type Pad). Maybe figure out what features will make your service stand out and create a name from that."
- our thing (okay, that's stil me, but a few of you said you liked it!)
- postnet
- crack rack
- fanthing
- fandomain
- sanctuary
- fantastica
- fan_freed
- zippy
- fandom world
- fanverse
- fanspire
- fanspiration
- archnalunity
- the place (because it's time)
- fanhaven
- No one really cares about my e-mail issues, but I was having them, and now I'm not. I still have a zillion comments to go through, though, and I estimate one-third of the comments directed to me never showed up, and also there are a few hours of time where I just wasn't getting any comments that were left. So I apologize for kind of sucking at correspondence right now.
- I need someone who still has a paid account to help me. I'm certainly not buying one, but I can't post polls, and at some point polls are going to be required. I'm sure there have been people volunteering to help me mod this comm, but see previous bullet point.
- I cleared out the mod queue by just rejecting everything, largely because I let stuff pile up and then I didn't want to approve stuff and have all the posts show up at once. (I couldn't figure out from the FAQ if that would actually happen. Does anyone know?) Sorry for the mod fail. Here's what was in the queue:
- LJ layouts ported to GJ, for those of you moving sooner than later and wanting your layouts. Posted by slash_eater.
- A webmonkey tutorial on protecting content on your websites; a BellaOnline tutorial on forms and passwords. Posted by dracothelizard for people who want to put up websites and password-protect the fic and art hosted on those sites, as a possible solution for people not ready for The Great Migration but who don't trust LJ with their work.
- treewishes was wondering if LJ even really cares about us and our paid accounts anymore, now that they have advertising dollars.
- LJ layouts ported to GJ, for those of you moving sooner than later and wanting your layouts. Posted by
- metafandom has the list, as usual. I'd like to bring attention to femmequixotic's open letter to 6A/LJ, which nicely highlights the remaining issues. (There are plenty.)
- synecdochic has written a post about being heard in the right places. Personally, I'm not inclined to fight LJ on anything. I don't feel the need to yell at them or try to screw them over. I just want to pour all my efforts into getting the hell out of here as quickly as possible.
- 2-3 pythonistas, anal about test-driven (& agile) development, familar with version control
- 1 db god (mysql or postgres pref.)
- People who are staying right here, thanks very much
- People who want to leave
- People who are looking to jump to an LJ clone
- People who are not married to that idea
- People who are looking to jump to an LJ clone
| Friday, April 12th, 2024 | |
| 7:22 pm | vague sort-of update Hey everyone. Been a while, hasn't it? Yeah. There isn't much of an update, I don't think, and I'm not sure what to say. I remain of the opinion that LJ isn't really the best home for fandom. The issue, though, is that there aren't a lot of options. People (myself included) aren't going to leave LJ for greener pastures unless the pastures are quite shiny (in terms of awesome features and ease of transition) and their friends are there. A fannish journaling site has the potential to be amazing, but it would definitely not be easy or cheap or smooth sailing. It requires a lot of resources and knowledge and skills that I don't personally have, and I don't know if I could find them. I'm working on it, in a fills-the-empty-spaces-of-my-time sort of way, but there aren't a lot of those. I still think about it, though, all the time; for a while I was thinking maybe it could live on the Google App Engine, but there's a no-porn policy, so that idea died within about five minutes of inception. It was attractive, though, because it took all the infrastructure issues away. Alas. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm still thinking and talking and recruiting and brainstorming and occasionally hacking and coming up with insane ideas. Maybe the thing could be distributed, maybe the porn could be encrypted on the server and decrypted by the browser, maybe the thing could be on a pre-existing platform so all we'd need to do is write a few plugins and package everything together, etc. The leaving LJ idea isn't dead, but I'm not as optimistic as I once was that it can happen soon (obviously). So I feel like right now the thing to do is try to make the best of the situation here. To that end, please vote in the LJ Advisory Board elections. Others have discussed it at length in more eloquent terms than I have time for right now, but the point is that if we want a fannish representative on the board, we need to make our voices heard. There's more information at fandom_votes, so please check it out and vote if you haven't already done so. You've got till Thursday, 9pm PDT.ETA: There are some comments coming in regarding the status of other projects, so I figured I should link them. |
| 7:22 pm | Introducing LJ United Hi. My name's Mark. Some of you might know me from as LJ's first "All things Business" Manager in the early, freewheeling days of the site before it started becoming yet another dotcom. Recently, I created ljunited -- a coalition of LiveJournal users dedicated to putting forth a slate of two qualified candidates for the upcoming LJ advisory elections, drawn from individuals who believe strongly in the original promise of LiveJournal. Specifically, we believe in: Working with the community, for the community. Honoring the status of every account. (That means supporting and championing your free speech!) Maintaining the uptime and performance of the site. Staying advertisement free. Never sending unsolicited e-mail. Supporting the Free Software movement. and ... Protecting your privacy. It's a simple promise. A list of goals to aspire to that plenty of LiveJournal members theoretically believe in. ... and yet, it doesn't always work out that way in practice, does it?! Recently, I posted about ljunitedto the earlyadopterscommunity, which includes many of the earliest users of the site. The community's founder -- who is a strong defender of the rights of earlyadopters to maintain the free special features they were given -- recently quizzed me about ljunited's platform, first asking me...."when you step into, say, parryhotter, do you let them know how serious you feel about being allowed to write children's-book-inspired pornography?"My reply was: "I haven't had the time yet to really reach out enough to the fandom community, but when I do, you can absolutely count on me defending the right for people to write children's-book-inspired pornography. YES. ABSOLUTELY. You might as well ask me if I would support jailing Nabokov, or Henry Scott Tuke, for that matter. Last time I heard, there were no minors harmed in the making of slashfic... and, in fact, many of the creators of slashfic are minors. And while I have heard it argued by some that their work has no redeeming artistic value, I have to wonder... to who?! To me? Probably not more than a laugh or two at times. To someone who reads slashfic? Moreso. It's a stupid question, in that it's like asking whether anyone in any given tenth grade English class is going to write something in that class of redeeming artistic value. Answer: probably not. But many of the young people writing slashfic will at least feel motivated to write regularly, and that's arguably a more significant accomplishment than than many tenth grade English classes achieve." He went on to say: "I personally think it's far more likely that the slash authors who are writing about child characters online are probably more likely to be child predators. . ." ... to which I responded: "From personal experience running things at LJ for a long time, I think its safe to say that the facts do not support this claim, unless you mean it perhaps in some sort of vague statistical manner, such as: "I think it's more likely that men who express an interest in women are more likely to be rapists." Statistically? Well, yeah, it's probably true. But it's hardly an indictment or reason for preemptive steps against all men, is it?! The fact of the matter is that during the years that I oversaw LJ's abuse department, there were exactly *ZERO* reported trial convictions of anyone on LJ related to child molestation." As a final note, he wrote: "You want me to believe that it's more likely that chilren are writing sophisticated sexual content surrounding the characters that are currently most popular to children, you show me. I personally think it makes a great cover for child sexual abusers." to which I commented: "Or a dad. Or an uncle. Or a priest. Or a babysitter. Or a teacher. Really, any family member, or any other person who is trusted with kids. That's who is statistically most likely to molest a child." Basically, he doesn't believe that people under 18 write slash... so, if you or your friends either are or were involved in slashfic, yuri, yaoi, etc. before the age of 18, please let him know... and please ask your friends to do the same.... and as for all you adult fans out there, well... you might want to let him know that you're not actually a child molester, too. As I said recently: "What's a mistake, I think, is to think that the rights of those in earlyadoptersand those over at parryhotteraren't intrisically connected... because they are.To those who don't believe me, all I can say is that you *ALL* had your rights once, and now some of you might not, or might feel that your rights are threatened... and you don't see any connection there?! All too often, the management has played one minority after another against the weight of "public opinion". (Whose public?! Russia's? America's? LJ's?) The end result being that people's rights get infringed upon and rolled back, LJ dies a bit more, and there's a precident for even more rights to be taken away, usually for profit. It's always easy to make a popular argument to take away someone's rights. But it takes integrity to defend someone whose rights most people do not need or use, based on solid principles. And sometimes, it takes a small army to not get steamrollered in the process." </div> That's why I stress the need for unity. Because, this isn't just about you. It's about us. Join LJ United. Help us take strong, principled steps to bring back our rights, and to resist further attacks on our fellow LJers. We're looking for members who aren't willing to cave on issues involving the rights of any LJer, just because they happen to be an early adopter, or a breastfeeding mother, a survivor of child molestation, a sex-positive advocate, a Harry Potter fan, a Russian teen angry at the police, a Chinese dissident, a person who glorifies drugs, a person who worships a banned religion... or you. "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write." - Voltaire As we've seen, it's too easy to scapegoat one community or group of people. That's why we need unity. Help us appoint representatives for LiveJournal who aren't *just* strongly supportive of fandom, but of ALL the promises that were made to us over the years, and of ALL our rights and freedoms. I don't care whether you are still on LiveJournal or have let your account go inactive, having moved on elsewhere. There is still a fight to be fought, an argument to be made, and a reason to cast your vote and try and turn back the tide. If you feel powerless and alone in the fight, but know some friends who feel the same way, spread the word, because WE WANT YOU. If you would like to run as a LJ United candidate, embracing the promise of the site and representing us all, WE WANT YOU. If you are tired, dispirited, frustrated... ready to pack it all in, but hanging around on LJ for the sake of your friends, WE WANT YOU. If you are tired of watching your friends be targeted, and wonder what will be next, WE WANT YOU. If you personally have no worries and no fears, but you can't stand LJ's policies anymore, WE WANT YOU. Join LJ United. Let's stand together. |
