- What It Is
Dreamwidth is a new journal service that takes LJ's code as a starting point, adds many cool things, and strips out some old and/or annoying stuff. It goes into open beta on April 30.
I'm personally excited about Dreamwidth because:
- it's ad-free;
- it will split the two functions of LJ's "friends" function, "I want to allow these people to read my locked posts" and "I have time to read every post these people make";
- it has a more sensible "adult content" policy;
- it's demonstrated a commitment to making it easy to interact across sites; and
- it has cool planned features like a complete revamp of S2 journal customization, killfile support, a more useful "memory" system, etc.
Further reading: a list of changes from LJ; general FAQ; Business FAQs.
- How You Can Use It
DW is committed to being ad-free by a) pricing paid accounts higher than LJ's and b) controlling the growth of free accounts through an invite code system. On April 30, you can purchase paid accounts for as little as $3 for a month, which will then revert to a free account at the end of the month.
- If you want a free account, you can get an invite code by doing the following before April 30:
- Log into LJ.
- Then log in to DW using OpenID by putting the URL of your LJ (username.livejournal.com) in the box.
- Set an e-mail address where you get e-mail notification of replies to your comments.
On April 30 or thereabouts, everyone who has set an e-mail address through OpenID will get an invite code.
(Alternatively, all existing users have been promised many invite codes once open beta starts, and you can ask me for one then.)
- If you don't want a DW account, log in via OpenID as above.
This will let you:
- Subscribe to communities and people (put them on your friends page, in LJ-speak);
- Track journals & posts (same as in LJ-speak);
- Be granted access to locked posts (be friended, in LJ-speak);
- Comment and get replies e-mailed to you;
- Upload 6 userpics; and
- Edit your profile.
- If you want a free account, you can get an invite code by doing the following before April 30:
- How I Plan to Use It
- I am on DW as
kate_nepveu. Sometime after it goes into open beta on April 30, when everything's set up there to my liking, I will be cross-posting between LJ and DW. I'm almost certainly going to disable comments here, so as not to split conversations. Since you can stay logged into DW via OpenID if you choose, and since logging in is really easy if you don't, I hope that it won't deter people from commenting.
- I will do complicated things involving filters and such to give LJ users access to the same posts on LJ as at DW: so you won't be missing anything.
- I will maintain a reading list here of people who aren't posting at DW: so I won't be missing anything.
- I am not sure whether I am going to import my existing LJ entries into DW (existing links would still go to the LJ pages and it seems like splitting the discussion, which I don't want to do, see above). I will at least do placeholder posts so that tags on DW go to the appropriate tags on LJ.
- In other words, I want to make this as seamless and easy for everyone who reads or comments here.
- I am on DW as
Questions?