Spent the weekend dusting off my Dreamwidth account as a place to be both social AND long-form. (And by "dusting off", I mean I built a custom layout and theme. Hope you like it!)
While I have my website for long-form thinking, it's evolved to be something more formal than I want to use all the time, and it also doesn't really afford me the opportunity to interact with you folks, since there's no commenting system (and I don't want to go to the time and expense of maintaining one).
While I have Twitter, it's just not that useful for discussion of any kind. The tweet length is too short, and most nuance gets lost, leading lots of rage and little opportunity for substantial, thoughtful engagement. (And, to be clear, I'm just as guilty of this—I engage when I shouldn't, or when I should do so in another forum, and the discussion has a way of spiraling pretty quickly.)
LiveJournal used to fill that same social/thoughtful niche for me online, but they're no longer trustworthy as a company for a variety of reasons. So here we are. I like Dreamwidth's business model and if I find that I'm using them regularly, I intend to $upport their efforts.
It's funny to me that after all the "advances" in social media—Twitter, Google Plus, Medium, and so on—I still prefer to be on what is almost the same platform I was in the early 2000s. Sure, you can re-skin and update your UI, or improve/extend your back-end infrastructure, but there's just not much more to be done to improve a good ol' blogging service.
Hope to see y'all here soon.
— Des
While I have my website for long-form thinking, it's evolved to be something more formal than I want to use all the time, and it also doesn't really afford me the opportunity to interact with you folks, since there's no commenting system (and I don't want to go to the time and expense of maintaining one).
While I have Twitter, it's just not that useful for discussion of any kind. The tweet length is too short, and most nuance gets lost, leading lots of rage and little opportunity for substantial, thoughtful engagement. (And, to be clear, I'm just as guilty of this—I engage when I shouldn't, or when I should do so in another forum, and the discussion has a way of spiraling pretty quickly.)
LiveJournal used to fill that same social/thoughtful niche for me online, but they're no longer trustworthy as a company for a variety of reasons. So here we are. I like Dreamwidth's business model and if I find that I'm using them regularly, I intend to $upport their efforts.
It's funny to me that after all the "advances" in social media—Twitter, Google Plus, Medium, and so on—I still prefer to be on what is almost the same platform I was in the early 2000s. Sure, you can re-skin and update your UI, or improve/extend your back-end infrastructure, but there's just not much more to be done to improve a good ol' blogging service.
Hope to see y'all here soon.
— Des
no subject
Date: 2017-01-25 05:31 am (UTC)From: