PSA

[ladysprite]

I am not bailing to Dreamwidth. I know it's made of rainbows and unicorn fluff, and is apparently perfect in every way, and that LJ is evil and bad for having other people attack it and occasionally being unavailable for once in the ten years that I've been here, but.... I just like LJ better.

I do have a Dreamwidth account; I've grabbed it mostly for the sake of grabbing my username while I still can, and because so many people are panicking, flailing, and jumping ship that part of me is afraid that eventually I'll be the only person left here. Until I absolutely have to, though, I will not be reading there and I will not be posting there.

This is my home. I like it here.

Comments

[mermaidlady]

I'm still here. I'm thinking of backing up my LJ entries on my DW account, but that's about it for the moment.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

I do too, but rumor has it the past week has been a dry run for the Kremlin (or, you know, the Russian central government) taking down LJ for political reasons. Regardless of the source, I'm getting a little skeptical of LJ's ability to stay up under concerted attack.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Reference, since it seems paranoid: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2063952,00.html

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

I guess it's cheaper than polonium.

[calygrey.livejournal.com]

This!

[leiacat.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, you're definitely not alone in this.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I use DW as a mirror/backup for LJ... and after my hard-disk crash last summer, I'm much more aware of the need for backups. *wry* And I do my posting from DW because they've enabled automatic cross-posting to LJ, while going the other way is a pain. But a lot of my friends aren't on DW yet, and unless that changes, or LJ goes under*, I will continue to be primarily active here.

* I'd be less worried about that if LJ weren't Russian-owned and -hosted. Not that I don't think our government would be capable of trying to shut it down for political reasons (especially not after the example of WikiLeaks), but that I think they'd find it harder to do. I hope the Russian Overlords have the smarts to have an entire mirror site somewhere in another country and ready to go at a moment's notice.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty happy with LJ, too. And while a few of my friends have jumped, I think I still have more that are on LJ only.

[metaphysick.livejournal.com]

While I certainly don't post very often, I'll certainly be staying with LiveJournal, so you won't be alone (even if it's just the two of us occasionally waving to one another in an otherwise empty corner of the Internet.)

[mamatiger.livejournal.com]

I hope you do download/backup your entries here! It would be such a shame if you lost all the history of your self-work progress!

[iamjw.livejournal.com]

Yes. That. Exactly that.

[suzilem.livejournal.com]

I also have a DW account, also for the purpose of getting my username locked down. If LJ ever goes permanently down, I'll migrate. Same name, same time, different station.

[joannahurley.livejournal.com]

I'm with you, only more so. If the handful of folks I read on LJ leave, I won't follow at all. I'm already trying to "drink from the fire hose" as it is, with folks scattered all over the internet. If DW supports RSS, I'll probably read folks via that, I guess.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

You're not going to be the only person here, if only because of all the people who greatly enjoy saying snide things about Dreamwidth while staunchly avowing their committment to LJ.

I personally could do with a bit less dumping on Dreamwidth, none of which I see any basis for, but whatever.

[gmkieran.livejournal.com]

What is this Dreamwidth of which you speak? ;) In all seriousness, this is the first I've heard of Dreamwidth or attacks on LJ by the Russians - guess that tells you how much attention I've been paying! In any case, I'll be here as long as LJ is here! :D

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

Dreamwidth is an alternate blogging site, made mostly using a lot of the original set-up and ideas from LJ. It started up... I can't remember how long ago, when some folks were unhappy with some of how LJ was handling some aspects of business (those who know more than me can comment in more detail).

There have been some hefty denial-of-service attacks on LJ this week, and in response a lot of my friends have decided to either abandon LJ and move to Dreamwidth, or at least reserve a seat over there and start keeping an emergency bag packed just in case.

[droewyn.livejournal.com]

Part of the reason it gets the sneering that it does is because a lot of the first people to leave LJ for DW were slashfic writers who were worried about LJ shutting down their communities.

I seem to remember that it was spearheaded by Potterverse 'ficcers because LJ was cracking down on depictions of underage sex. DW swore they'd never do that, so for a while they had a reputation of "Bring me your pervy, your kinky, your outrageous anti-canonical pairings yearning to breathe heavy..."

Every time there's LJ drama, a few people announce That's It, I'm Going To Dreamwidth.

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

I'm the same way. I don't even cross-post because I'm lame. I want to back up my LJ to Dreamwidth, but I'm waiting for the moment since too many people have been doing it.

[aries-walker.livejournal.com]

I also have not heard of Dreamwidth until this very moment. I hope that doesn't mean I have to get an account to keep up with half of my friends there and half of my friends here. I suspect that's exactly what it means. Ugh.

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

Like I said above, Dreamwidth is an alternate blogging site, that started out based on the LJ model with some tweaks. I'm with you; I don't want to have to follow two different things to keep track of everyone I care about - that's why I'm planning on staying here if at all possible....

