Active comms? And, is growth a problem? (maybe not)

[charmian]

Last entry had a lot of comments, and the results of the poll surprised me. [BTW, if you found that poll interesting, you may be interested in this poll. holyschist is interested in your responses.) A clear majority (~60% at present) of the poll results cited a 'dearth of active comms' as the major factor impeding DW growth (among those who believed there was a growth issue). I was actually surprised by this stat. I expected the other options to be more popular.

So then, I ask a followup question (to those of you who checked that option last post, or who believe there is one, even if they did not cite that as the major factor):

Poll #2896

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40

View Respondents

If you believe that there is a dearth/lack of active comms on DW, what do you think is the major reason?

View Answers

Moderators who lack social capital (moderator is not high profile enough to attract an initial core group)
2 (5.0%)

Comm duplication (i.e. identical or very similar comm already flourishing on LJ)
29 (72.5%)

DW users less interested in using comms
3 (7.5%)

Moderators don't promote comms enough
1 (2.5%)

Can't crosspost to other services with comms
0 (0.0%)

More difficult to import comms
3 (7.5%)

Some other reason which I will explain in comments
2 (5.0%)

On the results in general

Actually, I was surprised more people didn't say invite codes. I was also surprised more people didn't say lack of original content.

There were a significant amount of 'other reason' responses: Can't read locked LJ friends-list entries from DW, the commenting form/openID commenting, perception that DW is a clone (vs. a fork), lack of BNFs/popular users, user inertia.

Some responses questioned whether growth was slow, or if there was a problem with it at all, recalling their experiences with early LJ.

Is there a 'Growth Issue' at all?

To start out with, the question over whether DW has a growth 'issue' or 'problem' is very subjective, although the perception definitely exists. yvi noted that around this time last year DW had ~2,500 daily posts, while now it has ~4000. Others also said that they thought DW was growing at a healthy rate.

Based on solely anecdotal evidence, I've seen people going 'yeah, I joined DW, but it never really took off so I went back to LJ,' or 'I'd like to join, DW, but there aren't enough people,' so the size/growth issue exists in the minds of some people. The idea of network effects suggests that the more people who join a network, the more valuable it becomes, so what these responses seem to be suggesting is that DW is not yet large enough (or not large enough in the right areas) to convince these people to come over.

The issue of growth is also subjective in the sense that 'there is a dearth of active comms/posting/w/e' in practice is equal 'dearth of active comms/posters/etc which I am interested in' So, even though on DW, there may be an active... macrame community, if you have no interest in macrame, but love snowboarding and winter sports, no matter how massive the macrame community and related comms are, it doesn't really matter. Growth probably doesn't occur evenly among parts of the service as well, so whether you are perceiving growth on your d-roll depends on who is on your d-roll.

There's also the fact that DW is only a year old, and some note that they find it comparable to LJ at the same age. I have no idea what LJ was back in 2000, so I'll take their word for it. While this may be true, in terms of the perceptions of the users, it may not be especially relevant, as many of them weren't using LJ in 2000. It may be that many people are not used to being early adopters of a social media service, and since they didn't join LJ at that stage, 2002 LJ is not their point of reference.

holyschist made an interesting point here: "Where people are seeing it as not-active is, I think, because they want their entire LJ friendslist and all their favorite LJ comms to move/replicate here. And I don't think that's realistic." People who perceive a 'slowness' or 'lack' of growth, or a 'dearth of comms or original content,' may feel that way because they expect DW to be a replacement for their current LJ usage.

That reminded me of back in the day, I asked my LJ flist what would cause them to move to another social media service (this was IIRC before DW had started up), and the biggest answer was not any specific feature or policy, but 'if my friends and fandoms all moved.' However unrealistic, I suspect this is what many people desire to happen (I may be wrong), especially
those who began to use LJ in a group, as part of a migration. Accurately or not, many people think of what happened as 'we were all using y!groups/pitas.com/MLs/usenet, and then some of us started to use LJ, and then there was a tipping point and then everyone was on LJ and the old place became a ghost town.' (again, with the caveat that this is a narrative which might not actually be what happened) So people may be expecting what happened in the shift to LJ to repeat itself, indeed, wishing for it, even.