| 7:22 pm | the following are presented without comment. except for the parts with comments. This is stuff from the mod queue and my inbox. I really love that you guys submit posts and links, and I really hate that giant red "reject" button, but I think it's better to try and round up links in news posts than fill up the f-lists of a couple thousand people (!!) with small chunks of info. |
| 7:22 pm | the virtues of going non-profit elements has another great post about users, representation, and "impossible possibilities" that we should all be reading. Many of the ideas listed are relevant to the project being discussed here. Snip:"The only way we can move en masse to another site is if it's something with what we need built right in to the way it's structured. And oddly enough, the main thing we need is NOT "freedom of speech" or assurances that the site is fan-owned or pro-fan. What we need is a site that is designed with user needs taking explicit priority over profit, and with a user voice built in and guaranteed from the ground up. What I mean by users over profit is not that the site can't make money. What I mean is that the goal of the people running the site shouldn't be making the site look good - ie, be "monetizable" - with the primary purpose of eventually selling to a bigger company or holding an IPO that will make the original financers of the project rich. This needs to be a site created for the public good, and the public good ain't ever made folks rich. Luckily, it's possible to run a small company without the need for insane growth and glittering visions of IPOs - provided you can get past the initial investment period and then get and keep enough regular customers to pay your bills and salaries. Even better, if the site were part of a nonprofit, there'd be a built in prohibition on IPOs and sellouts (though being a nonprofit is not a guarantee an organization will be well-run). Nonprofit doesn't have to mean financially struggling, or even poorly-paying for employees. It just means, not driven by the desire for exponentially maximized profit made on the backs of an uncompensated and unrepresented user base. It means, operating a public good. So one possible long-term way out is the  fanarchive model, whether or not a blogging service would be part of the fanarchive project. Another is some of whats being discussed over at fandom_flies. I lean right now to thinking it oughtn't be quite exactly either, because fans are better protected when intermingled with non-fen, and because, heck, I want to take all my Livejournal community with me, not just the fandom part of LJ. This journal isn't even a very fandomish journal. I want this site for a lot more than fandom, and I think other people would too.A lot of comments to my User as Citizen post mentioned modeling after a credit union. I like that idea (it's the core of my stakeholder model for reforming existing sites, mentioned later). There are a lot of options when you're starting fresh and you want to be user-owned. As a company, you can choose a stakeholder/shareholder route; as a nonprofit, you can choose various types of membership; there are possibilities for combining in odd and exciting ways, with some legal consultation of course. I'd love to see these ideas built in from the ground up to fandom_flies." |
| 7:22 pm | weekend update Howdy, fandom. The technobabble update is that I'm in the process of setting up a dev box. I've got the subversion repository set up, and now I need to configure it to allow multiple users. Then I need to install TRAC, and hook it in to the resository. Then we get coding. The dev team itself is not quite hammered out yet, but it's close. I still have e-mails to send and e-mails to read and e-mails e-mails e-mails, but once the hammering is done, I'll let you guys know who is rocking the behind-the-scenes development work. One thing I really need to get better at is sorting or noting comments as they come in. I didn't make a running list of name suggestions as they appeared in my inbox, so it took me forever to go through the five pages of comments on that post and find them. Here they are: Other suggestions? And, last but not least, I set up fandom_flutter as a place to vent, share, post essays, etc. It's still moderated, in order to keep out spammers/advertisers/whatever, but I hope people who are interested in discussing the further implications of the exodus will head over there. I'm going to clear out the mod queue for this comm, and I hope anything that gets rejected will end up over there. I guess I'd like to try to keep this community for Project-related updates. I dunno. It's a fuzzy line. And I've maybe had some drinks, so it's clearly time to step away from the laptop. |
| 7:22 pm | "The User as Citizen" Taken from robin_anne_reid : "User Generated Content" & Ownership: The User as Citizen.This is a great post, and I suggest everyone read it. Many of the issues we've discussed here are also brought up there. One of my favourite parts: This issue of ownership is much bigger than Six Apart and Livejournal, because it's really about how we as a culture construct the new class of relationships between citizens and businesses that is embodied by the interactive, hyper-connected social nodes that form the new structures through which modern humans are organizing our public lives. |