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I hate to say this, but... back in the day, that was exactly what I said about LJ vs. a.c., and I fought a valiant rear-guard effort to keep a.c. going when everybody I knew started coming over here. Times change, and I expect that after some indeterminate interval, the critical mass will shift from LJ to DW, just as it did from a.c. to LJ. But I don't expect that to happen for a while yet.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I'm staying here too. Thankfully most of the people who are jumping ship are cross posting. I do have the same name at DW but largely as a name-squatting measure, since there is at least one other person out there who now uses my username.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Seconded on all counts, except I don't have a DW account. I can barely keep up as it is.

[jducoeur]

Truth is, I mostly agree with you. I don't have any intention of abandoning LJ unless I am forced to -- even on the occasions I post *from* DW, that's mostly pragmatic: because I can post via DW while LJ is down, and the posting will get forwarded to LJ once it's back again. So it makes a nice workaround for the DDoS attacks, at least from the posting side. All of my *reading*, which is the important part, is still on LJ for the time being, and I don't plan to stop reading here.

That said, I've been thinking about this for the past day, and I don't actually share the feeling that LJ is my home. The past year's taught me a lot of hard-won perspective about what I really care about: the *people* are my home, and I care about being where they are. I don't care about LJ anywhere near as much as I do about reading your words, and those of my other close friends.

LJ itself is just a thing. I cared about it more personally when bradfitz was still leading the charge to change the world through blogging; I cared about the SixApart folks somewhat. I confess, I don't even *know* who the current owners are, though, which means it's hard to care about the site itself quite so much.

Indeed, in some ways I actually care more about DW, precisely because it is so much a personal project -- a scrappy startup that's trying to make things better. I identify with that, for obvious reasons, and respect it a lot. It's not actually that DW is somehow perfect that makes me like it: it's that it started from the assumption that LJ is A Good Thing, and they are being fairly cautious about making little improvements while still keeping it nearly identical in most respects.

That said, I will admit that the recent attacks have actually made me care about LJ more -- not so much because of the site itself, as what it represents. It's being attacked precisely because it's the most conspicuous bastion of free speech in an increasingly repressive country; *that* matters to me. So I'm even less inclined to leave now than I normally would be.

And all *that* said -- like I said, it comes down to my friends. The DW account is mostly a fallback, and I don't *intend* to use it. But the signs indicate that the current situation isn't a random hacker attack: it may well be that LJ has found itself out and alone on the front lines of a really serious civil cyberwar. I dearly hope it survives, but these are uncharted and dangerous waters, so I'm prepping my life raft just in case...

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

It's not actually that DW is somehow perfect that makes me like it: it's that it started from the assumption that LJ is A Good Thing, and they are being fairly cautious about making little improvements while still keeping it nearly identical in most respects.

Yes, this. I have NO idea where all the sneering "Oh, everybody thinks DW is perfect and full of rainbows and kittens" BS is coming from, because nobody I know thinks anything like that... and it rather annoys me to be accused of it, merely because I'm on both sites.

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

It comes from all of the people on my friendslist who post statements that DW is perfect and made of rainbows. I'll accept that you may not have seen those statements; while there is overlap in our friends, there's not 100% match.

I don't hate DW, and I'm not accusing anyone of anything. And, if and when LJ falls apart and I have to leave, I will. But I've seen a lot of panicking, flailing, and fleeing, and I don't see the need to add to that right now.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Well, that brings us to the reason for the attacks. If it is against the LJ business, then leaving LJ makes sense, as the attackers would stop once LJ is dead.

If it is against the content, however, then if the targeted content moves to DW, the attacks would follow it, and you have no safety.

[jducoeur]

Yep, that's true.

I don't think it's obvious that the Russians would move en masse to DW, mind. Indeed, the underlying theory of the attacks seems to be that wrecking LJ would cause the Russian blogosphere to disperse and stop being a problem, although that's probably naive and incorrect. I expect that everybody would wind up recollecting *somewhere*, but there are a number of possibilities of where.

But there's certainly a non-trivial chance of the scenario you describe, with ever-widening collateral damage taking down DW shortly after LJ...

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Or, there's also the possibility that it isn't "the Russians", and that the whole thing is about something else, in which case the future is unpredictable.

And while the future is uncertain, the fact of the matter is that most cataclysmic predictions fail to materialize.

[jducoeur]

Yep -- considerably more often than not, issues can be fixed before they become true crises. But when the situation involves this many unknowns, I prefer to have a fallback plan in place.

(It's true that the Russian thing is just a theory, but it's a plausible one, especially since nobody else has the obvious motivation and capability to mobilize quite this level of resources against LJ. And I gather that the attack was originally centered specifically against some Russian political blogs before widening...)

[evcelt.livejournal.com]

I'm sticking with LJ for the time being. I suppose I will look into getting a Dreamwidth account for backup purposes, but that's all.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

I plan to stick with LJ as long as there is an LJ with which to stick.

I do have a DW account that I'm using to back up my journal and as a bolthole Just In Case.