However, perhaps the reality is that making the shift will perhaps be most successful for those who are looking for a 'fresh start' and 'meeting new folks/finding new interests.'

Lastly, an interesting point was brought up by various people about 'comm-centric users' and 'journal-centric users,' which holyschist's poll has some questions about. (see link at top of entry). Perhaps users who interact mostly on personal journals, both their own and others, feel less bothered about a lack of comms (should they perceive one).

Comments

[morineko]

I joined LJ in 2001, but had been reading LJs earlier than that--there were active communities, and some were fannish in the non-fanfic sense of fannish, but I don't really think LJ took off as a fannish platform until all the Harry Potter fans started moving in.

(I'll be honest, I think a lot of people stopped using off-LJ blogs when their friends stopped commenting at off-site blogs)

[charmian]

Yeah, I think I joined somewhat later (actually, thanks to you) but I don't recall that much.

Hmm, so that might be what it takes.

[delphinapterus]

The journals vs. comms debate is interesting for me because I'm here primarily for fandom which uses a lot of both. Like when I just get into a fandom it's the comms I'm going to check first then I'll go into personal journals. This is especially true if a fandom isn't big enough/doesn't have a newletter type round up of posts so the comms function as a way to back read the fandom. Without the comms on DW it's harder to pick up a new fandom here than picking it up on LJ. There is also the comfort level of commenting to a fannish comm vs. commenting to a personal journal. With the access vs. subscription thing it's a lot easy to do here than on LJ because you don't have to give the same level of access to track a personal journal's posts.

[charmian]

On LJ, I would often tend to friend journals rather than the comms, because often the comms would be full of stuff that I wasn't interested in/bad moderation. But the comms do help you find people, although since DW has a far better search function, it is easier to find folk.

Hmm, that's interesting, that perhaps this has something to do w/ the access/subscription split.

[ursamajor]

I joined LJ in June 2000, so I can definitely vouch for what LJ felt like to me back then :)

LJ of summer 2000 had this new-shiny, open, small-community, organic feel. It wasn't polished and professionalized, but the friends-list thing was revolutionary, and it made it really easy to keep track of friends that had a little less time to spend on IRC than we did before. The people I knew posting to LJ back then were very open to new people swinging on by their journals; this was before communities even existed on LJ, so of course this was how you'd find people. Moving in with a group of pre-existing friends made LJing very sticky for me - being able to see so many friends' updates on one website was a killer app on the technical side, and it was a significant contributor in building Community on LJ on the personal-social side.

For me, this is what I mean when I say that I wish LJ could go back to feeling that way. Where TPTB are real, easily-perceived people that actually communicate with the community. (Okay, Mark and Rah and Fu are all better versed in good communications than Brad was, but we also have the benefit of hindsight.) Where the members of the larger community are all relatively new, so feel relatively equal and friendly and open. And I definitely feel like this is the case here on DW.

[holyschist]

Do you remember when LJ introduce communities? I can't seem to find that information.

[synecdochic]

Early 2001, IIRC.

[jenett]

I know they were in by June 2001, because that's when I started, and they existed.

[holyschist]

Hmmm, so I started using LJ when it had had communities about the same amount of time as DW, perhaps a little less.

I really can't remember communities figuring at ALL in my early LJ experience, but I can't remember if that was me or the communities not being very active.

Of course, as charmian pointed out, if people weren't around in LJ's early years, it doesn't matter to their perceptions that LJ didn't become a giant hit right off, either.

[ursamajor]

The LJ timeline on Wikipedia says December 2000, and that seems about right to my memories.

[holyschist]

Thank you! That is exactly what I was looking for.

[charmian]

Yeah, when I started using LJ, it totally had communities and was already pretty large.