| 7:22 pm | finally, the post of doom! Results of the Request Post of Doom, plus comments from the other journals and from e-mails, under the cut. Sorry it took me so long. It's kind of huge, and I'm ill today. Note that something's presence on this list doesn't mean it's absolutely going to make it into the software. It's a long list, yo. I think we'll be putting it to the community to find out which of these features are most important and are therefore things we should focus on first. As you read them, maybe see if you can come up with some name possibilities? The project really needs a name (I have gone all mafia about it and taken to calling it "our thing," which probably won't work), which will make it easier to talk about and enable us to get started on cool things like logo contests, to keep people excited and involved. I'm also going to refer to LJ plus its clone sites (JF, GJ, IG, Scribblit) as "LJC." Thing we like about LJ: Our friends lists Ways to make it better: Stop calling it our "friends list." Ability to click the "also friend of" link so you can see who's reading you (I think we should totally call this function "who watches the watchers?" or maybe just "quis custodiet"); makes it easier to decide if you want to add them to your reading list. Some tech stolen from RSS readers so you can close a post when you're done with it; makes you less likely to miss things and easy to come back to posts later. No friends limit. Thoughts: The nomenclature has really got to change, and that's not going to be difficult to do. I gather the reasons for f-list limits has something to do with server and bandwidth resources. Possibility of setting the limit as high as we reasonably can and allowing users to purchase the ability to increase that limit? I would like to have no limits at all, but that's going to depend on the sort of back-end we have. Migration Madness: Will need a way to read journals from LJC on reading list. dizzycadence is working on a way to do this w/ authentication so you can also read locked posts. (Assuming they've got you friended.) More info here. Also, implement clone-based username linking: < lj user= , < jf user= , < gj user= , < ij user= , < sc user= . Thing we like about LJ: Layouts Ways to make it better: Support for external stylesheets. Make it easier to customize fannish layouts without having to learn arcane S2 rules. Thoughts: I think external stylesheets are a must-have. And while we're talking markup, validity & accessibility will be paramount, so the site will be browsable by non-standard methods (voice browsers, iPhones, Lynx, whatever. I actually do a surprising amount of text-based browsing these days). One step further: Tag-based filters + linked stylesheets/custom layouts = a page of Pirates posts with a nice Pirates layout. One click and you're looking at a page of PoT posts with Tezuka in the background. Thing we like about LJ: Icons Ways to make it better: More of them. Mass uploading. Saved keywords. Longer keywords. Multiple keywords. Maybe tags instead of keywords (so, "show me all of so-and-so's Naruto icons" will be a possibility)? Larger icon (byte) size? Thing we like about LJ: Image hosting Ways to make it better: Allow comments to scrapbook images. Add vid hosting. Thoughts: I feel like scrapbook needs to be seriously re-imagined. I have not done said re-imagining. I think people use scrapbook for a few different things: artists to host their artwork, picspammers to host this week's pictures of Johnny Depp, icon-makers to store icons, others to put up misc. pics of their cat or store the art they need for their layouts. Maybe do something like split this functionality in two: galleries, with thumbnails and tags and the ability to comment on pictures; and something that works a lot more like an ftp server, so you just have storage space and you can upload the 150 icons you just made and call them whatever you want to call them. Maybe? Also, if storage were more FTP-like, you could put up things that weren't necessarily images. Still thinking about this piece of it. Thing we like about LJ: Comments. Comment threading. Comment notifications. Ways to make it better: Editable comments. Formatting options (RTF? Wiki formatting?). Easy previewing. "Unfold all." Thoughts: Apparently the "unfold all" thing comes up in suggestions, and it's always determined that it's too much of a resources hog. Would it help to do it without icons? What about making it a feature you can purchase? Editable comments (with system-added datestamp, like in forums?) and formatting options FTW.Thing we like about LJ: Tags Ways to make it better: Ability to subscribe to certain tags of certain users. Ability to not subscribe to certain tags of certain users. Ability to search the site by multiple tags. Tag browsing. Tags, tags, tags. Thoughts: I think we might also want to tag our actual journals and communities, to make searching/browsing easier. I think this would work a bit like interests, except better; it'd allow us to easily look for, say, users and communities with a lot of Battlestar Galactica femmeslash. Thing we like about LJ: Memories Ways to make it better: Nested categories for better/easier organization. Tag memories. Move them around, edit them, delete them without it being a tremendous pain-in-the-ass. Add notes or comments to the links you add to your memories. Add outside links to your memories. Migration Madness: There would ideally be a way to transfer memories to the new service. I suspect it may be possible to hack antennapedia's lj migrate script to do this. Will maybe work on that now, because I'm kind of ansty to get coding. *grin*One step further: People talking about the functionality they'd like to see in the memories section started to sound a lot like people talking about del.icio.us. Adding del.icio.us-like bookmarking to the site? Made of win. Thing we like about LJ: Communities Ways to make it better: Easily back up entire community, comments and all. Better moderator functionality, like the ability to change the security on every community post at once. Thoughts: One thing that was brought up was, put some measure in place for when comm mods disappear. I'm not sure there's a way to do that with code, but maybe there could be some kind of policy in place like, if no one hears from the mod in X days, comm members can elect a new one and the site admins can make it happen. One step further: I like the idea of community types. When you go to create a community, obviously you have to option to make it be whatever you want. But maybe newsletters are a special type of community, where you set up a post template and enable the "I edit a newsletter" feature, and then as you're browsing, each post has an "add to newsletter" button by the "add to memories" button and all the other little buttons. Or you make a fanworks community and have the option to add challenges to a Master Fandom Calendar (more on the MFC later). Thing we like about LJ: Filters Under consideration: Levels of "public," such as locking entries to logged-in users only. Ability to label posts NSFW combined with a default SFW filter (by default I mean it's always available if you want it, not that you're forced into using it). Ability to lock posts to all members over [18] (actual age TBD) or all members AND guests over [18]. Only okay if easy and largely unobtrusive cookie-based "yes, I'm of age" guest-pass thing is possible (which it should be). No, it will not keep the kids out. Yes, it will cover our asses. Thing we do not like about LJ: The amazing changing unchanging TOS Ways to make it better: Be clear. Be detailed. Be responsive. Have some balls. Statement: Not even under debate. This will happen. Thing we do not like about LJ: Search functionality is well-nigh useless Ways to make it better: Search by tags -- more than one at a time. Ability to narrow results. Search by fandom. Thoughts: I'm probably going to put together a mockup of what I think the search page is going to look like, and then solicit input. This, I feel, is really important functionality and it's going to help to have an idea of what we want early on, because it's going to be a big driver of the data model. One step further: While I absolutely think that users should be able to opt out of having their individual journals searchable (much like what LJC does now with appending the norobots stuff to headers), I think it would be AWESOME to be able to have a little search thing on posts that lets you search through (collapsed) comments to a given post. Thing we can't decide if we like about LJ: Paid accounts Likely course: Free accounts + option to buy highly modular add-ons. No generic "paid account" as such, but allow users to purchase the add-ons they want and will use. Possibly offer packages for the super-lazy. More info: Because this is going to be a non-profit venture, the only purpose of charging for add-ons is allowing us to afford the resources to provide them. I'd like as much of this stuff as possible to be free, but right now, I have absolutely no way of knowing what we will and will not be able to provide. It's also going to vary depending on what users want. So, the very tentative "maybe it will cost extra" list: voice posts, a gazillion icons, pages, vid hosting, killfilters, unfold-all, more layouts, SMS capability, actual server space (http://user.awesomename.com/site/), more friends, more accounts, widgets, custom mood themes. Thing we can't decide if we like about LJ: The nav bar Thoughts: Some people like it, some people hate it. At the very least, if it's going to be an option, it should be customizable (and maybe hideable?). I kind of like the idea of a nav bar made of widgets. Thing LJ has never heard of: Master Fandom Calendar How it works: You create a community. The system says, "hey, is this community going to have challenges?" If so, you can add them to the Master Fandom Calendar, which users can go check out and view by fandom. Anyone can add new events, but only event creators or their (designated) proxies can edit or delete them. Why? It would be hugely cool? It would help foster a sense of community? I know challenge-listing communities pop up all the time, asking people to show up and announce that they're running such-and-such type of challenge. Everyone thinks they're a good idea, and they last for like two weeks, and then people stop posting. I think making "add a challenge" an automated process that the system takes care of would help a lot. Thing LJ has never heard of: Master/slave accounts How it works: You sign up with an e-mail address and set up your main account. You can then set up other accounts (for RL stuff, RPGs, whatever) and link them to that same e-mail address. All features of all accounts are accessible from the master account. Other thoughts: I love this idea, but I'm torn about implementation. Should Master accounts get unlimited slaves? Or they get X number of slaves and can buy more? I like the idea of purchasing add-ons and then allowing users to split them up between accounts as they see fit. So, buy 100 additional icons, and give 10 of them to your RL account and 35 to some RPG account and the rest to your fannish account. Etc. Thing LJ has never heard of: RPG consoles How they work: Easy way for mods to see what's going on in their games -- maybe a listing more like a forum so they could see where the most recent activity is. What else? I'm not an RPer, so I don't know. Thing LJ has never heard of: Post templates How they work:The site has default templates for different types of post (fic, art, regular journal entry, icons, whatever). Users won't have to use them if they don't want to, but it'd be shiny if they did, because then we could use those fields as metadata to search against. Fields and field values editable by user. Think LJ has never heard of: Account types How they work: Much of this functionality is fen-specific, but I also want this site to be a place where non-fen can feel at home. I think it'd be kind of nice to say, when you are creating your account, "no, I don't want all the fannish bells and whistles," and then you won't be bothered with quite so many fannish options. Obviously, you should be able to change that at any time, and activate said bells and whistles. Whew. Okay. That's a lot. But see what I mean about how awesome it will be if we can even do half this stuff? So. Anything I missed? Other thoughts? |
| 7:22 pm | news Man, I really really wanted to have the Features Post of Doom up, but I'm still compiling. Yesterday I sat in a bar for three hours after work and made notes. Nineteen pages of them. *grin* If we can get even half of this stuff done, it's going to be totally awesome. Now let's do the news. ...which leaves me with these words of wisdom from insomnia, writing in this post:Truth is, the future belongs to you, and not to Brad or Mena or Ev or any of those other sold out dotcom slackers who are too busy with the keynote and cocktail circuit to get an honest 20 hours of coding done in a day. They're a good six years past their prime, and that's a century or two in 'net years. You don't need these people who seem to have lost their way and their ideals. You don't need their bloated stacks of code, their crumbling edifices, and their failed idealism. You don't need to feel like the barrier to making something meaningful is too big and too insurmountable, and you certainly don't need to think that everything has been done, either. So let's get hacking, yeah? Yeah. I really will have the features post up soon. |
| 7:22 pm | I just want to make sure everyone has seen this buried subthread We report child pornography to the NCMEC, as required by law. Scroll down to markf's reply in particular. It's heavily implied that ponderosa121 and elaboration were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited I'm going to check innocence_jihad and if this isn't already there, I'm gonna crosspost it. Sorry if you see it twice, but I'm finding that a lot of people haven't lurked quite as aggressively as I have and haven't seen it. |
| 7:22 pm | Official statements in the lj_biz post (title taken from the post with the links in question) Hi everyone! I just wanted to send you over to this post, in which the lovely user aura218 compiled a nifty list of all official statements from LJ staffers on the most recent post on lj_biz.rachel isn't an official worker of LJ/SixApart.rachel's response to someone else, here. If you scroll down to the very bottom, the original writer of these words even says that she's unsettled that she was basically copied from. |
| 7:22 pm | fandom_flies @ 2007-08-07T14:08:00 For Everyone, (from fandom_action):This all began with 6A/Livejournal's lack of reliability when it comes to the TOS. This is the open letter to Livejournal and Six Apart by bubble_blunder requesting (very eloquently, I might add) clarification of the TOS and other recent concerns. I suggest anyone who plans on keeping their livejournal and even anyone who doesn't to read it and sign if they agree. It can't hurt; After all, we might be here for another couple months. There are over sixteen pages of "signatures"; I just signed the seventeenth.Especially regarding the United States, obscenity and copyright: Here synecdochic writes the most important thing I've read regarding fandom this week. First of all, obscenity law in the USA doesn't care if the minor depicted in a sexual explicit situation actually exists. Last year John McCain introduced a bill to further lock down on "child pornography." One that would require any website, or "social network," supporting the suspected material to report it, and report all the real-world identities and ages of its users. Rep. Steven Chabot (R-OH) has introduced a bill that strengthens copyright laws. This bill modifies existing laws to make it possible for you to be charged criminally for copyright infringement and increases the penalty for such infringements. While this law is mostly designed to help the RIAA and MPAA send people who use P2P networks to jail (and make more money), it could also be applied to the fandom world. Because it could also result in 6A being held criminally liable for hosting what some might report as "illegal" fanfic and/or fanart, it is very important that this measure not be passed. If you click on the link below, there is a form you can fill out to automatically have your local politicians notified that you oppose this measure. https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?JSe This is our first chance to act as a community for our rights. Lets make sure we stand up for what we believe in. fandom_actionBoth of these links are courtesy of ithiliana. More information can be found in their journal and at fandom_action. Even after we've moved to a new home, thankfully far, far away from 6A and their iffiness, these issues will still exist elsewhere, but we can begin preparing for and acting on them now. |
| 7:22 pm | the tentative plan. The current unpleasantness has hit CNET again. This comm is linked at the bottom. And, see, what happens when I post and then go to bed is that I wake up to 150 comments that I've only been able to skim. But I did skim over something a few times that needs addressing. A few people have (rightly) brought up the question, "Okay, this sounds totally shiny, but, uh, how much is it going to cost?" The answer is, honestly, I have no idea. But what I do have is a plan. It goes like this: I assemble a small, crack team of developers. (This part is in the works.) We build the shiny. They're all volunteers, so this won't happen overnight. However, I don't think it's going to take a year, either. We release and open it up to limited beta. I will front the cash for that myself (and also for the lawyer to write the TOS). I am not about to ask for money for an unproven product and system. If the site is popular, and if it looks like it's going to take