A Cunning Plan

[willowisp]

As anyone who has followed me for any amount of time on Facebook knows, I loathe Facebook. I despise everything it stands for and how it treats it product (read: us). I abhor its invasions of privacy, its stalking tracking of users, its manipulation, the secret-and-therefore-unethical social experiments, the repeated breaches of privacy & trust, and the "sponsored" posts it doesn't bother to identify so that programs like Social Fixer can block them.

Its "curating" of what we see, no matter what we repeatedly tell them, via our settings, what we want to see has caused me real harm. I have missed so many important and/or time sensitive posts. I have failed to comfort friends or family who have lost loved ones because I never saw their post. I have not known the change of status, good or bad, of friends or family because I never saw the post.

As noted above, I use Social Fixer and it helps, but one thing it doesn't do is notify me when friends post. Another problem is the Facebook constantly changes its code to thwart Social Fixer's fixes.

I have lamented the loss of Livejournal, which I cannot use when it is owned by Russian interests due to the Russian government's policies of silencing the LGBTQIA+ community and its persecution of and human rights violations against its citizens.

I miss LJ a lot, especially its comment system, which was the best I've encountered in social media. I miss being able to pay to not see ads. I miss my lifetime subscription that allowed me to personalize it in ways Facebook or Twitter don't allow. And I miss its notifications, something that I've not seen addressed well in any of Facebook's knockoffs, including MeWe.

Fortunately, there is a solution -- Dreamwidth uses LJ's source code and not only kept the best aspects, but improved on them. The problem: even fewer people on Dreamwidth than on LJ in its prime, and nothing like the reach I have on Facebook despite Facebook's best efforts. I have tried, time and again, to revive my Dreamwidth account, but I always end up just resuming regular posting on Facebook.

Today on Twitter a user reminded me of LJ and Dreamwidth, and I've made an executive decision. I'm going to begin posting everything I post on Facebook here, and a link to here on every Facebook post. I'm hoping that my friends and family on Facebook will try Dreamwidth and see what it's like to have an ad-free experience and in general how nice Dreamwidth is, and they'll be encouraged to join. The more people we can get to join, the less of a stranglehold Facebook will have. Also, with any luck, people will join and start posting here, and I'll actually be able to see when they do since Dreamwidth doesn't decide for me what I'll see.

Comments

Dreamwidth is 99% of my social media

[mdlbear]

I should probably start linking to my DW posts on FB and Twitter; I've basically abandoned them except for following up @mentions and messages. I'd want to find a command-line client for each of them; if I had to log in and post manually I wouldn't keep it up.

[echoweaver]

I am here, and it looks like at least one other friend is too, so that's two.

Netmouse is here if you aren't linked.

One of my friends from Sunflower River is here, but I'm not sure you two ever connected socially.

Studentbane now uses Dataslayer because the old monikker no longer applies. But you're probably already linked. I can poke her to check more regularly, and also there are notifications as you say.

Every friend who keeps up here makes it easier to keep up here, so welcome back.

A Hit and a Miss

[willowisp]

Thank you for the updates! I was able to connect with Netmouse, but Dreamwidth claims it can't find Dataslayer. Please do nudge her on both this count and the Father's Day post. Thank you again!

Re: A Hit and a Miss

[echoweaver]

Dur, that's because I lied. She's still Studentbane here. She changed on a different platform.

[netmouse]

I keep telling myself I will post more regularly here, and then failing to do that. I think part of it is the inability to easily share photos that are not posted for all the public to see. Perhaps I have been trained by FB to expect photos with no pictures to not be read/seen.

I would like to see more people here, but also for the codebase to develope, which so far as I can see it hasn't. It could. It's an open source project. But it hasn't. Maybe we were all just burned out when LJ imploded. Hadn't really thought about an open source platform getting SOLD along with all of our content. It was really disruptive.

Glad to see you here and hope you are well.

Catching Up

[willowisp]

Hello! I think most of my failure to post here was that it was too easy to just do a quick post to Facebook. They've finally crossed a line, however, and I'm set on posting here and linking, in hopes that I can get some people at least to jump ship.

Facebook has also gotten much worse with notifications. Right now I'm mostly being notified for group posts, and very rarely for a friend posting. Dreamwidth isn't perfect in this sense since they don't do push notifications, but I'm going to request that as something they work on. Right now the only social media I use that gets notifications mostly correct is Discord, but I believe that it would be even harder to convince friends and relatives to go there because the setting up of earphones/speakers and mics would spook them. Plus, there's not really set up for long, involved posts.

I think the ideal social media outfit for me would be the comment system here; the notifications from Discord; the absence of ads and ability to monetarily support from here, Discord, or MeWe; the photograph posting from Facebook (though it would be better if they did nested albums); and the posting style of MeWe. I have a dream of making a sandbox social media site with all of the above for friends and family, but between Andy's vertigo and how busy he is at work, it won't be happening any time soon.

It's good to connect with you here! I hope to see you around.

Re: Catching Up

[netmouse]

Those all sound like good features!

I think adding more of that to Dreamwidth would probably be better than an all new site - as you say, either way it lives or dies by how many people you care about adopt it. I am on discord (Netmouse#3372) but mostly for conrunning.