Huh, in your mind, does newness of members really play that large of a role in community relations? It seems on LJ a lot of people can be on the service for a long time and never come into contact with each other, so they can't really know which one of them is newer.

[holyschist]

It may be that many people are not used to being early adopters of a social media service, and since they didn't join LJ at that stage, 2002 LJ is not their point of reference.

I actually know one person who had a closed beta account who left for exactly that reason--she didn't like being on a site that was still buggy, where the social etiquette wasn't all worked out yet.

[charmian]

Huh, you know, I really didn't think the site was that buggy when I got in on the closed beta. Although, I'm not sure the social etiquette is that different from LJ; there is the access/subscribe thing, but it's not really rocket science.

[holyschist]

I didn't either, but it was just...beyond her comfort zone. I think that may be true for a lot of people.

Me, I am all "Early adoption, yay! I love reporting bugs and suggesting features!"

[eruthros]

Me too!

[pne]

I voted for "other" and my guess is that the userbase isn't big enough yet to support enough active communities -- so you have a wide variety but each comm only has 1/10th of the membership because DW only has 1/10th of the number of users compared to LJ (or whatever the numbers are).

But "LJ already has an equivalent, established community" (= inertia) is surely also a thing.

It's the network effect, I guess: people will join the place where most of their friends / most people sharing common interests are. So it's hard to bootstrap a new community site (whether it's a Facebook clone or a LiveJournal fork).

[charmian]

Yeah, that might be it. But I think the established community thing is a larger factor.

It's hard, yet in the past it's been done (as in, look at what happened to Friendster, and then Myspace). But just how does it occur, I wonder?

[torachan]

It's hard to pick just one reason in this poll, but I suspect that a lot of it is that they're duplicate comms and the LJ versions are getting more activity, because LJ is bigger, so people use the LJ version more rather than DW.

[matgb]

I think the biggest problem is that your options don't actuall address the question you're easking.

Your answers are for the question "why aren't more LJ users switching to DW", whereas your question is "why isn't DW more active".

It's a mistake to expect many mor eusers to jump ship in large numbers, even after open beta and the notional end of invite codes.

If the site wants to expand more, which is possible, it needs to expand into other markets; for example, a fair number of people are increasingly worried about privacy on Facebook, and are looking for other options, DW's privacy controls are exceptionally good. It's a different platform and service to Facebook, but it'd appeal to the right sort of end user.

People that have never wanted a 'blog' really enjoy using Twitter; there's potential there for a number of people to come across directly, especially if we ever get the 'claim your external ID' feature set up; someone could log in using Oauth or similar from Twitter, then set up a DW account in that way, and it wouldn't be at all hard to have a headline pusher back to Twitter with links here.

Then there are the people that 6A thought were a market for Vox; privacy controls, neighbourhood, simplicity. Teh DW UI is already better than LJs by a huge margin, make the setup process easier, possibly with a 'visual' account creation (ie, simpler with less detailed options that assumes defaults for many settings), and we could pick up there.

I signed up to LJ partially because many friends were there already, and partially because it was the only service of its type. Now there're hundreds of social media/network services, DW can reach into that market as something new.

Just looking to LJ for new users is a plan doomed to fail; yes, people will always jump ship, but we've had the main surge of people that wanted something better. Now we need to build the product into something that anyone might want to use, not just annoyed LJers, already a diminishing market.

[holyschist]

+1

[charmian]

Wait, which poll are you talking about? The one in the entry before this one, or the one in this entry? I don't really see how all of the options in either are about LJ users switching to DW. So in your opinion, what would be better options to put down?

Hmm, why do you say that? So in your opinion, you don't think there is any feature or anything that would prompt more LJ users to use DW? Even if it isn't 'many more,' even 'some' would increase DW's growth.

