Comm Importation and Dreamwidth

[charmian]

There are two features related to LJ that people continually ask for on DW. One is cross site friends-list reading, which is in progress, but will only be IIRC for paid users. The other is importation of communities.

The first I expect to cause some kerfluffling, but in practice, any impact will be probably limited, as there are only a small amount of DW paid users, and quite a few of them may feel no need to use the service; also, the usage of cross site friends-list reading will not really be visible. The second may potentially have a much bigger impact socially, if it is ever implemented (I have no idea whether it can be implemented presently, or to what extent it is planned.


Anyhow, I think this will bring up issues similar to comment importation on personal journals, except even more so, unless they do it in such a way that people only import entries to a comm which they have personally posted. I'm actually not sure how many people want to import their comms, or how this would come out socially. Would people start polling the members? Just do it themselves without telling them?

However, this brings up something that I was wondering about previously: given that you can also import a personal journal to Wordpress (can you import a comm to wordpress? no idea), why hasn't there been a widespread outcry over that? (BTW, by Wordpress I mean both personally hosted Wordpress and Wordpress.com)

I can think of several reasons:

a) No one knows about this (well, in relative terms), and thus since no one knows about it, no one has bothered to get upset (probably the biggest reason)

b) A wordpress installation is viewed as an individual thing, not as a community. Part of the resentment against importation is that it's wrapped up in whatever feelings people have about Dreamwidth as an institution. Perhaps the way that the comment is controllable and appearing in an LJ-like space makes people feel as though they are 'participating' in DW?

Comments

[noxie]

I think importing comms to DW would be going one step too far. Unless *every* member of the comm agrees to their content being imported, and how would you even go about that? I think it would be better if people just created mirror comms here, and reposted their stuff manually.

[charmian]

There are probably ways technically? IIRC somehow scans_daily was moved over from Insanejournal. Anyway, another idea someone had was that maybe there could be a way for an individual poster to repost their content in an automated fashion. That probably wouldn't run into as many problems.

[noxie]

maybe there could be a way for an individual poster to repost their content in an automated fashion.

That would be pretty awesome, actually.

[charmian]

Yeah, I think that would be pretty useful! It would be a good way for a comm to populate itself with content, and it probably wouldn't cause as much controversy.

[holyschist]

I'm less down with community importation than comment importation, but it's hard to entirely put my finger on why.