off, and if there is demand, we incorporate as a non-profit, appoint a board, and start the fundraising to buy some hardware. If it doesn't look like it's going to take off, hey, everyone who worked on it has a cool project to put on their resumes. Fandom moves to an LJ clone, and life goes on. Throughout this process, I intend to be as open and transparent as possible. I intend to solicit feedback from fandom every step of the way. Is it perfect? No. Is it fraught with danger? Maybe. Will I get any sleep in the next year? Doubtful. Is it something? Yeah. I feel like... I don't know. There's something in the air. It's time. This feels different and exciting and new, and maybe this plan is insane but I think it'd be equally insane to sit here and do nothing at a time like this. We have to try, dammit, and if we try and fail, so be it. So. I have a bunch of e-mails to write to volunteers, but in the meantime, here's the list of starry-eyed optimists I'm looking for: Any takers? Comment or e-mail me (atrata at gmail.com). (Er, if you fit one of these things and have ALREADY volunteered, I promise I will send you e-mail in the very near future. I've got a little folder of people who've kindly volunteered, and I need to look at everything in that folder more closely. That said, it wouldn't hurt to send me another e-mail, because I'm drowning in it and my mail client has been very, very weird about actually delivering my mail lately.) Love! So much love. |
| 7:22 pm | age restrictions Man, I had a great time today reading all the comments in the features post. There's a lot of really good stuff there. Some of it's completely insane, and some of is likely far too server-intensive to be supportable (right away, anyway), but the thing I like most is just, you know, once we stop thinking strictly in LJ terms, it's like this whole new world opens up. And it's a whole new world of awesome. I've been working on compiling the most asked-for features and discussing them, and I have been working on it on and off for, uh, five hours now! Time for a break. I'm going to try to have it up tomorrow. In warm-off-the-presses news, looks like brad is leaving 6A for greener pastures. (Like us! (Hopefully!))antennapedia has written a journal migration tool that will grab all your entries and post them in an LJ clone such as InsaneJournal. It'll run on Mac OSX, most *nix boxen, and Windows machines on which you've installed python. I tried it out and it ported everything to IJ quickly and easily and I feel this is more proof that python scripts can save the world. My corner of it, anyway. Now, okay, one thing that repeatedly came up in terms of features, and which has come up again and again when talking about the site in general, is the age-restriction issue. Let me start with what I think is possible, and I happen to think it'd be a nifty bit of code. You create an account. You enter your birthday. Displaying it is up to you. But the system keeps track of what it is. Communities, individual posts, and individual journals can be designated 'mature,' and the system automatically filters younger users out of those posts. But it would also filter out lurkers. And I kind of like lurkers. I was a lurker once. (And actually, I still kind of consider myself to be one, considering my utter ineptitude at commenting on the posts I read.)What would it mean for us to lock them out of the picture? Sure, there are a lot of fen here on LJ, but no one really knows how many fen are not on LJ. We know they're there, though. How many of you have websites where you track click-through rates? Do your stories get far more clicks than they get reviews? Where does traffic to your site come from? How many of you keep your stories in archives that tell you how many times a story has been viewed? What's the highest viewcount? And how many reviews does that story have? What are the chances that everyone who looks at that archived story has an LJ? Wants an LJ? There is a great post on this subject here by heyheyrenay. That post links to this one, by litotease, an eloquent lurker who was locked out by all the kneejerk comm and f-locking that happened after Strikethrough. Check it out. Read comment after comment saying, "if fandom locks down, I'm locked out."And the shiny code to designate 'adult' communities? Would lock those communities down. So... I don't know, guys. I really don't. My inclination is always, always to go with inclusion. What does everyone else think? |
| 7:22 pm | apologies for the lack of ticky boxes. Happy Monday, fandom. Old business: squeaky19, the owner of InsaneJournal, has shown up here to categorically deny that his site has anything to do with Six Apart. In case anyone was still wondering.More old business: This comm is now moderated. My mod stick grows pokier. Spam me all you like (not that anyone has). Spam the watchers and we have a problem. Now, on to new business. I haven't talked to every member of fandom. I haven't read every single thing everyone has to say. But I have read a lot. And fandom seems to be pretty well divided. Shocking, I know, but bear with me. Here's how it shakes out: twocorpses' LJ. But she and I have talked, and we have quite different ideas. She wants to put together a journaling site that has some better features and a TOS that doesn't suck. She wants it to be a cool, fun, friendly place to hang out, for fen and non-fen alike. And that? Is awesome. I encourage you to check it out and support her if you're so inclined. But me, I have crazy mad plans. I continue to feel that people aren't going anywhere without their friends, and that the people who feel unthreatened by the Sword of 6A Damocles won't move unless they can move someplace shiny. And that means new code, a new site. I was going to make a poll, but it turns out that free users don't get polls. Fancy that. So we're going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. So tell me: If you could make the uber-fandom journaling site, what features would it have? Here's an idea I'm in love with at the moment. You go to make a new post. There's a drop-down menu where you say if it's a regular post or if it's fic (or art, or meta, or whatever). If you go the regular post route, you get something a lot like the LJ update screen. If you're posting fic, there are some fields for you to fill in (title, rating, notes, etc.). When you post it to your journal, you can post it to your website at the same time. Or you can post it to an archive (ideally, otw_news). Don't have a website? Disable that option. Don't write fic? Disable that option. So let's hear it. Go nuts. I'll share my crack pipe and you tell me your pipe dreams. |