Yeah, this all does assume the site wants to expand. However, I don't think one can say it's a matter of poaching other users. IMHO, FB's functionality and service are so different that it makes more sense to speak in terms of FB users using DW in addition to using FB. And while FB has 400 million people, and I'm sure some of them might enjoy using DW, how would they learn about it? How would the marketing take place? I don't really think that the FB experience is similar to the DW or the LJ experience, and while there may be overlap, it's like saying that some FB users might enjoy using Flickr. Flickr is similar to some aspects of FB, but one cannot be considered a potential substitute for the other. (Anyway... FB's users are even MORE locked in than LJ's, and the friending concept is different, and FB emphasizes RL names and anyhow, people will not move from one social network to another unless some of their friends are already there, so this would need to start with the DW users who are already on FB; plus, DW doesn't have good FB integration)

So why would people who do not want a blog want to use DW? Also, all of this depends on features which do not exist yet. It would IMHO be good to use easy Oauth registration procedures, though.

I don't know, I think many of those people went to FB.

Huh... but I don't know if by those standards DW is something new, at this point? Many of the major features are targeted to LJ users. (Crossposting, LJ-import, cross-site friendslist) LJ had an advantage when it started out because its features were novel, like you said. It would seem even harder to bring in more early adopters from other services, who would come in without many of their friends being on DW already.

[matgb]

Sorry, this comment is basically a rewritten version of a comment eaten by my phone last night, so it's a bit less coherent, and was partially meant for the previous post; life is hectic currently, so long ramlby comments rather than shorter concise thought through stuff.

I do think more LJ users will switch over, especially with some of the features planned, but I don't think it will be a strong switchover again, partially as those left on LJ are those that don't mind what LJ does, to an extent, and partially they're those resistent to change, or won't jump unless friends jump, etc.

Re FB, it's partialy just an idea for growth; we know people on FB are unhappy about the privacy stuff, and we know that DW, for example, is planning a decent image system. Yes, integration into FB sucks, currently, and requires a walkthrough for most, but that could be fixed easily. Regardless, I'm looking at the idea of poaching users who're attracted to the communication/text aspect of DW. It's a potential market, not necessarily the one to go for.

And the point about people not wanting a blog that use Twitter is that Twitter is a blog. But it's incredibly user friendly and some users want something bigger.

It wouldn't be hard to design a spec for integration that'd work for Oauth and allow expanded posts with an easy Twitter account commenting/notification, etc. Someone using Twitter wanting more, might come over if it's usable.

And yes, they did go to FB, and are now not happy with FB. Some of them. Only needs to be a tiny proportion to be a big chunk of users for DW.

And also? Don't necessarily need to bring in early adopters from elsewhere. Need to start them being adopters of us instea of elsewhere.

So need to really work on the non-LJ integrated USPs, of which there ar emany, some of which take ideas from LJ and really expand them.

But you're right, all of this depends on DW wanting to grow more; I assume it does, but I don't think growing from LJ is the right approach now.

[charmian]

I agree that the people who are left on LJ are likely to be more accepting of what LJ does, but then, why isn't that true of people on FB as well?

I think most of the people on FB who are annoyed about the privacy stuff are not necessarily likely to be interested in DW, and I'm not really sure that FB integration is that simple, and it's questionable whether the existing users would appreciate the influx. (As in all of the people who like it that there are invite codes and that only people who know existing users create accounts?) I myself was pretty surprised at how many people wanted to retain invite codes for social (as opposed to spam or growth control) reasons.

I don't know... isn't it kind of obvious that you can easily create a Tumblr or a Posterous or a WP.com blog if you want one so badly? All of those already have easy crossposting, and Posterous has "tweet this entry" also.

Depends... for Vox it's not just images, but also mp3 uploads and other media, IIRC.

Eh? I mean that unless you are an LJ user or know a lot of people on DW from elsewhere, you're going to be coming into DW as a very early adopter, and that means you're likely to be the sort of person who is a habitual early adopter/'innovator,' and these people tend to be those who are very focused on technology and are more okay with there not being anyone there that they know. That's what I meant by 'early adopters from other services,' meaning 'people who are the sorts who are early adopters, who currently use other services.'

