blogging and platforms

[charmian]

http://feathertail.dreamwidth.org/103445.html

Yeah, I think now whether you can successfully move to DW really tend to depend on whether there is an audience here.

The usage of LJ nowadays is heavily dependent on communities, both in the sense of comms themselves and networks of people. Perhaps nowadays, most of the real-person English side growth on LJ is about people who join in order to join a comm. However, for a comm to be successful, there needs to be a pool of people to join it. And comms are need to attract people, so it's a chicken and the egg problem. (As has been discussed here on this blog, to not much conclusion) LJ/DW are blogging platforms whose main appeal comes from their network effects, unlike Wordpress, where the main appeal is the software, and one generic MU site can offer many of the same benefits as the others. (And even some of the proprietary Automattic stuff is available for free if you register at wp.com)

Anyway though, I think it's also natural that the amount of suggestions and such has slowed, though. In the past year or so, the size of the monthly active DW userbase has remained relatively stable, around 20-23K. (IMHO, barring any crazy moves by SUP, this will probably be the size DW will remain for the near future) This would suggest that there's either a lot of influx and churn (many people leaving, many people coming in to replace them) or that it's pretty much the same groups of people. I think the latter situation is more likely. If it's mostly the same group of people, it's only natural that most of them will have already suggested whatever suggestions they have (assuming they have any). Also, the more suggestions are made, the more likely it is that any suggestion you come up with will have been thought of before.

Not sure why there are fewer layouts (supposedly) though. Any thoughts?

Comments

[azurelunatic]

LJ's had a lot more time to accumulate layouts, I think. I would be interested to see what the rate of adding new ones was for each site over the years, month by month and year by year.

[charmian]

I don't think they mean in comparison to LJ. They mean they perceive that before, more people were posting layouts in the layout comms here.

[kareila]

My perception is that most of the layouts added to DW in the past 12-18 months have come from a core group of half a dozen people or so. I agree that the number of submissions of new layouts for public use has gone down recently, at least from what I've seen.

[charmian]

Ah, I see.. Once I got this layout, I haven't been really looking for new ones, so I haven't been really following the layout situation.

[charmian]

Quote I was referring to: "And the flood of suggestions and layouts and posts in the comms that I follow has slowed to a trickle."

[feathertail]

One of my posts is the subject of your commentary? I'm flattered!

I'm mostly thinking of dreamscapes. They used to post stuff all the time, and that plus the news updates plus all the suggestions and progress they seemed to be making gave me a lot of hope for Dreamwidth's future. I wrote a post that summed up my wild optimism last year.

A big part of the optimism was because I recognized the problem you describe. LJcode sites are inherently cliquish. There are extremely high barriers to entry for anyone who's not already a part of the in-group, whether it's a journal, a comm or a site. The biggest thing I was excited about was that it looked like Dreamwidth was breaking down those walls and addressing those issues, not that it was making things 10% more convenient for LJcode power users. But for a variety of reasons, that never happened, and it doesn't look like they're any closer to it than when I wrote that post.

I'm obviously still watching things here, but yeah.

[charmian]

I don't think though, that DW was really addressing those issues most foremostly... DW seemed to be, at the beginning, more addressing the flaws about the policies of LJ, at least as far as the actual changes made. The thing is that open source isn't necessarily a panacea for these problems either; you can be as open as you want to be, but there need to be sites that want to interface with you also, whereas it's also possible to have a site which isn't open-source, yet also allows for portability, due to the API. (In other words, you can export your Tumblr) The tools for portability also need to be constructed, especially as the protocols are always evolving.

[feathertail]

You're right, it was my mistake to think they were more focused on interoperability.

[charmian]

I can't speak for what people were thinking, but I do think there was the intention of interoperability, but it's a very difficult thing. (I think for LJ interop, perhaps the best hope is the Russian userbase creating more tools)

However, at the same time I think there's a big.... ambivalence? About interop, in the userbase.

[feathertail]

That's a good way of putting it. :\ LJcode sites encourage that kind of cliquishness, like I was saying.

[azurelunatic]

Hmm, yes.

So many things are getting fixed! So many things aren't driving me crazy anymore!

I suspect that when there's a new round of novel user-facing features, there's going to be a new round of suggestions for refinements and spinoff features.

I've been turning my attention in a more documentation-ward direction -- not quite at FAQ-writing, but at doing things to the wiki and collecting the disparate bits of community-comments into organized forms. So I think there's social-organization debt as well as the technical debt that D mentioned, that needs paying down.

[charmian]

I suspect so, although personally I think it's more that people have run through the obvious suggestions.

[azurelunatic]

I'd bet that a decent number of suggestions are still being made, and being rejected with a note that it's planned for implementation, or that it's been recently suggested and here's the discussion.