| 7:22 pm | Reach out to More People Someone in the  news posts mentioned an LJ friend of theres who had no CLUE anything was going on at all.This is a concern, because that means no everyone who could potentially help with both the protest effort and the movement away from LJ is being reached. So I'm just asking everyone that if you haven't already posted something about the current situation in your personal journals, something public to reach not only your friends list but everyone who might read your journals, then please do post something now. If this is going to work, if we are all going to manage to get out of here at the same time, then we need to reach out and let as many people know as possible. Don't just post, encourage everyone to care, get involved, and post. The more we are, the stronger the chain of communication. ~~**Sailorcelestial**~~ Edit: Thanks frabjously for the correction on which place I meant for the posts. |
| 7:22 pm | Go Team Fandom! I was away from the computer most of the day and am only now back and trying to get caught up. A few quick things, and then I swear I'm going to be answering comments and sending e-mail to those of you who've written me and whom I've said I'd e-mail. First. This comm is open; anyone can post here. I have no desire to be a lone voice in the wilderness; indeed, much of the point of this community is that I am not a lone voice in the wilderness, that there are a lot of people thinking the same thing I'm thinking (fandom needs a new home, in case you have somehow missed that that's what I'm thinking. *grin*). That said, I know everyone is suspicious and jumpy right now, but please, please be careful what you say. If you hear some freaky rumour and it pisses you off, stop. Breathe. Think. Try to verify it. If you can't, go ahead and post, but say it's a rumour. Say you've tried to verify it and can't. Ask if anyone has any information. Do not make accusations or point fingers or yell that the sky is falling. The sky, I assure you, is not falling, and we have quite enough to contend with. When you are able to confirm or deny that rumour, edit your post to reflect it. ETA: Guys, no memes. Reasonable and mostly constructive discourse, k? Thanks. I'm going to edit the userinfo and add a posting policy so as not to seem quite so capricious. Apologies for not doing it sooner. /ETA. Second, in the name of following my own rules, I stated earlier that elaboration was suspended for incest. That was incorrect. Like ponderosa121, she was suspended for "drawings depicting minors in explicit situations." (link to her response.)Third. This is totally turning into a PR nightmare for LJ. Check out the articles here and here. (Thanks to alert readers atropos4 and esteven for the links.) And, as always, elke_tanzer has a giant collection of links and information well worth checking out.... and now one of them has got me sidetracked. oceana_'s got a post about LJ and other journaling sites. She comes down on the side of LJ, and her reasons look pretty solid to me. I won't be staying, but I'm not jumping ship tomorrow, either. I mean, really, here I am. Hi, irony.But in the comments to that post, and in the comments to a LOT of posts I've seen, there seems to be the assumption that whatever we come up with will host illegal material. It will not. That would be... well, it would be illegal. I'm not trying to organize a migration so we have some servers on which we can break the law. I love you people, but I'm not going to jail for hosting illegal material. And the [U.S.] laws on child pornography are really pretty clear. Stories and art depicting fictional characters are not and can never be child pornography. (There's info on this flying around all over the place, but I recommend this as a good starting point.) This thing that LJ is doing? Is not about enforcing U.S. law. It's about making money. It's about taking the easy way out, and not having to explain to some outraged mother (or, better yet, some outraged advertising exec) that that picture is not, in fact, child pornography. Seriously? What businessperson in their right mind who is trying to make money sides with the HP chanslashers? It's not going to happen. But it's about more than that. It's actually mostly about working together to build something completely awesome. But back in LJ-land, it's about their shitty customer service. It's about the fact that they refuse to tell us what content is and is not acceptable on their servers. Yes, I concede they are their servers, and they absolutely have the right to host or not host whatever they damn well please. If only they would tell us what that is. But when they do tell us, what they say is that they will be deciding what does and does not have artistic and literary merit. To me, that's unacceptable. There is no legal standard for it, and it allows them to weasel out of making any concrete statements and continue with their asstastic customer service. /rant. Sorry 'bout that. But at least the sky's still there. Now comments, and then e-mails, and hopefully that post about features I've been talking about for days. Yours in somewhat ranty love, Atra. |