Well, I have no idea what anyone other than myself is thinking, but I think currently DW really does come off (from an outside perspective) as though what they are mainly seeking are current/former LJ users. If DW is going to try going for non-LJ users, at the very minimum I think they're going to have to implement some Twitter/FB integration and get rid of invite codes. I could be wrong, of course, though.

[zvi]

Hmm, I can definitely see the argument that there needs to be better integration with other social media platforms, but why do you think invite codes are a major dealbreaker?

[charmian]

Invite codes are a huge hoop to jump through.

For a legitimate potential user (meaning not a bot or a spammer) who is unfamiliar with LJ platforms in general, but say, happens upon a DW journal or comm and decides to get an account, it's a much bigger barrier than it would be for someone who is an experienced LJ user, or who knows a lot about DW.

Generally, the more complex/time consuming the procedure for registration, the lower the conversion rates (%age of visitors who successfully register) are going to be.

So, the visitor is confronted with this 'enter an invite code' thing, and then for a lot of people, they're going to go... 'eh? what is this? is this one of those closed beta things?' or 'oh... you need to know someone to get an account? But I don't.' and then they're going to give up. Or, if they see they can get one in the code sharing comm, then they kind of need to click through even more screens, and then leave an anonymous comment (meaning doing a captcha, maybe leaving a comment on an LJ-style journal for the first time ever), with their email address. Many people understandably do not want to give out their email addresses in public, because of spam reasons or just cautiousness. Also, there is nothing which really suggests that the invite code applications are being filled unless you read down on the comments. You have no idea how long you are going to have to wait. (Heck, the way it is, people might even get the impression that it might take five days) It looks very ad-hoc and sort of questionable to just leave a comment, when on other sites you can simply register by logging in using Twitter or FB connect, or by entering in your preferred email address/password.

Anyway, when someone sends an invite code, then the person might have entirely forgotten about DW by the time they check that email account again.

[luscious_purple]

I still tend to be more active on LJ because many of my longtime friends -- I mean REALLY longtime IRL, like going back 25-30 years -- are still over there. And, yeah, there tends to be a lot more discussion going on over there on the things I'm interested in.

The people whom I've seen desert LJ aren't coming here -- they went to Facebook for those short little postings and games and the ability to click "Like" on things.

[charmian]

Yeah, for me, it's enough that some people comment on this journal (for whatever reason). For some of my other interests... not really. I don't really think there's much that can be done about that, because even on LJ there wasn't that much discussion on them, so my expectations were low to begin with.

Interestingly, LJ seems to be planning to put a "like" feature in.

[dorkpie]

Huh. I've always been aware that the reluctance for some/most people in moving to DW was rooted in the fact that most of their friends were still over at LJ, but I admit it surprises me that people thought there was a growth issue.

Anyway, this entire post was very informative. (: I'm really glad I stumbled here.

[charmian]

Well, growth issue in the sense that 'ok, my friends aren't moving... are there other things?'

[somnolentblue]

(here via network. I'm subscribing because I keep clicking through to read your posts; even if I don't have anything to contribute, I often find the discussion interesting.)

I can only speak to my own experience about creating spn_bitesized, which is a fandom-specific comm that doesn't replicate one elsewhere. (Although I think someone just made a Supernatural commentfic comm on lj if I'm reading the spnnewsletter correctly.)

I was really worried about the question of social capital in attracting people to the comm; however, I've found that people on dw are much more willing to try out new comms, even ones run by relative unknowns, than on lj. (This is actually congruent with my experience across dw in general - there may be fewer users, but I interact with more people across a broader variety of topics.) When bitesized went live, I posted announcements at every single place on DW that I could think of posting an announcement. Also, because of our nature - we're a weekly challenge comm - I post specific announcements in other comms when our themes are relevant. If anything, I'm worried that I'm over-advertising. The fannish infrastructure is still evolving here, which allows for a lot of flexibility but also means that there's not a generally agreed-upon way of getting the word out about something. So, tradeoffs. (I also still think I got a bit lucky because we have an OpenID post that got picked up in a way I never could have anticipated, which means that there were a whole lot of links floating around to a page on the comm, even if it wasn't a fannish-content page on the comm [if that makes sense].)

I've also made an effort to get the word out at lj-based locations that we exist and that we welcome people coming from lj and using OpenID to participate. We're well set up for OpenID participation because bitesized is for comment fanworks, so anyone can post and play. I have sought out lj comms to make announcements as we do different challenge themes; I would guess about half of the mods I ask get back to me, and most are happy to let me post a blurb. (We're excluded from the main form of Spn news, which has lead me to trying to create some workarounds.) Even with doing this, we don't get users participating with OpenID. However, we do get people who are housed primarily on LJ coming in and participating with their DW journals. Bitesized hasn't devoured fandom whole or anything, but I'm not sobbing into my cereal about it being an epic failure.

I think the thing about new comms and comms on smaller platforms, like dw, is that fewer people posting means it takes a bit more effort all the way around to keep them going because content has to come from somewhere. I'm lucky with bitesized because I have the flexibility to give it a lot of attention and do the promotion and whatnot. omnomnom is probably the most active comm on my rlist, averaging a post or two per day. It has 790 members, 954 subscribers. That's a really large member/subscriber:post ratio. If anything, I would point to this being the reason behind the perceived lack of activity, in conjunction with people being reluctant to post in a comm they think is dead making it a cycle of not-posting. Posting at community X hasn't become The Thing One Does yet, so people don't do it, leading to community X looking dead, leading to people not posting to community X. (Does that convoluted line of reasoning make sense?)

Within my fandom, I have seen a lot of inertia and a lot of reluctance to move or crosspost. There's some sort of alchemy of critical mass that I would guess relates to a combination of numbers, key BNFs, and shiny new content before fannish migration seems to occur en masse; I suspect the particular formula differs across fandoms (and the particular corner of fandom that one inhabits). I'm keeping my lj open because there are people on my flist there who aren't currently inclined to move. I also suspect that people tend not to move when they're happy-enough where they are; I'm happier at dw, but that came about because I was trying out my dw journal and loved the interface and functionality, which was followed by interacting with other people. (That's probably a bass-ackwards way of doing things, but the journal with basic cross-posting definitely came first, the activity second.)

All of this seems to have been a tl;dr way to say that I think there's a lot of murkiness around (the perception of) comms on dw being active/non-active as a reason for (fannish, since that's the context I know) dw journal use.

[charmian]

Yeah, that doesn't really seem to be as much of a factor. With all of the name-changing and fresh starts, people may be paying much less attention to all of that.

Congrats on creating a successful comm. It would seem that publicity is key.

I think also with ommnomnom, it could be that the comm is relatively old (by DW standards), and was promoted a lot at the beginning, when a lot of users began to flood in, so perhaps many of the accounts are ghosts/inactive. Unfortunately, it's impossible to know what percentage of a comm's members are active members. Also, yeah, a low volume comm doesn't really inspire more people to post.

I guess that it's in many ways natural that even the active comms are less active, but I find it odd that it's so overwhelmingly cited as a cause, rather than an effect.

[somnolentblue]

Heh, can you tell that this is a topic that I've been contemplating for a bit. *facepalm* I didn't realize quite how long that had gotten until I hit post.

Interesting, I didn't know that about omnomnom. I picked it up from a dw-community-promo post, I think. (dw_community_promo is so incredibly awesome, as is create_my_comm.)

Maybe it's because we're used to using comms as clearinghouses, where we go to figure out the individuals we want to follow, and it's harder to do that here? There are certainly comms I don't follow but were invaluable when trying to figure out who does what and what personal journals I was interested in seeing. So, people are used to going comm -> personal journal, whereas on dw people are working to build the comms so one starts at places like personal journals and the follow friday feed? (Huh, Follow Friday and the Latest Things feeds as comms/fulfilling the function of comms? Obviously they're not a comm in that they don't have a communityname.dreamwidth.org site, but they're a communally created display of content formed through use of specific tags....)

Right, I think it's time for bed, before I have any more oddly expressed ideas that may or may not make sense.

[rodo]

There are certainly comms I don't follow but were invaluable when trying to figure out who does what and what personal journals I was interested in seeing.

This is why comms are so important for me as well. I tend to prefer reading personal journals and skip posts in many comms, but I need communities to work up the courage to approach an individual journal. This is especially true for comms like littledetails and fanficrants, where a lot of interaction takes place in the comments.

Posting at community X hasn't become The Thing One Does yet, so people don't do it, leading to community X looking dead, leading to people not posting to community X.

This is definitely true. I posted the only fic entry to a fic community that is dead, and it took me a lot of time to work up the courage to do it because I feel intensely uncomfortable if my post isn't burried inbetween others. Unfortunately, it's the only community I can think of where I can post my (German) fic, which kind of sucks. I definitely won't be posting links to my other stories until somebody else uses the community or the mod shows up. The community was also established roughly a year ago, when everybody started communities left, right and center, no matter if they had the time or the energy to promote it properly. The mod was talking about running challenges and such and it never happened, so the comm died.

There was also another German comm on my dwircle, which was a mirror of a ficathon comm. The members were asked where the fic posting should take place, and since it had more LJ members who were unwilling to use DW, I unsubscribed because I won't post fic to LJ.

[somnolentblue]

The community was also established roughly a year ago, when everybody started communities left, right and center Oh, is that what happened? That would explain all the April 09 create dates I've seen around. O hai obvious thing is obvious, open beta anniversary.

You know, I wonder if comms actually require more promotion on dw, or if there's just a perception that they do because there are Very Established Comms on lj whereas we're in the process of establishing them at dw. Because, frankly, there are a whole lot of low-subscription, low-volume, low-content comms at lj; maybe it's just that there are the flagship comms (for me, places like padacklesrps, spnnewsletter, supernaturalfic) that everyone knows about, whereas the more specialist comms are still tiny and may or may not be as active as we seem to implicitly accepting that lj-comms are? So, it's not so much a dearth of comms or active comms on dw in comparison to other sites (or, you know, lj) as it is that we look for flagship comms. The would-be flagship comms *have* been set up to replicate lj-comms, so they *don't* seem as successful in comparison and lead to the perception of failed/dead comms on dw. Hmmmm.

[rodo]

I also think that a lot of maintainers might be inexperienced and that it is a problem for the mirror communities that their maintainers are more focussed on the LJ comms, which probably demand a lot more attention from them. So the DW community just sits there and nobody really cares about it. It seems a bit as if everybody set up the infrastructure so that new users would feel at home, nobody wanted or was ready to use it and so they stopped caring for it.

I suppose even the flagship comms needed promotion at the beginning, unless there were established at just the right time when everybody desperately wanted to use this comm. Which probably isn't the case for most DW comms.

[littlebutfierce]

Here via... network? Or maybe someone linking in a Three Weeks post?

I wanted the poll to have ticky boxes, not radio buttons, heh. But I picked 'other': I think it's partly just a lack of critical mass so far, whether or not there are thriving communities on LJ or elsewhere. Also, if you're starting an obscure community, for which there will be little audience even on LJ (I think here of my poor baseball_animanga, but I've seen this w/other tiny comms on DW), you're even more out of luck in a lot of cases.

Accurately or not, many people think of what happened as 'we were all using y!groups/pitas.com/MLs/usenet, and then some of us started to use LJ, and then there was a tipping point and then everyone was on LJ and the old place became a ghost town.'

That's totally what happened w/me & my online friends w/Diaryland (though some of them were on Pitas too, hahaha).